THE CORKER-MCCAIN “RUSSIAN AGGRESSION PREVENTION ACT OF 2014″…
The craziness and out-of-control nature of the corruption evident in foreign policy lately has taken yet another turn for the worse. But this one boggles the mind folks. It seems that the aptly named US Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Bob Corker, with the considerable political weight of US Senator John McCain behind it, has come up with a bill that is…well…a corker:“Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014″: Another U.S. Style Violent Regime Change?
I hope you caught all of that… but in case you didn’t, here are the highlights:
“Corker and fellow Republican Party senators have shepherded to full U.S. Senate passage the «Russian Aggression Prevention Act of 2014». The law, if enacted, would subject Russia to the same level of draconian sanctions currently employed by the United States against Iran, Syria, and Sudan. There is no doubt that such sanctions have one intention: U.S.-style violent regime change as previously directed against Libya and Iraq.OK…we get it: the bill is to make the Ukraine safe for plundering by the West, with the USA being plunderer in chief, but something tells me that the sanctions regime will not put any brakes on the Russian energy companies, the Russian banks, or Mr. Putin’s travel plans, although, if I were him, I’d invest in a stealth aircraft for his presidential airplane, and take along a flight of the latest Russian fighters when traveling. Airplanes seem to be falling out of the sky over there.
“Corker’s Senate co-sponsors include the typical neo-conservative riff-raff associated with other Cold War-era foreign adventures of the United States. Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, the Cuban-American Republican wunderkind who is a right-wing favorite for the presidency in 2016, weighed in with his support for Corker’s bill. Rubio is pushing for similar sanctions against Venezuela and Nicaragua.
“Also supporting the Corker bill is Corker’s Republican colleague from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander.
“The chief supporter of the sanctions bill is Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, a longtime Russophobe who has never passed up a chance to confront Russia militarily, whether it be in Syria, Afghanistan, or Ukraine.
“The Corker bill would impose travel bans and asset freezes on Russian government and Russian corporation officials. Targets include President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and deputy prime ministers and government ministers. Several Russian firms are targeted in the legislation, including Sberbank, VTB Bank, Vnesheconombank, Gazprombank, Gazprom, Novatek, Rosneft, and Rosoboronexport. Corporate targets include «senior executives» of institutions, defined by the law as «a member of the board, chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, secretary, treasurer, general counsel, or chief information officer, or the functional equivalent thereof, of an entity».
But hey, look! there’s more!
“But there may be more than «drugstore cowboy» politics involved with the Republican sanctions bill. Corker, a former mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee, is known to have engaged in a number of illicit real estate and other financial schemes while serving as mayor. Tennessee political sources report that businessmen associated with Ukrainian steel and pipeline billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk had business dealings in the Tennessee city while Corker served as mayor. Pinchuk, the son-in-law of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, is also closely linked to neo-conservative U.S. politicians, including McCain; former George W. Bush political adviser Karl Rove; and Rick Davis, McCain’s presidential campaign manager in 2000 and 2008. Pinchuk is also the only Ukrainian member of the powerful New York-based Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Pinchuk’s annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference, held in the czarist-era Livadia Palace on the Black Sea, draws various Western politicians, many with political and financial interests in Ukraine. Past attendees have included Rove, Soros, McCain’s foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, and such corporatist politicians as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, John Kerry’s 2004 campaign manager Bob Shrum, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Viktor Yushchenko, Mikheil Saakashvili, Newt Gingrich, CFR President Richard Haass, Shimon Peres, and Ukraine’s «acting» Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk.”Ok, like I said, we get it: the bill is to make the Ukraine safe for plunder.
But there’s a catch, and it’s a huge one:
“The Republicans seem intent on punishing former officials of its NATO allies, including Germany and the Netherlands. For example, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder would be subject to a travel ban and asset freeze by the United States because of his chairmanship of the board of Nordstream AG, which is 51 percent owned by Gazprom. Other Germans who face asset freezes and travel bans include Nordstream board members Eggert Voscherau, the deputy board chairman of BASF AG, Reiner Zwitserloot, chairman of the board of the German gas company Wintershall AG, Burckhard Bergmann, chairman of the board of E. ON AG, and Hans-Peter Floren, chairman of the board of E. ON Ruhrgas AG. Dutch chairman of the board of Gasunie of the Netherlands, a member of Gazprom’s Nordstream board and chairman of its Southstream board would also be slapped with American sanctions. Southstream corporate officials who would also be subject to travel bans and asset freezes include corporate officials of Italy, France, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Greece, Germany, Bulgaria, and Hungary, all NATO members, as well as Austria, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.”So there you have it: make the Ukraine safe for plunder, by throwing over Germany, Italy, France, and the rest of Europe. Perhaps the Senators in their infinite wisdom might want to consider a rider to the bill, something to the effect of “but this doesn’t apply to our good friends in Europe,” and then go on to list the exempted parties in the paragraph above.
One begins to wonder if there’s LSD in the water supply of Washington, because the only end result of the cumulative policies of Washington’s oligarchs – the punishment of BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, the spying on European leaders including Chancellorin Merkel, the recruiting of spies within Germany’s intelligence services, the imposition of austerity measures on the Ukraine, and on and on we could go – can only have the long term result in the dissolution of the careful alliances and goodwill built between the USA and western Europe since the end of the last World War, and that, ultimately, cannot be good either for America or Europe.
The last time we saw such incomprehensible and counter-intuitive geopolitical lunacy and war lust was with Sazonov, von Berchthold, Delcasse, Poincare, Grey, and von Bethmann-Hollweg, one hundred years and two days ago, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. The Dual-Monarchy, a “multi-cultural” polyglot entity of several ethnic groups held together by the iron hand of the Hapsburg oligarchy, as we all know, dissolved and disappeared into the dustbin of history in 1918.
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