The HealthCare.gov Website Debacle and the Fraud of Obamacare

By Kate Randall

Global Research, November 08, 2013

World Socialist Web Site

Region: USA

Theme: Global Economy, Poverty & Social Inequality

As the debacle at HealthCare.gov continues into its second month, the Obama administration is facing increasing pressure to fix the technical problems that have plagued the site set up to sell insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Barack Obama has faced criticism from Democratic Party supporters that the dysfunctional web site is creating a “crisis of confidence” that needs to be addressed.

In an appearance before the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the government is still working to fix a “couple of hundred” problems with the federal health insurance web site. She rejected calls from politicians of both parties to delay the initial enrollment period beyond March 31, 2014, arguing, “There’s plenty of time to sign up for the new plan.” The White House is determined to stick to the March 31 deadline, and has also rejected calls to temporarily take the site down until the technical problems have been resolved.
Under what is commonly known as Obamacare, all those who are not insured through their employer or through a government program such as Medicare or Medicaid, with a few exceptions, must obtain insurance or pay a penalty. Pushing back the deadline, or delaying it by as much as a year as a number of Congressional Republicans have demanded, would block this key provision, which the administration hopes will force millions of people to purchase coverage from private insurers on the exchanges.
An outright collapse of the HealthCare.gov site would signal more than technical ineptitude and mismanagement on the Obama administration’s part. Enrollment under the threat of penalty through the “individual mandate”—providing the insurance companies with millions of new cash-paying customers—is the only substantial component of Obamacare.
There are no plans to train new doctors and nurses, or to expand health care to the rural poor, or to launch a nationwide program aimed at eradicating hunger and disease. Rather than initiating social reforms, the health care legislation is aimed at increasing levels of social inequality and setting up a more heavily class-based health care system in America.
This is why Barack Obama has gone to absurd lengths and resorted to outright lies in a public relations campaign aimed at damage control over the beleaguered insurance exchange web site. Defending the health care legislation in an appearance Wednesday before a group of volunteers in Texas, the president said, “We were able to get it done in part because of grass-roots folks like you that fought so hard to make sure we were able to deliver on universal health care.”
Obama’s claim that the health bill will provide anything approaching “universal health care” is an insult to the intelligence of the American people. Even if the web site were running smoothly, the Congressional Budget Office has projected that the health care overhaul will leave 31 million people uninsured, and about 6 million of these will pay penalties. These figures include undocumented immigrants who do not qualify for government subsidies to purchase coverage, millions of the very poor whose resident states are not expanding Medicaid, and those who choose to pay a penalty because they cannot afford insurance, with or without government subsidies.
Many of those who have somehow managed to access HealthCare.gov and peruse the policies available for purchase have also been in for a rude shock. While days before the web site launch Obama was promising that many plans on the exchanges “will cost much less than they do now,” people are finding that the least expensive priced plans come with the highest out-of-pocket costs due to annual deductibles and cost-sharing.
In the course of the disastrous web site rollout the president has been caught in yet another lie, his oft repeated claim that “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.” It has been revealed that the White House was aware as early as June 2010 that an estimated 40 to 67 percent of the 14 million Americans who purchase health insurance on the individual market would be dropped by their insurers. Millions of people have already received cancellation notices, and many are finding that replacement policies are priced substantially higher.
As the fallout over the federal web site continues, one of the more insidious objectives of the health care overhaul is also becoming clearer. Behind the doubletalk of providing “universal” and “affordable” coverage, from the outset the health care legislation has been devised as a means of dismantling the employer-based system of insurance that for decades has guaranteed a basic level of health care for millions of workers in the US.
Modeling themselves after the ACA, major companies, including IBM, Time Warner and Caterpillar, have already shifted their retirees off of company-administered health care plans and into privately run health care exchanges. Others, such as Sears Holding and Darden Restaurants, have moved their active employees to these private exchanges. According to one estimate, within the next five years nearly a quarter of the 170 million people presently enrolled in company-sponsored plans will be dumped by their employers onto these private exchanges.
City and state governments across the US are also considering moving their retirees, and in some cases their active employees, off of municipally funded benefits. In Detroit, the emergency manager overseeing the city’s bankruptcy proceedings announced earlier this month that health insurance is being eliminated for retired city workers under age 65 and replaced with a paltry $125 stipend toward purchasing coverage through Obamacare.
A voucher-type system is essentially being instituted with these moves. This principle will inevitably be extended to Medicare, the government-run health program for seniors and the disabled, and the Medicaid program for the poor. These vast shifts in the way health care is to be delivered to millions of Americans underscore the anti-working class agenda underlying the Obama administration’s health care “reform.”
As the World Socialist Web Site wrote at the time of its passage, the Affordable Care Act “represents the opening shot in a sweeping attack on health care for working people.” Legislation hailed as a historic reform has in fact been exposed as a counter-reform in health care. More broadly, it has put into motion a drive by the Obama administration and the ruling elite to restructure class relations in America, establishing a system in which the wealthy can purchase the best care out of pocket and working class families are relegated to substandard care.
A real solution to the crisis of health care in America requires a program and perspective that is the class opposite of Obamacare. The provision of universal, quality health care requires taking the profit out of the health care and placing the entire health system on socialist foundations.

Jets, Tanks, Planes, Bombs and Occupying Soldiers: The Wall Street Pentagon War Machine

By William C. Lewis

Global Research, November 08, 2013

Theme: Crimes against Humanity, Militarization and WMD, US NATO War Agenda

Corporate military armaments factory genocide of weapons contracts stimulated through backroom business deals with big businessmen sell wars to anesthetize the population to military slaughter of the target race and produce and consume on command without thought of the victims whose lives are terminated through aggressive bombing, Special Operations counterinsurgency and tomahawk missile massacre for resources control.

Arms merchants sell reams of ammunition to the Pentagon corporate state war masters who in turn tax the thoroughly inculcated population to pay for the mass death facilitated through jets, tanks, planes, bullets, bombs and occupying soldiers.

The U.S. imperial NATO/CIA war slaughter machine backs coup attempts that the Pentagon facilitates with ships whenever the Wall Street elite fortune 500 cabal wants an unpopular leader deposed and this act of corporate imperial military hitman homicide smashes and destroys the aspirations of the poor, the workers and those whose wishes are for sovereignty of their lands while strengthening the morale of the rightest military factions supportive of a fascist dictator that will readily accept military aid and anticommunist purges against popular democracy. Likewise, when the people and the guerillas rise up against CIA-funded police state constabulary elite landowner capitalist death squad regimes these armaments slaughter machine ships instantly appear to reinforce the CIA sponsored right-wing military dictatorship with missiles and murderous jet-take-off bombing massacre runs.

Homicidal agent-orange herbicide extermination methods implemented by the U.S.A. as a continuation of the French imperial genocide initiated against the Vietnamese exemplifies the armaments corporate military war factory interests in destroying the social destiny of thousands upon thousands of indigenous poor people.

U.S. armaments factory war massacre machines of death still drop bombs via robot and piloted flight over areas of the world designated for control under U.S. geopolitical war crime command structures and like the Indochina slaughter of yesteryear, believe that Yemen is an area where innocent civilian life is of no consequence to their profit margins.

Warships of imperial armament factory homicide ruthlessly lob missiles from the Gulf of Aden into areas where civilians reside, making life miserable for those whose existence is growing more and more burdensome each day while the few sitting in the Pentagon War master Wall Street armaments complex board and meeting rooms become increasingly wealthier and more powerful over the domestic U.S. population and the world with their NSA spy grid.

Body parts of those hit with missiles from robotic assassination machines hovering above are grotesquely strewn about the ground as bystanders shriek in terror at the sight of their exploded countrymen.

U.S. counterinsurgency helicopters whether piloted by U.S. personnel or murderously trained puppet proxies target and hunt down innocent civilians on a routine basis from Indochina, to El Salvador, Guatemala., Iraq, to Afghanistan and Somalia.

The death factory includes those thrown out of helicopters for the Vietnamese whose lives were stolen and maimed by the assassination program, Operation Phoenix.

This is armaments factory corporate military genocide. The NATO capitalist imperialist armaments factory corporate war machine interests of death control the combatant command structure of the planet to divide up control of resources within the world. The U.S. corporate imperial NATO war masters claim the right to incinerate Iran with a nuclear first-strike when Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon.

These war machine criminals use their proxies whether U.S. military, CIA or private mercenaries to control Middle East Oil and Caspian Basin oil while maintaining highly profitable military bases constructed via Kellogg Brown and Root and Halliburton. Tortured prisoners cleared for release remain near death in slow and painful unnecessary punishment all to maintain the profits of the rich and wealthy. Lithium is extracted for computers and I-Pads from Afghanistan and Coltan from Uganda and Rawanda for the benefit of the I-Phone industry while merciless corporate backed militias slaughter African peasants for greed.

Murderous aggression drone bombing is the reality of NATO’s murderous air assault and surveillance assassination onslaught of 397 sorties and 145 massacre drone hits, coupled with jihad proxy mercenary slaughter against civilians that secured Libya as one more nation in the hands of the bloody Pentagon-NATO-CIA armaments merchant oil-mafia-machine.

Joint American/Peruvian counterinsurgency campaigns napalm, burn down villages and slaughter rebels whose existence is to serve the Spaniard-European class of landowning slave masters and whose aspirations to make social gains are diminished with every ounce of U.S. military aid supplied to their nation. CIA-green beret-cross pollination to finance mess halls, barracks, classrooms, parachute towers, and helicopters to stimulate the U.S. corporate military war factory and private contracting base-building economy of murderous capitalist interests ensured that populist guerillas who desired to see their children not eat garbage for a meal remained subordinate to the Latin American and U.S. military homicidal officer class.

The war criminal system breeds corporate-military-imperial war homicidal structures of secret police informant cadre death to protect the land owning elite goon squad plantation classes, the multinationals and U.S. Pentagon war machine armaments interests. The imperial command structure of the armaments massacre machine concentrates inordinate power into the Executive to slaughter civilians using robotic CIA-Pentagon murderous death machines.

The NATO homicidal armaments massacre machine of flying robotized death targets people with missiles who are horrified and fleeing their slaughterers sitting in termination centers to assert corporate war factory military elite control over centers the U.S. empire designates its resource control area.

The real reason the homicidal arms merchants of U.S. empire and the psychotic imperial government is killing is because the U.S. Pentagon war machine equipped with Special Forces in 120 nations asserts world control through a command structure and the operations against civilians is to maintain hegemony as part of U.S, NATO war machine aims against terrified populations.

CIA partners with Pentagon war machine in assassination, the purpose of which is to reinforce U.S. hegemonic control through the imperial NATO war machine commands that designate areas of the globe for U.S. occupation and resource control. War crimes, informant spying networks to figure out who should be assassinated next and brutal atrocities against non-combatant civilians are what flow out of this structural U.S. Pentagon militarized full spectrum control of the planet.

It’s a corporate warfare military imperial slaughter machine.

Iraqi sanctions took the lives of a half million innocent Iraqis whose infrastructure, electrical grids and water sanitation facilities were obscenely targeted for corporate war military assault in the same fashion that NATO destroyed Libya’s infrastructure and the Iraqi people now live without a functioning system of water and electricity.

William C. Lewis is a journalist, researcher and book collector from Yreka California. He blogs at http://politicalaffairs.weebly.com/

The U.S. Is a State Sponsor of Terrorism

Drone attacks are raw terror tactics that terrorize civilian populations

By William Boardman

Global Research, November 08, 2013

Reader Supported News

Region: USA

Theme: 9/11 & 'War on Terrorism'

Now we know exactly how many members of the U.S. House of Representatives care enough about American terrorism to attend a Congressional briefing about a U.S. drone attack that followed a classic terrorist pattern in killing a grandmother and wounding nine children in Pakistan. Five.

Five members of “the people’s house” came to the briefing, and one of them was there for the full 90 minutes.

When one of the witnesses expressed disappointment at the turnout, a congressman reassured him: this was better than we expected. They were all Democrats.

Had any other American lawmakers joined the audience of somewhat more than 100, they would have heard some of the survivors describe the inexplicable (and unexplained, because the CIA does not explain) attack in which the first drone missile blew up a 67-year-old midwife as she was picking okra and wounded two of her grandchildren. Others came out of a nearby house to see what had happened and the second drone missile wounded seven more children.

This is a classic terrorist tactic, sometimes called the “double tap,” using the first explosion to draw a crowd of first responders and onlookers as targets for the second explosion. Typically the double tap attack rings up a higher score.

In a sane world there might be more outcry against the world’s only superpower using terrorist tactics on civilian populations in a half dozen or more countries, based on the rationale of a global war on terror (no longer the official name) that, so far, seems only to have added death and chaos to an already deadly, chaotic world because no one in authority seems capable of coming up with a less destructive way of defending our homeland at the expense of any other homeland we select.

The Pakistanis keep telling us to stop killing their people

Even the organizer of the briefing, Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida, who showed great sympathy to the family of the assassinated grandmother, somehow thinks the killings are ultimately Pakistan’s fault. In a strange application of blame-the-victim, Grayson told the BBC that drone strikes were not possible without the approval of the Pakistani government.

“Pakistan has a strong air force which has the power to impose a restriction on its borders whenever it chooses to,” Grayson said, leaving listeners free to infer that he had no objection to Pakistani planes shooting down American drones. He also claimed that the Pakistani army of a million soldiers should be able to control hundreds of militants easily, perhaps looking back to the swift American success against counter-insurgencies elsewhere in the region.

Pakistan’s information minister, Pervaiz Rashid, promptly rebutted Grayson and reaffirmed the Pakistani government’s rejection of drone attacks as violations of Pakistani sovereignty that were most effective in creating more militants. He spoke of Pakistani unanimity in opposition to drone attacks, of growing international opposition to drone attacks, and of his hope that his government would succeed in ending drone attacks soon.

Like Grayson, Rashid avoided the central fact of drone attacks around the world: the United States is an outlaw nation that continues to violate international law with impunity; it is a rogue state that others cannot control at a cost they are willing to bear. (Other states currently waging drone warfare include Great Britain in Afghanistan and Israel in Gaza.)
The day after the Grayson terror-strike briefing, Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif met with President Obama at the White House and reiterated Pakistan’s opposition to drone attacks in his country. Publicly, the prime minister put the issue in the broader context of the war on terror:

“Pakistan and the United States have a strong, ongoing counterterrorism cooperation. We have agreed to further strengthen this cooperation. I also brought up the issue of drones in our meeting, emphasizing the need for an end to such strikes.” [emphasis added]

Obama doesn’t talk about secret wars, even when everyone knows about them
President Obama did not show enough respect for Sharif even to acknowledge publicly that America’s drone war might be an issue for those being attacked.

This was the same lack of response the president earlier gave another Pakistani emissary, Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Taliban shooting victim. Malala visited the White House October 11 for a chat with the president and a photo op with his daughters. The only public acknowledgement of the American drone war came in Malala’s statement after the meeting:

“I thanked President Obama for the United States’ work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees. I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people.”

The cover story for the president is that the CIA runs America’s drone wars, so they’re by definition secret, regardless of how many people know about them. This is a doublethink decision that was made by the Bush administration when the drone war began, which is thought to be 2004. Any self-respecting war crimes tribunal would explore this issue in detail and assign accountability accordingly. Until then, American drones can kill indiscriminately in a bombing campaign that officially doesn’t exist, even though everyone knows it does and many officials talk about it publicly (but anonymously).

The result can sometimes be unintended hilarity, as when the president, in his unresponsive comments about Prime Minister Sharif, said that they had talked about “senseless violence, terrorism, and extremism,” which is certainly a usefully euphemistic phrase that describes the U.S. drone wars, among other terrorist activities. The president compounded this dark joke by going on to say with a straight face that “we need to find constructive ways to … respect Pakistan’s sovereignty.”

Respecting other nations’ sovereignty really isn’t the American Way

The president wouldn’t have to go whole hog into respecting Pakistani sovereignty – he could start with a gesture, a small offer of good faith, like forbidding the CIA to exercise the pure terrorism of the double tap technique. Pakistani doctors and nurses and good Samaritans might not be grateful, but they’d be alive.

Or the president could start even smaller, he could just forbid the CIA from blowing up the mourners at funerals of earlier missile attack victims. That would show respect at least on a traditional Mafia level.

The United States doesn’t admit that it employs these terrorist tactics in its terror war on terrorism. But there’s a sweet spot in that – the president would not have to admit he’s stopped them, either.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Manipulation

D id the Obama Administration ever spy on Mitt Romney during the recent presidential contest? Alex Tabarrok, who raised the question at the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, acknowledges that it is provocative. Until recently, he would’ve regarded it as a “loony” question, he writes, and he doesn’t think that President Obama ordered the NSA to spy on Romney for political gain.
Let’s be clear: I don’t think so either. In every way, I regard Obama as our legitimate head of state, full stop. But I agree with Tabarrok that today, “the only loonies are those who think the question unreasonable.” * Most Americans have a strong intuition that spying and electoral manipulation of that kind could never happen here. I share that intuition, but I know it’s nonsense: the Nixon Administration did spy on its opponents for political gain. Why do I worry that an unreformed surveillance state could put us in even greater jeopardy of such shenanigans?
Actually, I have a particular scenario in mind, and it seems frighteningly plausible. I’ll sketch it out at the end of this article. But first, let’s get back to Tabarrok:

Do I think Obama ordered the NSA to spy on Romney for political gain? No. Some people claim that President Obama didn’t even know about the full extent of NSA spying. Indeed, I imagine that President Obama was almost as surprised as the rest of us when he first discovered that we live in a mass surveillance state in which billions of emails, phone calls, Facebook metadata and other data are being collected.
The answer is yes, however, if we mean did the NSA spy on political candidates like Mitt Romney. Did Mitt Romney ever speak with Angela Merkel, whose phone the NSA bugged, or any one of the dozens of her advisers that the NSA was also bugging? Did Romney exchange emails with Mexican President Felipe Calderon? Were any of Romney’s emails, photos, texts or other metadata hovered up by the NSA’s break-in to the Google and Yahoo communications links?
Almost certainly the answer is yes.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Romney’s information was improperly exploited during the election. “Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not,” Tabarrok writes. “Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.”
I’ll tell you why I agree on both counts.
Why do I doubt Romney was treated unfairly? Because I doubt Obama would have dared order it, and because the prospect of a Romney victory didn’t threaten either the NSA nor a contractor like Booz Allen Hamilton nor the national-security state generally. There was reason to believe he’d have been friendlier to them than Obama!
The scenario I worry about most isn’t actually another Richard Nixon type in the Oval Office, though that could certainly happen. What I worry about actually more closely resembles Mark Felt, the retired FBI agent exposed 32 years after Watergate as Deep Throat **—that is, I worry more about people high up inside the national-security state using their insider knowledge to help take down a politician. Is part of the deference they enjoy due to politicians worrying about that too?
Imagine a very plausible 2016 presidential contest in which an anti-NSA candidate is threatening to win the nomination of one party or the other—say that Ron Wyden is challenging Hillary Clinton, or that Rand Paul might beat Chris Christie. Does anyone doubt where Keith Alexander or his successor as NSA director would stand in that race? Or in a general election where an anti-NSA candidate might win?
What would an Alexander type do if he thought the victory of one candidate would significantly rein in the NSA with catastrophic effects on national security? Would he really do nothing to prevent their victory?
I don’t know. But surely there is some plausible head of the NSA who’d be tempted to use his position to sink the political prospects of candidates antagonistic to the agency’s interests. And we needn’t imagine something so risky and unthinkable as direct blackmail.
Surveillance-state defenders will want to jump in here and insist that there are already internal safeguards and congressional oversight to prevent the abuses I am imagining. But I don’t buy it. It isn’t just that I can’t help but think Alexander could find a way to dig up dirt on politicians if he wanted to without it ever getting out to overseers or the public.
Forget about Alexander. Let’s think about someone much lower in the surveillance state hierarchy: Edward Snowden. As we know, Snowden broke protocol and violated his promise to keep classified information secret because his conscience demanded it: He believed that he was acting for the greater good; his critics have called him a narcissist for taking it upon himself to violate rules and laws he’d agreed to obey.
It isn’t hard to imagine an alternative world in which the man in Snowden’s position was bent not on reforming the NSA, but on thwarting its reformers—that he was willing to break the law in service of the surveillance state, fully believing that he was acting in the best interests of the American people.
A conscience could lead a man that way too.
This Bizarro Edward Snowden wouldn’t have to abscond to a foreign country with thousands of highly sensitive documents. He wouldn’t have to risk his freedom. Affecting a U.S. presidential election would be as easy as quietly querying Rand Paul, or Ron Wyden, or one of their close associates, finding some piece of damaging information, figuring out how someone outside the surveillance state could plausibly happen upon that information, and then passing it off anonymously or with a pseudonym to Politico, or The New York Times, or Molly Ball. Raise your hand if you think that Snowden could’ve pulled that off.
And if you were running for president, or senator, even today, might you think twice about mentioning even an opinion as establishment friendly as, “Hey, I’m all for NSA surveillance, but I don’t trust a private contractor like Booz Allen Hamilton to do it”? Maybe safeguards put in place since the first Snowden leak would prevent a Bizarro Edward Snowden with strong Booz loyalties from targeting you.
Maybe. Why risk it?
In yet another scenario, the NSA wouldn’t go so far as to use information obtained through surveillance to affect an election. But they’d use it to their advantage to thwart the reform agenda of the candidate they didn’t like if he or she won.
And maybe the NSA would be as horrified by this sort of thing as I am. But maybe one of their contractors is on the payroll of a foreign government, and that person wants to affect a presidential election by exploiting the unprecedented amounts of data that the surveillance state has collected and stored on almost everyone.
American democracy could be subverted in all sorts of hypothetical ways. Why worry about this one in particular? Here’s the general standard I’d submit as the one that should govern our thinking: If a powerful institutional actor within government has a strong incentive to do something bad, the means to do it, and a high likelihood of being able to do it without getting caught, it will be done eventually.
The NSA has the incentive. At least as recently as the Snowden leaks, an unknown number of its employees or contractors had the means. And many informed observers believe abuse undetected by overseers could be easily accomplished.
If this particular abuse happened, it would be ruinous to self-government.
Let’s fix this before it causes a scandal even bigger than Watergate—or permits behavior more scandalous than Watergate that is never uncovered, rectified or punished.
__
*And yes, it’s just as legitimate to ask, did the Bush Administration spy on John Kerry?
**How sure are we that we know why he leaked?

Study Shows Why Some People Can’t Wake Up

By Melissa Melton on October 2, 2013

• http://truthstreammedia.com/study-shows-why-some-people-cant-wake-up/

(Truthstream Media)

Ever wondered why some people who seem otherwise educated on all other fronts appear hopelessly trapped in the left-right paradigm?

Yale law professor Dan Kahan put together a study which essentially found that people were less likely to choose a mathematically correct answer if it went against their political beliefs. To boil it down, groups were given fake data about skin cream efficacy and asked to solve a math problem. When the same exact data was given in the context of gun control, intelligent people gave wildly different answers based on their political beliefs instead of reality.

In other words, liberals and conservatives alike openly allowed politics to skew their own basic capacity for reasoning.

Grist explains:

“If the wrong answer is contrary to their ideological positions, we hypothesize that that is going to create the incentive to scrutinize that information and figure out another way to understand it,” says Kahan. In other words, more numerate people perform better when identifying study results that support their views — but may have a big blind spot when it comes to identifying results that undermine those views.
What’s happening when highly numerate liberals and conservatives actually get it wrong? Either they’re intuiting an incorrect answer that is politically convenient and feels right to them, leading them to inquire no further — or else they’re stopping to calculate the correct answer, but then refusing to accept it and coming up with some elaborate reason why 1 + 1 doesn’t equal 2 in this particular instance.

So people can and will lie to themselves if it fits their political beliefs. In essence, this shows us that buying into the political divide blinds people to the reality that, year after year, nothing Uncle Sam does ever really changes (and when it doesn’t change, it’s the other party’s fault).

This is why you can argue with someone all day and present as many facts as you like to prove that, ultimately, the American government is just…broken. Irreparably damaged. Hijacked. A wrecked specter of what our founding fathers attempted to set up here over 200 years ago.

You can waste your time spending hour after hour carefully laying out the fact that President Obama, for all his oratory puffery and Nobel Prize bling, has only advanced the agendas of George W. Bush, and Bush Jr. only really continued those of Clinton, who really only furthered the policies Bush Sr. put in place. Each time the American people misplace their faith and a shiny new face gets slapped on the same old worn out puppet. People are mired in the bog of eternal left-right paradigm stench.

It’s glorified Dr. Seuss’ bee watch watchers except these guys get to run around in suits playing with trillions of dollars in fake money all day, making decisions that ultimately impact all of our lives and all the while, somewhere in the background, the dwindling middle class is becoming the new poor, and while that poor just keep getting poorer, the rich have kept on getting richer the whole time.

(Interesting side fact: the income gap between the rich and poor is the greatest it has been in 100 years, or since the Federal Reserve was created.)

The line “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” from The Who tune “Won’t Get Fooled Again” has pretty much been literally applied to the U.S. government since the band wrote it in 1971. (Well, to get technical, it goes back to JFK’s assassination…)

None of these bread and circuses concerns what the people want or need. Big government is booming and the bang is only going to get louder until we all go deaf. Rest assured whoever graces the White House in 2016, that person will only make it there if he or she plays the Washington game. It’s called Oligopoly, created by bankers and megacorporations for bankers and megacorporations.

So next time someone says it isn’t Obama’s fault that everything sucks, he was just left holding Bush Jr.’s bag, remember the next person to grace the podium will be holding whatever is left of Obama’s bag in a couple more years and no matter which side of the aisle you choose to sit on at the inauguration, whether or not you like red or blue better, rest assured the turd sandwiches churned out by the United Corporations of America will still continue to taste like shit…no matter how you fudge the math.

How China Can Cause The Death Of The Dollar And The Entire U.S. Financial System

By Michael Snyder, on November 7th, 2013

The death of the dollar is coming, and it will probably be China that pulls the trigger.  What you are about to read is understood by only a very small fraction of all Americans.  Right now, the U.S. dollar is the de facto reserve currency of the planet.  Most global trade is conducted in U.S. dollars, and almost all oil is sold for U.S. dollars.  More than 60 percent of all global foreign exchange reserves are held in U.S. dollars, and far more U.S. dollars are actually used outside of the United States than inside of it.  As will be described below, this has given the United States some tremendous economic advantages, and most Americans have no idea how much their current standard of living depends on the dollar remaining the reserve currency of the world.  Unfortunately, thanks to reckless money printing by the Federal Reserve and the reckless accumulation of debt by the federal government, the status of the dollar as the reserve currency of the world is now in great jeopardy.
As I mentioned above, nations all over the globe use U.S. dollars to trade with one another.  This has created tremendous demand for U.S. dollars and has kept the value of the dollar up.  It also means that Americans can import things that they need much more inexpensively than they otherwise would be able to.
The largest exporting nations such as Saudi Arabia (oil) and China (cheap plastic trinkets at Wal-Mart) end up with massive piles of U.S. dollars...

Instead of just sitting on all of that cash, these exporting nations often reinvest much of that cash into low risk securities that can be rapidly turned back into dollars if necessary.  For a very long time, U.S. Treasury bonds have been considered to be the perfect way to do this.  This has created tremendous demand for U.S. government debt and has helped keep interest rates super low.  So every year, massive amounts of money that gets sent out of the country ends up being loaned back to the U.S. Treasury at super low interest rates...

And it has been a very good thing for the U.S. economy that the federal government has been able to borrow money so cheaply, because the interest rate on 10 year U.S. Treasuries affects thousands upon thousands of other interest rates throughout our financial system.  For example, as the rate on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has risen in recent months, so have the rates on U.S. home mortgages.
Our entire way of life in the United States depends upon this game continuing.  We must have the rest of the world use our currency and loan it back to us at ultra low interest rates.  At this point we have painted ourselves into a corner by accumulating so much debt.  We simply cannot afford to have rates rise significantly.
For example, if the average rate of interest on U.S. government debt rose to just 6 percent (and it has been much higher than that at various times in the past), we would be paying more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt.
But it wouldn't be just the federal government that would suffer.  Just consider what higher rates would do to the real estate market.
About a year ago, the rate on 30 year mortgages was sitting at 3.31 percent.  The monthly payment on a 30 year, $300,000 mortgage at that rate is $1315.52.
If the 30 year rate rises to 8 percent, the monthly payment on a 30 year, $300,000 mortgage would be $2201.29.
Does 8 percent sound crazy to you?
It shouldn't.  8 percent was considered to be normal back in the year 2000.
Are you starting to get the picture?
We need other countries to use our dollars and buy our debt so that we can have super low interest rates and so that we can afford to buy lots of cheap stuff from them.
Unfortunately, the truly bizarre behavior of the Federal Reserve and the U.S. government over the past several years is causing the rest of the world to lose faith in our currency.  In particular, China is leading the call for a "de-Americanized" world.  The following is from a recent article posted on the website of France 24...

For decades the US has benefited to the tune of trillions of dollars-worth of free credit from the greenback's role as the default global reserve unit.
But as the global economy trembled before the prospect of a US default last month, only averted when Washington reached a deal to raise its debt ceiling, China's official Xinhua news agency called for a "de-Americanised" world.
It also urged the creation of a "new international reserve currency... to replace the dominant US dollar".

So why should the rest of the planet listen to China?
Well, China now accounts for more global trade than anyone else does, including the United States.
China is also now the number one importer of oil in the world.
At this point, China is even importing more oil from Saudi Arabia than the United States is.
China now has an enormous amount of economic power globally, and the Chinese want the rest of the planet to start using less U.S. dollars and to start using more of their own currency.  The following is from a recent article in the Vancouver Sun...

Three years after China allowed the yuan to start trading in Hong Kong’s offshore market, banks and investors around the world are positioning themselves to get involved in what Nomura Holdings Inc. calls the biggest revolution in the $5.3 trillion currency market since the creation of the euro in 1999.

And over the past few years we have seen the global use of the yuan rise dramatically...

International use of the yuan is increasing as the world’s second-largest economy opens up its capital markets. In the first nine months of this year, about 17 percent of China’s global trade was settled in the currency, compared with less than one percent in 2009, according to Deutsche Bank AG.

Of course the U.S. dollar is still king for now, but thanks to a whole host of recent international currency agreements this status is slipping.  For example, China just recently signed a major currency agreement with the European Central Bank...

The swap deal will allow more trade and investment between the regions to be conducted in euros and yuan, without having to convert into another currency such as the U.S. dollar first, said Kathleen Brooks, a research director at FOREX.com.
"It's a way of promoting European and Chinese trade, but not doing it with the U.S. dollar," said Brooks. "It's a bit like cutting out the middleman, all of a sudden there's potentially no U.S. dollar risk."

And as I have written about previously, we have seen a bunch of other similar agreements being signed all over the planet in recent years...
1. China and Germany (See Here)
2. China and Russia (See Here)
3. China and Brazil (See Here)
4. China and Australia (See Here)
5. China and Japan (See Here)
6. India and Japan (See Here)
7. Iran and Russia (See Here)
8. China and Chile (See Here)
9. China and the United Arab Emirates (See Here)
10. China, Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa (See Here)
But do you hear about any of this on the mainstream news?
Of course not.
They would rather focus on the latest celebrity scandal.
Right now, the global move away from the U.S. dollar is slow but steady.
At some point, some trigger event will likely cause it to become a stampede.
When that happens, demand for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt will disintegrate and interest rates will absolutely skyrocket.
And if interest rates skyrocket that will throw the entire U.S. financial system into chaos.  At the moment, there are about 441 trillion dollars worth of interest rate derivatives sitting out there.  It is a financial time bomb unlike anything the world has ever seen before.
There are four "too big to fail" banks in the United States that each have more than 40 trillion dollars worth of total exposure to derivatives.   The largest chunk of those derivatives is made up of interest rate derivatives.  In case you were wondering , those four banks are JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs.
A huge upward surge in interest rates would absolutely devastate those banks and cause a financial crisis that would make 2008 look like a Sunday picnic.
Right now, the leader in global trade seems content to use U.S. dollars for most of their international transactions.  China also seems content to hold more than a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt.
If that suddenly changes someday, the consequences for the U.S. economy will be absolutely catastrophic and every single American will feel the pain.
The standard of living that all of us are enjoying today depends largely upon China.  They can bring down the hammer at any moment and they know it.

ass pipe !!!  :o   dr. frankenstein ..yer "monster"   is spewing ..again     douche bag :o  

Dianne Feinstein Cries ‘Gun Control’ in Wake of LAX Shooting…What Else Is New?

By Melissa Melton on November 4, 2013

http://truthstreammedia.com/dianne-feinstein-cries-gun-control-in-wake-of-lax-shootingwhat-else-is-new/

(Melissa Melton via The Daily Sheeple)
Every time a highly publicized shooting incident happens in this country, you can bet that Democratic California Senator Dianne Feinstein will be right there to call for increased gun control more than you can safely bet on the day’s weather forecast.
Even though LAX airport was already considered a “gun-free zone” (aside from roving police patrols curious removed from checkpoints for reasons unknown in the months leading up to the recent shooting), that didn’t stop Senator Feinstein from going on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday to say she’d introduce another bill over it.
From Politico:

The California Democrat said, “the weapon was a .223 MP-15, where the MP stands for military and police, clearly designed not for general consumption … Same gun that was used at Aurora. Would I do a bill? Sure, I would do a bill. I mean, I believe this down deep in my soul.”
But Feinstein said that such a bill would be very difficult to pass. “There’s a hammer lock on the Congress by the gun owners and gun people,” she said.

“Gun people”? Does she mean people who assert their Second Amendment right, one of the founding principles of this country written into the Constitution she swore an oath on when she took her position in Congress?
Feinstein already introduced a bill called the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 earlier this year, but it has since stalled out.
Remember, this is the same person who wants to strip independent journalists of their First Amendment and limit protections only to those she deems “real reporters” (read: mainstream media establishment puppets).
Never mind that law-abiding citizens aren’t the ones perpetrating gun crimes. If laws stopped crimes, there would be no crimes.
Congress’ approval rating is hovering around a pitiful 10%. People are more afraid of the government than they are of terrorists.
While the suspected LAX shooter has quickly been labeled a conspiracy theorist with strong anti-government views, in the crazy times we’re living in, that’s really not even saying a whole lot anymore. The claim is 23-year-old Paul Ciancia went to the airport specifically with intent to kill Transportation Security Administration officials and even had a note in his bag about wanting to “kill TSA”.
In fact, the whole story seems completely bunk to many who follow alternative media and are paying attention, people who are sick and tired of the never ending police state being erecting all around us… and here’s why.

Why would someone with anti-government views who dislikes TSA that much purposely commit a violent crime against them that would only serve to strengthen the very same TSA and government he is so against?

To do so will only be used as a new excuse by the government to give said TSA EVEN MORE POWER.
In a matter of mere days, we’ve seen this predictable response already. Look at Feinstein already calling for a new gun bill. Look at the fact that the Department of Homeland Security had already ordered over 3 million training bullets for the TSA officers back in August (and the shooting death of a TSA for the first time in the agency’s 12-year history is a perfect excuse to hasten that training). Look at the fact that any time something like this happens and it’s exploited all over the mainstream media, ultimately it is only used as an excuse to try drive the point home that we need to have more of our rights taken away.
They might arm the TSA, but they won’t let Americans exercise their Second Amendment rights at an airport. No way. This shooting will only give the government more power, and ultimately, more control over the people. That’s how these things work.
So it really doesn’t even make any sense in any way for someone who doesn’t like the TSA to shoot up an airport.
Anyone paying attention who is truly against what this tyrannical, runaway government is doing to centralize power and enslave its citizens — you know, someone who isn’t a false flag patsy — well, that person would know that.

---

Contributed by Melissa Melton of The Daily Sheeple. Melissa Melton is a writer, researcher, and analyst for The Daily Sheeple and a co-creator of Truthstream Media. Wake the flock up!

» How America Was Lost — Paul Craig Roberts

the Question IS ......Are the American People ..gonna take IT ..back ?     in OUR entire history  ..the people .....NOT the ass pipes in D.C. (degenerate city)   the best & brightest don't  go into pubelic ass~fice ..the lowest ,fucking basest R  in pubelic ass~fice  ,yer talking  the shit that IS under the trailer  park ..the fucking ONLY thing the shit festering in ANY pubelic ass~fice in ANY LEVEL has proven ......that it is possible fer a terd to wear an suit & tie or ...a dress   !!     folks NEVER in OUR History have the PEOPLE   ..not risen to the call!     fucking NEVER   !!     it's who the fuck we r !!                now "pipes" need cleaning :o 

» How America Was Lost — Paul Craig Roberts

By: pcr3| November 7, 2013 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: civil liberty, government crimes, Lawlessness, police state, |

How America Was Lost

Paul Craig Roberts

“No legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its power, position, and prestige." Dean Acheson , 1962, speaking to the American Society of International Law.


Dean Acheson declared 51 years ago that power, position, and prestige are the ingredients of national security and that national security trumps law. In the United States democracy takes a back seat to “national security,” a prerogative of the executive branch of government.

National security is where the executive branch hides its crimes against law, both domestic and international, its crimes against the Constitution, its crimes against innocent citizens both at home and abroad, and its secret agendas that it knows that the American public would never support.

“National security” is the cloak that the executive branch uses to make certain that the US government is unaccountable.

Without accountable government there is no civil liberty and no democracy except for the sham voting that existed in the Soviet Union and now exists in the US.

There have been periods in US history, such as President Lincoln’s war to prevent secession, World War I, and World War II, when accountable government was impaired. These were short episodes of the Constitution’s violation, and the Constitution was reinstated in the aftermath of the wars. However, since the Clinton regime, the accountability of government has been declining for more than two decades, longer than the three wars combined.

In law there is the concept of adverse possession, popularly known as “squatters’ rights.” A non-owner who succeeds in occupying a piece of property or some one else’s right for a certain time without being evicted enjoys the ownership title conveyed to him. The reasoning is that by not defending his rights, the owner showed his disinterest and in effect gave his rights away.

Americans have not defended their rights conveyed by the US Constitution for the duration of the terms of three presidents. The Clinton regime was not held accountable for its illegal attack on Serbia. The Bush regime was not held accountable for its illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama regime was not held accountable for its renewed attack on Afghanistan and its illegal attacks on Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen, and by its proxies on Syria.

We also have other strictly illegal and unconstitutional acts of government for which the government has not been held accountable. The Bush regimes’ acts of torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless spying, and the Obama regime’s acts of indefinite detention, warrantless spying, and murder of US citizens without due process. As the Obama regime lies through its teeth, we have no way of knowing whether torture is still practiced.

If these numerous criminal acts of the US government spread over the terms of three presidents pass into history as unchallenged events, the US government will have acquired squatters’ rights in lawlessness. The US Constitution will be, as President George W. Bush is reported to have declared, “a scrap of paper.”

Lawlessness is the hallmark of tyranny enforced by the police state. In a police state law is not a protector of rights but a weapon in the hands of government. [see Roberts & Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions] The accused has no recourse to the accusation, which does not require evidence presented to a court. The accused is guilty by accusation alone and can be shot in the back of the head, as under Stalin, or blown up by a drone missile, as under Obama.

As a person aware of the long struggle against the tyrannical state, I have been amazed and disheartened by the acceptance not only by the insouciant American public, but also by law schools, bar associations, media, Congress and the Supreme Court of the executive branch’s claim to be above both law and the US Constitution.

As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book about how the law was lost, liberals and conservatives chasing after their favorite devils, such as child abusers and drug pushers, and prosecutors, judges, and police devoted to conviction and not to justice, have gradually eroded over time the concept of law as a protection of the innocent, With the atmosphere of threat created by 9/11, the final destruction of the protective features of law was quickly achieved in the name of making us safe from terrorists.

The fact that we are no longer safe from our own government did not register.

This is how liberty was lost, and America with it.

Can liberty be regained? Probably not, but there is a chance if Americans have the necessary strength of character. The chance comes from the now known fact that the neoconservative Bush/Cheney regime took America and its puppet states to war in Afghanistan and Iraq entirely on the basis of lies. As all evidence proves, these wars were not the results of mistaken intelligence. They were the products of intentional lies.

The weapons inspectors told the Bush regime that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Despite this known fact, the Bush regime sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN with fabricated evidence to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction” and was a threat to the world. Even if such weapons had existed in Iraq, many countries have them, including the US and Israel, and the presence of weapons does not under the Nuremberg Laws justify unprovoked aggression against the possessor. Under the Nuremberg Laws, unprovoked military aggression is a war crime, not the possession of weapons that many countries have. The war crime was committed by the US and its “coalition of the willing,” not by Saddam Hussein.

As for the invasion of Afghanistan, we know from the last video of Osama bin Laden in October 2001, attested by experts to be the last appearance of a man dying of renal failure and other diseases, that he declared that he had no responsibility for 9/11 and that Americans should look to their own government. We know as a reported fact that the Afghan Taliban offered to turn over Osama bin Laden to Washington if the Bush regime would provide the evidence that indicated bin Laden was responsible. The Bush regime refused to hand over the (non-existent) evidence and, with support of the corrupt and cowardly Congress and the presstitute media, attacked Afghanistan without any legal justification. Remember, the FBI has stated publicly that it has no evidence that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11 and that that is why the crimes for which the FBI wanted bin Laden did not include responsibility for the 9/11 attack.

The war propaganda campaign was well prepared. Yellow ribbon decals were handed out for cars proclaiming “support the troops.” In other words, anyone who raises the obvious questions is not supporting the troops. Still today insouciant Americans sport these decals on their cars unaware that what they are supporting are the murder of foreign women, children and village elders, the death and physical and mental maiming of American soldiers, and the worldwide destruction of the reputation of the United States, with America’s main rival, China, now calling for a “de-Americanized world.”

A country with a population as insouciant as Americans is a country in which the government can do as it pleases.

Now that we have complete proof that the criminal Bush regime took our country to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq solely on the basis of intentional lies, how can the legal institutions, the courts, the American people possibly tolerate the Obama regime’s ignoring of the obvious crimes? How can America simply accept Obama’s statement that we mustn’t look back, only move ahead? If the US government, which has committed the worst crimes of our generation, cannot be held accountable and punished, how can federal, state, and local courts fill up American prisons with people who smoked pot and with people who did not sufficiently grovel before the police state.

Doubtless, the Obama regime, should it obey the law and prosecute the Bush regime’s crimes, would have to worry about being prosecuted for its own crimes, which are just as terrible. Nevertheless, I believe that the Obama regime could survive if it put all the blame on the Bush regime, prosecuted the Bush criminals, and desisted from the illegal actions that it currently supports. This would save the Constitution and US civil liberty, but it would require the White House to take the risk that by enforcing US law, US law might be enforced against its own illegal and unconstitutional acts by a succeeding regime.

The Bush/Cheney/John Yoo neoconservative regime having got rid of US law, no doubt the Obama regime thinks it is best to leave the situation as it is, rid of law.

Without accountability, America is finished. Not only will Americans live in a police state with no civil liberties, but the rest of the world is already looking at America with a jaundiced eye. The US is being reconstituted as an authoritarian state. All it takes is one failure of accountability for the police state to become entrenched, and we have had numerous failures of accountability. Does anyone really believe that some future government is going to make restitution to persecuted truth-tellers, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowdon, as was done for Japanese Americans?

Now that we know for a certain fact that the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were based on propaganda and lies, Congress and the world media should demand to know what was the real secret agenda. What are the real reasons for which Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded?

No truthful explanation for these wars exists.


Paul O’Neill, the Bush regime’s first Treasury Secretary, is on public record stating that at the very first cabinet meeting, long prior to 9/11, the agenda was a US attack on Iraq.

In other words, the Bush regime’s attack on Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.

What was the Bush regime’s secret agenda, kept secret by the Obama regime, that required an illegal, war criminal, attack on a sovereign country, an action for which officials of Hitler’s government were executed? What is the real purpose of Washington’s wars?

It is totally and completely obvious that the wars have nothing to do with protecting Americans from terrorism. If anything, the wars stir up and create terrorists. The wars create hatred of America that never previously existed. Despite this, America is free of terrorists attacks except for the ones orchestrated by the FBI. What the fabricated “terror threat” has done is to create a thorough-going domestic police state that is unaccountable.

Americans need to understand that they have lost their country. The rest of the world needs to recognize that Washington is not merely the most complete police state since Stalinism, but also a threat to the entire world. The hubris and arrogance of Washington, combined with Washington’s huge supply of weapons of mass destruction, make Washington the greatest threat that has ever existed to all life on the planet. Washington is the enemy of all humanity.

View Article Link

Unraveling Sandy Hook in 2, 3, 4, and 5 Dimensions 

Guest Posts, Videos • Tags: conspiracy research, gun control, news media, Public Opinion, Sandy Hook Elementary, social engineering

By Sofia Smallstorm
In this ninety-minute video independent researcher Sofia Smallstorm presents a thoroughgoing examination of the December 14, 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre event.
The presentation gives us a new vocabulary on which to build a sharp rebuttal to the total Hollywood treatment of deep events. It pulls it altogether–fact and fakery.

NEWS AND VIEWS FROM THE NEFARIUM NOV 7 2013   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hIoGMay66I

November 7, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell 

Joseph comments on Putin’s Russia:
1993-2013: is the twenty years long “pas de deux” of Russia and the USA coming to an end?
NATO Prepares for war with Russia?

Filed Under: Fireside Chats Tagged With: Boris Yeltsin, BRICS, BRICSA, EU, Germany, KGB, Russia, Vladimir Putin

Read more: NEWS AND VIEWS FROM THE NEFARIUM NOV 7 2013

1993-2013: is the twenty years long "pas de deux" of Russia and the USA coming to an end?

1993-2013: is the twenty years long "pas de deux" of Russia and the USA coming to an end?

The latest tensions between the EU and Russia over Greenpeace's stunt in the Arctic only confirmed a fact which nobody really bothers denying anymore: Western political and financial elites absolutely hate Vladimir Putin and they are appalled at Russia's behavior, both inside Russia and on the international scene.  This tension was quite visible on the faces of Obama and Putin at the G8 summit in Lough Erne where both leaders looked absolutely disgusted with each other.  Things got even worse when Putin did something quite unheard of in the Russian diplomatic history: he publicly  said that Kerry was dishonest and even called him a liar.

While tensions have reached some sort of climax over the Syrian issue, problems between Russia and the USA are really nothing new.  A quick look at the recent past will show that the western corporate media has been engaged in a sustained strategic campaign to identify and exploit any possible weaknesses in the Russian "political armor" and to paint Russia like a very nasty, undemocratic and authoritarian country, in other words a threat to the West.   Let me mention a few episodes of this Russia-bashing campaign (in no particular order):

• Berezovsky as a "persecuted" businessman
• Politkovskaya "murdered by KGB goons"
• Khodorkovsky jailed for his love of "liberty"
• Russia's "aggression" against Georgia 
• The Russian "genocidal" wars against the Chechen people
• "Pussy Riot" as "prisoners of conscience"
• Litvinenko "murdered by Putin"
• Russian homosexuals "persecuted" and "mistreated" by the state
• Magnitsky and the subsequent "Magnitsky law"
• Snowden as a "traitor hiding in Russia"
• The "stolen elections" to the Duma and the Presidency
• The "White Revoluton" on the Bolotnaya square
• The "new Sakharov" - Alexei Navalnyi
• Russia's "support for Assad", the (Chemical) "Butcher of Baghdad"
• The Russian constant "intervention" in Ukrainian affairs
• The "complete control" of the Kremlin over the Russian media

This list is far from complete, but its sufficient for our purposes.  Let me also immediately add here that it is not my purpose today to debunk these allegations one by one.  I have done so in this blog many times the past, so anybody interested can look this up.  I will just state here one very important thing which I cannot prove, but of which I am absolutely certain: 90% or more of the Russian public believe that all these issues are absolute nonsense, completely overblown non-issues.  Furthermore, most Russians believe that the so-called "democratic forces" which the Western elites support in Russia (Iabloko, Parnas, Golos, etc.) are basically agents of influence for the West paid for by the CIA, MI6, Soros and exiled Jewish oligarchs.  What is certain is that besides these small liberal/democratic groups, nobody in Russia takes these accusations seriously.  Most people see them exactly for what they are: a smear campaign.

In many ways, this is rather reminiscent of how things stood during the Cold War where the West used its immense propaganda resources to demonize the Soviet Union and to support anti-Soviet forces worldwide, including inside the USSR itself.  I would argue that these efforts were, by and large, very successful and that by 1990s the vast majority of Soviets, including Russians, were rather disgusted with their leaders.  So why the big difference today?

To answer that question, we need to look back at the processes which took place in Russia in the last 20 years or so because only a look at what happened during these two decades will allows us to get to the root of the current problem(s) between the USA and Russia.

When did the Soviet Union truly disappear?

The official date of the end of the Soviet Union is 26 December 1991, the day of the adoption by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union of the  Declaration № 142-Н which officially recognized dissolution of the Soviet Union as a state and subject of international law.  But that is a very superficial, formal, view of things.  One could argue that even though the Soviet Union had shrunk to the size of the Russian Federation it still survived within these smaller borders.  After all, the laws did not change overnight, neither did most of the bureaucracy, and even though the Communist Party itself had been banned following the August 1991 coup, the rest of the state apparatus still continued to exist.

For Eltsin and his supporters this reality created a very difficult situation.  Having banned the CPUS and dismantled the KGB, Eltsin's  liberals still face a formidable adversary: the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, the Parliament of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, elected by the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Federation.  Nobody had abolished this *very* Soviet institution which rapidly became the center of almost all of the anti-Eltsin and pro-Soviet forces in the country.  I cannot go in all the details of this legal nightmare, suffice to say that the Supreme Soviet presented itself as the "Russian Parliament" (which is not quite true) and that its members engaged in a systematic campaign to prevent Eltsin to implement his "reforms" (in hindsight, one could say that they tried to prevent Eltsin from ruining the country).  One could say that the "new Russia" and the "old USSR" were fighting each other for the future of the country.  Predictably, the Supreme Soviet wanted a parliamentary democracy while Eltsin and his liberals wanted a presidential democracy.  The two sides presented what appeared to be a stark contrast to most Russians:


1) The Russian President Eltsin: officially he represented Russia, as opposed to the Soviet Union; he presented himself as an anti-Communist and as a democrat (nevermind that he himself had been a high ranking member of the CPSU and even a non-voting member to the Politburo!).  Eltsin was also clearly the darling of the West and he promised to integrate Russia into the western world.

2) The Supreme Soviet: headed by Ruslan Khasbulatov with the support of the Vice-President of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi, the Supreme Soviet became the rallying point of all those who believed that the Soviet Union had been dissolved illegally (which is true) and against the will of the majority of its people (which is also true).  Most, though not all, the supporters of the Supreme Soviet were if not outright Communists, then at least socialists and anti-capitalists.  A good part of the rather disorganized Russian nationalist movement also supported the Supreme Soviet.

We all know what eventually happened: Eltsin crushed the opposition in a huge bloodbath, far worse than what was reported in the Western (or even Russian) media.  I write that with a high degree of confidence because I have personally received this information from a very good source: it so happens that I was in Moscow during those tragic days and that and I was in constant contact with a Colonel of a rather secretive special forces unit of the KGB called "Vympel" (more about that below) who told me that the internal KGB estimate of the number of people killed in the Moscow Oblast was close to 3'000 people.  I can also personally attest that the combats lasted for far longer than the official narrative clams: I witnessed a very sustained machine gun battle right under my windows a full 5 days after the Supreme Soviet had surrendered.  I want to stress this here because I think that this illustrates an often overlooked reality: the so-called "constitutional crisis of 1993" was really a mini civil war for the fate of the Soviet Union and only by the end of this crisis did the Soviet Union really truly disappear.

In the days preceeding the tank assault against the Supreme Soviet I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with supporters of the President and the Supreme Soviet.  I took the time to engage them in long conversations to try to find out for myself what each side stood for and whether I should side with either party.  The conclusion I came to was a rather sad one: both sides were primarily composed of ex- (or not ex-) Communists, both sides claimed that they were defending democracy and both sides accused each other of being Fascists.  In reality both sides were in reality very much alike.  I think that I was not the only person to feel that way in these days and I suspect that most of the people of Russia deeply felt this and ended up being  really disgusted with all of the politicians involved.

I would like to share one more personal anecdote here: these tragic days were personally quite amazing for me.  Here I was, a young man born in a family of rabidly anti-Soviet Russian emigrés, who has spent many years fighting to Soviet system and, especially, the KGB.  And yet, ironically, I ended up spending most of my time in the company of a Colonel of a special forces unit of the KGB (how we met is a long story for another post).  Even more amazing for me was the fact that for all our differences, we had the exact same reaction to the events taking place before our eyes.  We both decided that we could not side with either party engaged in this conflict - both sides were equally repugnant to us.  I was in his apartment when he received a call from the KGB headquarters ordering to show up at a location downtown to prepare a special forces assault against the "White House" (that was the street nickname of the Russian Parliament building) - he refused to obey, told his bosses to get lost, and hung up.  He was not alone in that decision: just as in 1991, neither the Russian paratroopers nor the special forces agreed to shoot at their own people (others, supposedly "democratic" forces showed no such scruples).  Instead of obeying his bosses orders, my new friend took the time to give me some very valuable advice about how to safely get a relative of mine out of Moscow without getting shot or detained (being a native Russian speaker with a foreign passport was not a very safe thing in these days).

I wanted to retell this story here because it shows something very important: by 1993 a vast majority of Russians, even exiled emigrés and KGB special forces Colonels, were deeply disgusted and fed up with both parties to this crisis.  In a way, one could say that most Russians were waiting for a THIRD force to appear on the political scene.

From 1993 to 1999 - a democratic nightmare

After the crushing of the opposition by Eltsin's thugs, the gates of Hades truly opened for Russia: the entire country was taken over by various Mafias and the vast natural resources were pillaged by (mostly Jewish) oligarchs.  The so-called "privatization" of the Russian economy created both a new class of multi-millionaires and many tens of millions of very poor people who could barely survive.  A huge crime wave overtook every city, the entire infrastructure of the country collapsed and many regions of Russia began actively planning their secession from the Russian Federation. Chechnia was allowed to secede from the Russian Federation after a grotesque and bloody war which saw the Russian military back-stabbed by the Kremlin.  And throughout these truly hellish years, the Western elites gave their fullest support to Eltsin and his oligarchs.  The only exception to this love-fest was the political, economic and military support given by the Anglosphere to the Chechen insurgency.  Eventually, what had to happen did happen: the country declared bankruptcy in 1998 by devaluing the Ruble and defaulting on its debt.  Though we will never know for sure, I firmly believe that by 1999 Russia was only a few steps away from completely disappearing as a country and as a nation.

The legacy left by the liberals/democrats

Having crushed the opposition in 1993, the Russian liberals acquired the complete freedom to write a new constitution which would perfectly suit their purpose, and with their typical short-sightedness they adopted a new Constitution which gave immense powers to the President and really very little to the new Parliament, the Russian Duma.  They even went as far as abolishing the post of Vice-President (they did not want another Rutskoi to sabotage their plans).

And yet, in the 1996 Presidential elections the liberals almost lost it all.  To their horror, the Communist Candidate Gennadi Zuiganov won most of the votes in the 1st  round, which forced the liberals to do two things: first, of course, they falsified the officials results and, second, they passed an alliance with a rather popular Army General, Alexander Lebed.  These two moves made it possible for them to declare that they had won the 2nd round (even though in reality Ziuganov won).  Here again, the West fully supported Eltsin.  Well, why not?  Having given Eltsin full support for his bloody crackdown on the supporters of the Supreme Soviet, why not also support Eltisin in a stolen election, right?  In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Eltsin himself, however spent most of his time drinking himself to death and it soon became rather clear that he would not last very long.  Panic seized the liberal camp which ended up committing a huge mistake: they allowed a little-known and rather unimpressive bureaucrat from Saint Petersburg to replace Eltsin as Acting President: Vladimir Putin.

Putin was a quiet, low key, competent bureaucrat whose main quality appeared to be his lack of a strong personality, or so did the liberals think.  And, boy, was that one big miscalculation!

As soon as he was appointed, Putin acted with lightening speed.  He immediately surprised everybody by becoming personally involved the the 2nd Chechen war.  Unlike his predecessor, Putin gave all the freedom to the military commanders to wage this war as they wanted.   The Putin surprized everybody again when he made a truly historic deal with Ahmad Hadji Kadyrov to bring peace to Chechnia even though the latter had been a leader of the insurgency during the first Chechen war.

Putin's popularity soared and he immediately used that to his advantage.

In an amazing twist of history, Putin used the Constitution developed and adopted by the Russian liberals to implement a very rapid series of crucial reforms and to eliminate the power basis of the liberals: the Jewish oligarchs (Berezovksy, Khorodkovsky, Fridman, Gusinsky, etc.).  He also passed many laws destined to "strengthen the vertical power" which gave the Federal Center direct control over the local administrations.  This, in turn, not only crushed many of the local Mafias who had managed to corrupt and  infiltrate the local authorities, it also rapidly stopped all the various secessionist movements inside Russia.  Finally, he used what is called the "administrative resource" to create his United Russia party and to give it the full support from the state.  The irony here is that Putin would never have never succeeded in these efforts had the Russian liberals not created a hyper-Presidential Constitution which gave Putin the means to achieve his goals.  To paraphrase Lenin, I would say that the Russian liberals gave Putin the rope to hang them.

The West, of course, rapidly understood what was going on, but it was too late: the liberals had lost power forever (God willing!) and the country was clearly being taken over by a third, previously unseen, force.

Who really put Putin into power?

That is the $10'000 question.  Formally, the official answer is straightforward: Eltsin's entourage.  Still, it is rather obvious that some other unidentified group of people managed to brilliantly con the liberals into letting the fox inside their hen house.

Now remember that the pro-Soviet forces were comprehensively defeated in 1993.  So this was not the result of some nostalgic revanchists who wanted to resurrect the old Soviet Union.  So no need to look to the this camp who, in fact, has mostly  remained opposed to Putin to this day.  So who else then?

It was an alliance of two forces, really:  elements of the ex "PGU KGB SSSR" and a number of key industrial and financial leaders.  Let's take then one by one:

The first force was the PGU KGB SSSR: the foreign intelligence branch of the Soviet KGB.  It's official name was First Chief Directorate of the Committee of State Security of the USSR.  This would be the rough equivalent of the British MI6.  This was beyond any doubt the most elite part of the KGB, and also its most autonomous one (it even had its own headquarters in the south of Moscow).  Though the PGU dealt with a number of issues, it was also very closely linked to, and interested by, the the world of big business, in the USSR and abroad.  Since the PGU had nothing to do with the KGB's most ugly activities such as the persecution of dissidents (that was the role of the 5th Directorate) and since it has little to do with internal security (that was the prerogative of the 2nd Chief Directorate), it was not high on the list of institutions to reform simply because it was not hated as much as the more visible part of the KGB.

The second force which put Putin in power was constituted by young people coming from key ministries of the former Soviet Union which dealt with industrial and financial issues and which hated Eltsin's Jewish oligarchs.  Unlike Eltsin's oligarchs, these young leaders did not want to simply pillage all the resources of Russia and later retire in the US or Israel, but they did want Russia to become a powerful market economy integrated into the international financial system.

Later, the first group would turn into what I call the "Eurasian Sovereignists" while the second one would become what I call "Atlantic Integrationists" (please see here and here for an explanation of these terms).  We could think of them as the "Putin people" and the "Medvedev people".

Lastly, it should not be overlooked that there is, of course, a third force which threw its full support behind this Putin-Medvedev tandem - the Russian people themselves who have, so far, always voted to keep them in power.

An absolutely brilliant formula but which has now outlived its shelf life

There is no doubt in my mind that the idea to create this "tandem" has been nothing short of brilliant: Putin would cater to the nationalists, Medvedev to the more liberally oriented folk.  Putin would get the support of the "power ministries" (defense, security, intelligence) while Medvedev would get the support of the business community.  Putin could scare the local authorities into compliance with the orders from the federal center, while Medvedev would make the US and EU feel good at Davos.  Or, let's put it this way: who would be against the Putin & Medvedev duo? Diehard supporters of the Soviet Union, rabid xenophobic nationalists, rabid pro-US liberals and Jewish exiles.  That's pretty much it, and that ain't much.

By the way - what do we see in today's opposition?  A Communist Party catering to those nostalgic of the Soviet era, a Liberal-Democratic Party catering to the nationalists, and a pretty small "Just Russia" party whose sole purpose appear to be to take votes off the other two and coopt some of the rabid liberals.  In other words, Medvedev and Putin have basically eliminated any type of credible opposition.

As I have mentioned in past posts, there are now clear signs of serious tensions between the "Eurasian Sovereignists" and the "Atlantic Integrationists" to the point that Putin has now created his own movement (the "All-Russia People's Front", created by Putin in 2011 (again, for background on that please see here and here). 

Having looked at the complex processes which ended up creating the Putin Presidency in Russia, we need to look at what took place in the USA during the same time period.

In the meantime - the US gets Neoconned

Unlike the Soviet Union which basically disappeared from the map of our planet, the USA "won" the Cold War (this is not factually quite true, but this is how many Americans see it) and having become the last and only real super-power the US immediately embarked on a series of external wars to establish its "full spectrum dominance" over the planet, especially after the events of 9/11 which deeply transformed the nature of the US society itself. 

Sill, the post 9/11 society has its roots in a far more distant past: the Reagan years.

During the Presidency of Ronald Reagan a group which later become known as the "Necons" made a strategic decision to take over the Republican Party, its affiliated institutions and think tanks.  While in the past ex-Trotskyites had been more inclined to support the putatively more Left-leaning Democratic Party, the "new and improved GOP" under Reagan offered the Neocons some extremely attractive features:

1) Money: Reagan was an unconditional supporter of big business and the corporate world.  His mantra "government is the problem" fitted perfectly with the historical closeness of the Neocons with the Robber Barons, Mafia bosses and big bankers.  For them, de-regulation meant freedom of action, something which was bound to make speculators and Wall Street wise guys immensely rich.

2) Violence: Reagan also firmly stood behind the US Military-Industrial complex and a policy of intervention in any country on the planet.  That fascination with brute force and, let be honest here, terrorism also fitted the Trotskyite-Neocon mindset perfectly.

3) Illegality: Reagan did not care at all about the law, be it international law or domestic law.  Sure, as long as the law happens to be advantageous to US or GOP interests, it was upheld with great ceremony.  But if it didn't, the Reaganites would break it with no compunction whatsoever.

4) Arrogance: under Reagan, patriotism and feel-good imperial hubris reached a new height.  More than ever before, the US saw itself as not only the "Leader of the Free World" protecting the planet against the "Evil Empire", but also as unique and superior to the rest of mankind (like in the Ford commercial of the 1980s: "we're number one, second to none!")

5) Systematic deception: under Reagan lying turned from an occasional if regular tactics used in politics to the key form of public communication: Reagan, and his administration, could say one thing and then deny it in the same breath.  They could make promises which were clearly impossible to keep (Star Wars anybody?).  They could solemnly take an oath and than break it (Iran-Contra).  And, if confronted by proof of these lies, all Reagan had to do is to say: "well, no, I don't remember".

6) Messianism: not only did Reagan get a huge support basis amongst the various crazy religious denominations in the USA (including all of the Bible Belt), Reagan also promoted a weird can of secular Messianism featuring a toxic mix of xenophobia bordering on racism with a narcissistic fascination with anything patriotic, no matter how stupid, bordering on self-worship.

So let's add it all up:

Money+violence+illegality+arrogance+deception+Messianism equals what?

Does that not all look very, very familiar?  Is that not a perfect description of Zionism and Israel?

No wonder the Neocons flocked in greater and greater number to this new GOP!  Reagan's GOP was the perfect Petri dish for the Zionist bacteria to grow, and grow it really did.  A lot.

I think that it would be reasonable to say that the USA underwent a two-decades long process of "Zionisation" which culminated in the grand 9/11 false flag operation in which the PNAC-types basically used their access to the centers of power in the USA, Israel and the KSA to conjure up a new enemy - "Islamo-Fascist Terror" - which would not only justify a planetary war against "terrorism" (the GWOT) but also an unconditional support for Israel.

There were also losers in this evolution, primarily what I call the "old Anglo camp" which basically lost control of most of its domestic political power and all of its foreign policy power: for the first time a new course in foreign policy gradually began to take shape under the leadership of a group of people which would in time be identified as "Israel Firsters".  For a short time the old Anglos seemed to have retaken the reigns of power - under George Bush Senior - only to immediately loose it again with the election of Bill Clinton.  But the apogee of Ziocon power was only reached under the Presidency of George W. Bush who basically presided over a massive purge of Anglos from key positions in government (especially the Pentagon and the CIA).  Predictably, having the folks which Bush Senior called "the crazies in the basement" actually in power rapidly brought the USA to the edge of a global collapse: externally the massive worldwide sympathy for the USA after 911 turned into a tsunami of loathing and resentment, while internally the country was faced with a massive banking crisis which almost resulted the imposition of martial law over the USA.

In comes Barak Obama - "change we can believe in!"

The election of Barak Obama to the White House truly was a momentous historical event.  Not only because a majority White population had elected a Black man to the highest office in the country (this was really mainly an expression of despair and of a deep yearning for change), but because after one of the most effective PR campaigns in history, the vast majority of Americans and many, if not most, people abroad, really, truly believed that Obama would make some deep, meaningful changes.  The disillusion with Obama was as great as the hopes millions had in him.  I personally feel that history will remember Obama not only as one of the worst Presidents in history, but also, and that is more important, as the last chance for the "system" to reform itself.  That chance was missed.  And while some, in utter disgust, described Obama as "Bush light", I think that his Presidency can be better described as  "more of the same, only worse".

Having said that, there is something which, to my absolute amazement, Obama's election did achieve: the removal of (most, but not all) Neocons from (most, but not all) key positions of power and a re-orientation of (most, but not all) of US foreign policy in a more traditional "USA first" line, usually supported by the "old Anglo" interests.  Sure, the Neocons are still firmly in control of Congress and the US corporate media, but the Executive Branch is, at least for the time being, back under Anglo control (this is, of course, a generalization: Dick Cheney was neither Jewish nor Zionist, while the Henry Kissinger can hardly be described as an "Anglo").  And even though Bibi Netanyahu got more standing ovations in Congress (29) than any US President, the attack on Iran he wanted so badly did not happen.  Instead,  Hillary and Petraeus got kicked out, and Chuck Hagel and John Kerry got in.  That is hardly "change we can believe in", but at least this shows that the Likud is not controlling the White House any more.

Of course, this is far from over.  If anything the current game of chicken played between the White House and Congress over the budget with its inherent risk of a US default shows that this conflict is far from settled.

The current real power matrix in the USA and Russia

We have shown that there two unofficial parties in Russia which are locked in a deadly conflict for power, the "Eurasian Sovereignists" and "Atlantic Integrationists".  There are also two unofficial parties in the USA who are also locked in a deadly conflict for power: the Neocons and the "old Anglos imperialists".  I would argue that, at least for the time being, the "Eurasian Sovereignists" and the "old Anglos" have prevailed over their internal competitor but that the Russian "Eurasian Sovereignists" are in a far stronger position that the American "old Anglos".   There are two main reasons for that:

1)  Russia has already had its economic collapse and default and
2)  a majority of Russians fully support President Putin and his "Eurasian Sovereignist" policies. 

 In contrast, the USA is on the brink of an economic collapse and the 1% clique which is running the USA is absolutely hated and despised by most Americans.

After the immense and, really, heart-breaking disillusionment with Obama, more and more Americans are becoming convinced that changing the puppet in the White House is meaningless and that what the US really needs is regime change.
 
The USSR and the USA - back to the future?

It is quite amazing for those who remember the Soviet Union of the late 1980 how much the US under Obama has become similar to the USSR under Brezhnev: internally it is characterized by a general sense of disgust and alienation of the people triggered by the undeniable stagnation of a system rotten to its very core. A bloated military and police state with uniforms everywhere, while more and more people live in abject poverty.  A public propaganda machine which, like in Orwell's 1984, constantly boasts of successes everywhere while everybody knows that these are all lies.  Externally, the US is hopelessly overstretched and either hated and mocked abroad.  Just as in the Soviet days, the US leaders are clearly afraid of their own people so they protect themselves by a immense and costly global network of spies and propagandists who are terrified of dissent and who see the main enemy in their own people. 

Add to that a political system which far from co-opting the best of its citizens deeply alienates them while promoting the most immoral and corrupt ones into the positions of power.  A booming prison-industrial complex and a military-industrial complex which the country simply cannot afford maintaining.  A crumbling public infrastructure combined with a totally dysfunctional health care system in which only the wealthy and well-connected can get good treatment.  And above it all, a terminally sclerotic public discourse, full of ideological clichés an completely disconnected from reality.

I will never forget the words of a Pakistani Ambassador to the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in 1992 who, addressing an assembly of smug western diplomats, said the following words: "you seem to believe that you won the Cold War, but did you ever consider the possibility that what has really happened is that the internal contradictions of communism caught up with communism before the internal contradictions of capitalism could catch up with capitalism?!".  Needless to say, these prophetic words were greeted by a stunned silence and soon forgotten.  But the man was, I believe, absolutely right: capitalism has now reached a crisis as deep as the one affecting the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and there is zero chance to reform or otherwise change it.  Regime change is the only possible outcome.

The historical roots of the russophobia of the American elites

Having said all of the above, its actually pretty simple to understand why Russia in general, and Putin in particular, elicits such a deep hatred from the Western plutocracy: having convinced themselves that they won the Cold War they are now facing the double disappointment of a rapidly recovering Russia and a Western economic and political decline turning into what seems to be a slow and painful agony.

In their bitterness and spite, Western leaders overlook the fact that Russia has nothing to do with the West's current problems.  Quite to the contrary, in fact: the main impact the collapse of the Soviet Union on the US-run international economic system was to prolong its existence by creating a new demand for US dollars in Eastern Europe and Russia (some economists - such as Nikolai Starikov -  estimate that the collapse of the USSR gave an extra 10+ years of life to the US dollar).

In the past, Russia has been the historical arch-enemy of the British Empire.  As for Jews - they have always harbored many grievances towards pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia.  The Revolution of 1917 brought a great deal of hope for many East-European Jews, but it was short lived as Stalin defeated Trotsky and the Communist Party was purged from many of its Jewish members.  Over and over again Russia has played a tragic role in the history of the Ashkenazi Jews and this, of course, has left a deep mark on the worldview of the Neocons who are all deeply russophobic, even today.  Somebody might object that many Jews are deeply grateful for the Soviet Army's liberation of Jews from the Nazi concentration camps or for the fact that the Soviet Union was the first country to recognize Israel.  But in both cases, the country which is credited with these actions is the Soviet Union and not Russia which most Ashkenazi Jews still typically associate anti-Jewish policies and values.

It is thus not surprising that both the Anglo and the Jewish elites in the US would harbor an almost instinctive dislike for, and fear of, Russia, especially one perceived as resurgent or anti-American.  And the fact is that they are not wrong in this perception: Russia is most definitely resurgent, and the vast majority of the Russian public opinion is vehemently anti-American, at least if by "America" we refer to the civilizational model or economic system. 

Anti-American sentiment in Russia

Feelings about the USA underwent a dramatic change since the fall of the Soviet Union.  In the 1980 the USA was not only rather popular, it was also deeply in fashion:  Russian youth created many rock groups (some of them became immensely popular and still are popular today, such as the group DDT from Saint Petersburg), American fashion and fast foods were the dream of every Russian teenager, while most intellectuals sincerely saw the US as "leader of the free world".  Of course,  the state propaganda of the USSR always wanted to present the USA as an aggressive imperialistic country, but that effort failed: most of the people were actually quite fond of the US.  One of the most popular pop group of the 1990s (Nautilus Pompilius) had a song with the following lyrics:

Good bye America, oh
Where I have never ever been
Farewell forever!
Take your banjo
And play for my departure
la-la-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-la
Your worn out blue jeans
Became too tight for me
We’ve been taught for too long
To be in love with your forbidden fruits.

While there were exceptions to this rule, I would say that by the beginning of the 1990 most of the Russian people, especially the youth, had swallowed the US propaganda line hook and sinker - Russia was hopelessly pro-American.

The catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the West's total and unconditional backing for Eltsin and his oligarchs changed that.  Instead of trying to help Russia, the USA and the West used every single opportunity to weaken Russia externally (by taking all of Eastern Europe into NATO even though they had promised never to do so).  Internally, they West supported the Jewish oligarchs who were literally sucking out wealth out of Russia live vampires suck blood, while supporting every imaginable form of separatism.  By the end of the 1990s the words "democrat" and "liberal" became offensive curse words.  This joke of the late 1990s is a good example of these feelings (Notice the association between liberalism and Jews):

A new teacher comes into the class:
- My name is Abram Davidovich, I'm a liberal. And now all stand up and introduce yourself like I did ...
- My name is Masha I liberal ...
- My name is Petia, I'm a liberal ...
- My Little Johnny, I'm a Stalinist.
- Little Johnny, why are you a Stalinist? !
- My mom is a Stalinist, my dad is a Stalinist, my friends are Stalinists and I too am a Stalinist.
- Little Johnny, and if your mother was a whore, your father - a drug addict, your friends - homos, what would you be then in that case? !
- Then I would be a liberal.

Notice the association between being a liberal and Jews (Abram Davidovich is a typical Jewish name).  Notice also the inclusion of the category "homosexual" in between a whore and drug addicts and remember that when evaluating the typical Russian reaction to the anti-Russian campaign waged by western homosexual organizations.

The political effect of these feelings is rather obvious: in the last elections not a single pro-Western political party has even managed to get enough votes to make it into the Parliament.  And no - this is not because Putin has outlawed them (as some propagandists in the West like to imagine).  There are currently 57 political parties in Russia, and quite a few of them are pro-Western.  And yet it is an undeniable fact that the percentage of Russians which are favorably inclined towards the USA and NATO/EU is roughly in the 5% range.  I can also put it this way: every single political party represented in the Duma is deeply anti-American, even the very moderate "Just Russia".

Anti-Russian feelings in the USA?

Considering the never ending barrage of anti-Russian propaganda in the western corporate media one could wonder how strong anti-Russian feelings are in the West.  This is really hard to measure objectively, but as somebody born in Western Europe and who has lived a total of 15 years in the USA I would say that anti-Russian sentiment in the West is very rare, almost non-existent.  In the USA there have always been strong anti-Communist feelings - there still are today - but somehow most Americans do make the difference between a political ideology that they don't really understand, but that they dislike anyway, and the people which in the past used to be associated with it.

US *politicians*, of course, mostly hate Russia, but most Americans seem to harbor very little bad feelings or apprehension about Russia or the Russian people. I explain that by a combination of factors.

First, since more and more people in the West realize that they are not living in a democracy, but in a plutocracy of the 1%, they tend to take the official propaganda line with more than a grain of salt (which, by the way, is exactly what was happening to most Soviet people in the 1980s).  Furthermore, more and more people in the West who oppose the plutocratic imperial order which impoverishes and disenfranchises them into corporate serfs are quite sympathetic to Russia and Putin for "standing up to the bastards in Washington".  But even more fundamentally, there is the fact that in a bizarre twist of history Russia today stands for the values of the West of yesterday: international law, pluralism, freedom of speech, social rights, anti-imperialism, opposition to intervention inside sovereign states, rejection of wars as a means to settle disputes, etc.

In the case of the war in Syria, Russia's absolutely consistent stance in defense of international law has impressed many people in the USA and Europe and one can hear more and more praise for Putin from people who in the past has deep suspicions about him.

Russia, of course, is hardly a utopia or some kind of perfect society, far from it, but it has taken the fundamental decision to become a *normal* country, as opposed to being a global empire, and any normal country will agree to uphold the principles of the "West of yesterday", not only Russia.  In fact, Russia is very un-exceptional in its pragmatic realization that to uphold these principles is not a matter of naive idealism, but a sound realistic policy goal.  People in the West are told by their rulers and the corporate media that Putin in an evil ex-KGB dictator who is a danger for the US and its allies, but as soon as these people actually read or listen to what Putin actually says they find themselves in a great deal of agreement with him.

In another funny twist of history, while the Soviet population used to turn to the BBC, Voice of America or Radio Liberty for news and information, more and more people in the West are turning to Russia Today, Press TV, or Telesur to get their information.  Hence the panicked reaction of Walter Isaacson,  Chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the US outfit overseeing US media directed at foreign audiences, who declared that “we can't allow ourselves to be out-communicated by our enemies.  You've got Russia Today, Iran's Press TV, Venezuela's TeleSUR, and of course, China is launching an international broadcasting 24-hour news channel with correspondents around the world".  Folks like Isaacson know that they are slowly but surely loosing the informational battle for the control of the minds of the general public.

And now, with the entire Snowden affair, Russia is becoming the safe harbor for those political activists who are fleeing Uncle Sam's wrath.  A quick search on the Internet will show you that more and more people are referring to Putin as the "leader of the Free World" while other are collecting signatures to have Obama give his Nobel Prize to Putin.  Truly, for those like myself who have actually fought against the Soviet system it is absolutely amazing to see the 180 degree turn the world has taken since the 1980s.

Western elites - still stuck in the Cold War

If the world has radically changed in the last 20 years, the Western elites did not.  Faced with a very frustrating reality they are desperately trying to re-fight the Cold War with the hope of re-winning it again.  Hence the never ending cycle of Russia-bashing campaigns I mentioned at the beginning of this post. They try to re-brand Russia as the new Soviet Union, with oppressed minorities, jailed or murdered dissidents, little or no freedom of speech, a monolithic state controlled media and an all seeing security apparatus overseeing it all.  The problem, of course, is that they are 20 years late and that these accusations don't stick very well with the western public opinion and get exactly *zero* traction inside Russia.  In fact, every attempt at interfering inside Russian political affairs has been so inept and clumsy that it backfired every single time.  From the absolutely futile attempts of the West to organize a color-coded revolution in the streets of Moscow to the totally counter-productive attempts to create some kind of crisis around homosexual human rights in Russia - every step taken by the western propaganda machine has only strengthened Vladimir Putin and his the "Eurasian Sovereignists" at the expense of the "Atlantic Integrationist" faction inside the Kremlin.

There was a deep and poignant symbolism in the latest meeting of the 21 APEC countries in Bali.  Obama had to cancel his trip because of the US budget crisis while Putin was treated to a musically horrible but politically deeply significant rendition of "Happy birthday to you!" by a spontaneous choir composed of the leaders of the Pacific Rim countries.  I can just imagine the rage of the White House when they saw "their" Pacific allies serenading Putin for his birthday!

Conclusion: "we are everywhere"

In one of his most beautiful songs, David Rovics sings the following words which I want to quite in full, as each line fully applies to the current situation:

When I say the hungry should have food
I speak for many
When I say no one should have seven homes
While some don't have any
Though I may find myself stranded in some strange place
With naught but a vapid stare
I remember the world and I know
We are everywhere

When I say the time for the rich, it will come
Let me count the ways
Victories or hints of the future
Havana, Caracas, Chiapas, Buenos Aires
How many people are wanting and waiting
And fighting for their share
They hide in their ivory towers
But we are everywhere

Religions and prisons and races
Borders and nations
FBI agents and congressmen
And corporate radio stations
They try to keep us apart, but we find each other
And the rulers are always aware
That they're a tiny minority
And we are everywhere

With every bomb that they drop, every home they destroy
Every land they invade
Comes a new generation from under the rubble
Saying "we are not afraid"
They will pretend we are few
But with each child that a billion mothers bear
Comes the next demonstration
That we are everywhere. 

(you can listen to the song by clicking here)

These words are a beautiful expression for the hope which should inspire all those who are now opposing the US-Zionist Empire: we are everywhere, literally.  On one side we have the 1%, the Anglo imperialists and the Ziocons, while on the other we have the rest of the planet, including potentially 99% of the American people.  If it is true that at this moment in time Putin and his Eurasian Sovereignists are the most powerful and best organized faction of the worldwide resistance to the Empire, they are far from being central, or even less so, crucial, to it.  Yes, Russia can, and will, play its role, but only as a normal country amongst many other normal countries, some small and economically weak like Ecuador, other huge and powerful like China.  But even small Ecuador was "big enough" to grand refuge to Julian Assange while China seems to have asked Snowden to please leave.  So Ecuador is not that small after all?

It would be naive to hope that this "de-imperialization" process of the USA could happen without violence.  The French and British Empires collapsed against the bloody backdrop of WWII, while did the Nazi and Japanese Empires were crushed under a carpet of bombs.  The Soviet Empire collapsed with comparatively less victims, and most of the violence which did take place during that process happened on the Soviet periphery.  In Russia itself, the number of death of the mini civil war of 1993 was counted in the thousands and not in the millions. And by God's great mercy, not a single nuclear weapon was detonated anywhere.

So what will likely happen when the US-Ziocon Empire finally collapses under its own weight?  Nobody can tell for sure, but we can at least hope that just as no major force appeared to rescue the Soviet Empire in 1991-1993, no major force will attempt to save the US Empire either.  As David Rovic's puts it so well, the big weakness of the 1% which rule the US-Ziocon Empire is that "they are a tiny minority and we are everywhere".

In the past 20 years the US and Russia have followed diametrically opposed courses and their roles appears to have been reversed.  That "pas de deux" is coming to some kind of end now.  Objective circumstances have now again placed these two countries in opposition to each other, but this is solely due to the nature of the regime in Washington DC.  Russian leaders could repeat the words of the English rapper Lowkey and declare "I'm not anti-America, America is anti-me!" and they could potentially be joined by 99% of Americans who, whether they already realize it or not, are also the victims of the US-Ziocon Empire.

In the meantime, the barrage of anti-Russian propaganda campaigns will continue unabated simply because this seems to have become a form of psychotherapy for a panicked and clueless western plutocracy.  And just as in all the previous cases, this propaganda campaign will have no effect at all.

It is my hope that next time we hear about whatever comes next after the current "Greenpeace" campaign you will keep all this in mind.

The Saker

Posted by VINEYARDSAKER: athttp://vineyardsaker.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/1993-2013-is-twenty-years-long-pas-de.html