Saturday, August 31, 2019
MCU Movies Ranked - All 14 Movies In Order, Worst to Best!
Thursday, August 29, 2019
Tear Down This Myth: Six Questions for Will Bunch
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| https://harpers.org/blog/2010/02/_tear-down-this-myth_-six-questions-for-will-bunch/ |
1. Your book describes itself as a deconstruction of the myth of Ronald Reagan. But how successful has the effort at myth-making been? How does Reagan now stack up among the presidents among historians and the public in general?
It’s interesting–Reagan’s reputation has risen with both the public and historians the further we get in memory from his actual presidency–which I think is a huge tribute to both the myth-making machinery created by the likes of Grover Norquist and the mainstream media’s willingness to embrace the myth. For example, in March 1990, some 13 months after Reagan left the Oval Office, Reagan’s popularity (59 percent) had dipped below that of Jimmy Carter (62 percent). Two major surveys of historians in the mid-1990s rated Reagan’s presidency as below average, not one of the all-time greats.
Ironically, it was those historian rankings that inspired Norquist, the Heritage Foundation, and others to begin what became the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project–the group that aims to name schools, roads, etc., for the Gipper in every U.S. county–and related activities. A key part of that myth-building was the notion that Reagan was largely responsible for “winning the Cold War”–a premise that was rejected, according to a USA Today poll in 1989, when it was actually happening, by Americans crediting Mikhail Gorbachev for the reforms instead. You see the fruits of that effort today; professors–arguably eager to show they’re not tools of liberal bias–now rate Reagan as high as the Top Ten of U.S. presidents, and public opinion of the 40th president is fairly high as well.
2. Lincoln’s birthday passed last week. It was remarkable that few Republicans paused to notice or to note the importance of the nation’s first Republican president. Is there a relationship between the fading away of Lincoln as a Republican icon and the rise of Ronald Reagan?
It was stunning in the 2009 debate between candidates to become chair of the Republican National Committee; as some may recall, all six hopefuls quickly named Reagan as their favorite ex-president, and not one even paid token lip-service to Lincoln. The simplistic answer would be racism – i.e., lack of excitement that Lincoln’s legacy was ending slavery – but I do not think that’s the reason, certainly not overtly. It’s just that Reagan, especially the mythologized version pushed by 21st Century GOPers, relates more to the battles the right is still fighting today, such as the unending “culture wars” against liberal elites and efforts to portray Democrats as weak on defense. That makes him a more potent and more useful symbol than Lincoln, whose remarkable nineteenth-century achievements are more abstract and are generally things that all Americans support.
3. Reagan is often portrayed as an arms hawk who brought down the Soviet Union through aggressive military spending. Is this a tenable claim? Does it take into account his arms control efforts?
The Cold War and Soviet relations are central to the Reagan legacy/myth. The conservative story line is (not surprisingly) a rather simple one: Reagan came in and spent billions on an arms race that bankrupted the Soviets, while his bellicose rhetoric – “evil empire” and “tear down this wall!” – cowed its leaders into allowing the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Reality is more complicated. For one thing, the U.S. arms build-up began under Jimmy Carter and a lot of the spending proved ultimately wasteful. Now that we have access to historical material from the Kremlin, we also know that our most bellicose moves strengthened hardliners at the expense of Soviet reformers. Reagan was right about one thing: Communism was a soon-to-fail economic system, as a new generation of USSR leaders led by Gorbachev also realized. This is why most people at the time, and most historians today, give the lion’s share of credit for ending the Cold War to Gorbachev and to the reform efforts that he initiated, such as glasnost and perestroika.
That said, Reagan deserves praise for realizing that Gorbachev was indeed a different kind of Soviet leader, and for encouraging his reforms. Likewise, people should realize that Reagan’s aversion to nuclear weapons was a deeply held, personal belief which motivated some major accomplishments in arms reduction at the tail end of his presidency. These aspects of the real Reagan – a willingness to negotiate with enemies at the right time, and his real concerns about nuclear weapons – are the parts of Reagan’s legacy that progressives should actually embrace and use in today’s political debates.
4. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, former Vice President Cheney claimed during a cabinet meeting that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.” How does deficit spending without consequences play in the Reagan legend?
This part of the Reagan legacy is so at odds with the 2010 message from Reagan-worshipping conservatives – especially the right-wing Tea Party faction – of fiscal discipline and deficit reduction that no one can figure out exactly what to do with it. I would argue that there are parallels between Reagan and Obama, in the sense that both presidents came into power during economic crises and both cut taxes and increased spending in their first year, leading to higher deficits. The one difference – and it’s an important one – is that Reagan’s increased spending was for the relatively wasteful area of defense (although it did lead to some job creation) while Obama is making an attempt to target more useful areas, such as infrastructure and alternative energy. The bottom line on Reaganomics is pretty bleak. Yearly deficits soared, and the overall national debt nearly tripled, from $930 billion to about $2.7 trillion, according to the Washington Post.
There was a short-term cost to this and a long-term cost. In the short term, Reagan’s profligate ways led to higher interest rates that slowed productively and eventually plunged the nation into a recession around 1990, leaving George H.W. Bush to deal with the mess. Policy makers had little room to maneuver in that 1990-91 recession because of the large deficits. Ultimately, both Bush 41 and Bill Clinton mounted a major effort to undo Reaganomics, including the breach of the “no new taxes” pledge that helped turn the senior Bush into a one-term president. Contrary to what Cheney said, deficits did matter, which is why the mythmaking and its influence in Bush 43’s reckless ways is so disturbing.
In the long-term sense, Reagan turned America from a creditor nation, which it had been since World War I, into a debtor nation. If you are unhappy about all the dollars that America owes to China today, that is a major element of the legacy of the president of whom we’re now erecting all these bronze statues. What’s more, many people – myself included – fault Reagan for promoting a kind of sunny, credit-card-driven consumerism that didn’t just hurt the nation’s wallet but led to unwise spending decisions and too much borrowing by everyday citizens. Do you remember “Wall Street,” with Gordon Gekko and “greed is good”? It’s not a coincidence that film was released at the zenith of the Reagan presidency.
5. Ronald Reagan signed the Convention Against Torture, and his Justice Department indicted and prosecuted a Texas sheriff for waterboarding. How can his views about torture be reconciled with the current Republican pro-torture dogma?
It’s important not to nominate Reagan for sainthood in the arena of human rights. His “Reagan Doctrine” in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure. That said, back on U.S. soil, Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.
But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”
It’s almost tragic – when you go back to the very recent history of the 1980s – when you realize how seriously an American consensus on human rights and the power of our criminal-justice justice system has been trashed by the modern conservative movement. It’s going to take a long time to get that back – although the words that Reagan and his aides left behind could help America get past this.
6. What is the most endearing thing you learned about Ronald Reagan in the process of researching and writing your book?
I mentioned above that his worries about the effect of so many nuclear weapons in the world were a sincere belief. One thing that I did not realize until I researched Tear Down This Myth was that in 1983, at Camp David, Reagan watched and was deeply moved by the nuclear war TV-movie sensation The Day After, which was perceived by most as a liberal and on some level anti-Reagan production. He wrote in his diary that the movie had strengthened his resolve to work with the Soviets on arms reduction, which he actually did after the arrival of Gorbachev. When he signed a major nuclear-reduction treaty in 1987, he telegraphed the producer of The Day After and said, “Don’t think that your movie had nothing to do with this, because it did.”
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
Khrushchev Thaw and Peaceful Coexistence
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Friday, August 23, 2019
Truth about Pol Pot and Maoism
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Moscow - Mira Avenue (1986)
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| https://rutube.ru/video/09d20364d0abdd66f89791d5c5f32bbb/ |
Soviet Russian artist Fedot Vasilievich Sychkov
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| https://soviet-art.ru/soviet-russian-artist-fedot-vasilievich-sychkov/ |
Born in a poor peasant family, early orphaned, Fedot Vasilievich Sychkov spent his childhood in the small village of Kochelayevo, Narovchatsky district, now located on the territory of the Republic of Mordovia. Sychkov showed his ability to paint in early childhood, but how could a simple peasant’s son count on learning the skill of an artist in the Drawing School, or even more so in the Higher Art School at the Academy of Arts? No, of course, this could only happen in a fairy tale. So, the talented boy painted icons, landscapes and portraits of fellow villagers. Fortunately, the fame of him went far beyond the icon-painting studio. In 1937 he became Honored Artist of the Mordovian ASSR, and in 1950 awarded the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR.
Fedot Vasilyevich Sychkov (1870-1958) – Russian (Soviet) artist, Honored Artist of the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1937), Honored Artist of the RSFSR (1950), People’s Artist of the Mordovian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1955).
Meanwhile, in 1892, commissioned by General Arapov, he painted the picture “The Laying Up of the Arapovo Station.” Shown to the director of the Drawing School for volunteers Eugene Alexandrovich Sabaneyev, the picture made an impression. Noting Sychkov’s talent, Sabaneev advised him to bring a young man to St. Petersburg.
In 1892 Sychkov moved to St. Petersburg and enrolled in the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. Supported by General Ivan Andreyevich Arapov, he studied in the Drawing School, from which he graduated in 1895. Then, he became an auditor in the Higher Art School at the Academy of Arts. After graduation, the artist returned to his homeland.
In 1900 he received the title of artist for the painting “News from the war.” And five years later, in 1905, he got an award – the A. Kuindzhi Prize at the Spring Exhibition at the Academy of Arts for the painting “Flax Mills”. Elected a member of the Committee of the Society for Mutual Assistance of Russian Artists.
Fedot Vasilievich Sychkov went on a trip to Italy, France, Germany (1908) and brought many landscapes of Rome, Venice, Menton and marine species. Suring 1909-1917, Sychkov repeatedly got awards at Russian and international art exhibitions. The son of a peasant, the artist enthusiastically accepted the Great October Revolution. Already in 1918-1920 he participated in the design of revolutionary holidays in the town of Narovchata, at the Arapovo station and in the native village of Kochelayevo.
Lydia Vasilievna Ankudinova – elegant, fragile St. Petersburg young lady became a real muse of the artist Fedot Vasilievich Sychkov (1870-1958). The role of this woman in the fate of FV. Sychkov was significant and invaluable.
The artist often painted images of his muse, his beloved woman, who throughout her life supported the fire of creative talent in him.
In 1903 she became the artist’s wife, sharing with him to the end of life all the joys and sorrows. Together with him, she lived in the village of Kochelaevo, in the Mordovian outback, visited exhibitions and was aware of all the events of artistic life. She, like her husband, was keenly interested in folk culture, including Mordovian culture.
The artist died in the city of Saransk in August 1958.
Monday, August 19, 2019
Honest Trailers - Captain America: The First Avenger
Saturday, August 17, 2019
The Neoliberals; A Bi-partisan, Hybrid Political-Corporate Party in Service of Predatory Globalization
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| https://nomadiceveryman.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-neoliberals-bi-partisan-hybrid.html |
The Neoliberal Party isn’t about “democracy”; it’s about the illusion of democracy and the absolute control that the illusion creates. Therefore, the less you know about them, the better off they are and the happier you will be in your self-sustained cocoon of blissful ignorance.
But we can no longer afford the luxury of hiding in our chrysalis with our heads buried in the sand. It’s time for a political and ideological metamorphosis on a national scale.
It goes by many names… “crony capitalism”… “free market capitalism”… the ”centrists”… the “Washington Consensus“…the “Third Way“… ”predatory Globalization“… many names.
And it is served by various think tanks and organizations like the “New Dems“… the “Project for the New American Century“… the “Democratic Leadership Council“… the “American Enterprise Institute“… the “Blue Dogs“… the “Council on Foreign Relations“… the “European Union“…the “International Monetary Fund“… the “World Bank“…the Aspen Institute“… the “Bank for International Settlements“…the CIA…”USAID”… and so on and so on.
The bi-partisan Neoliberal Party is, simply put, the most powerful single political, financial, and corporate influence this nation has ever seen. As such, without hyperbole or sensationalism, it is the deepest and most pervasive threat America and the world has ever known.
The greatest threat to our democracy is poised to overthrow us after decades of “plotting and planning” while most Americans don’t even know it exists. Of the few that do, the vast majority have refused to speak its name or to publicly address its corrosive influence in any meaningful way. But that dynamic is starting to change. It must change if we are to have any chance at all.
The influence of neoliberalism stretches well beyond Party affiliation into a bipartisan consensus of what can only be described as a brutally savage and ultimately self-serving ideology of jungle law which revels in the adage that “only the strong are worthy of survival”. But this isn’t “centrist” as they would have you believe, or even “pragmatic” as was repeated over and over again in the lead-up to the elections or whenever they try to explain away the latest ”compromise” coming from the administration of “CHANGE”.
This neoliberal ideology isn’t the middle of any road the vast majority of Americans would take were they to know where it was actually heading.
For followers of the neoliberal ideology, obfuscation is mandatory. In point of fact, fundamental dishonesty is a desperate necessity for the very survival of the Neoliberal Party. This is why we have recently witnessed a tremendous rise in the political influence of public relations agencies like Burston-Marstellar. They (and far too many other PR agencies littering the DC political landscape) produce the lines and the memes of propaganda which help control the narrative of the ongoing transition of our representative republic into a neoliberal based inverted totalitarianism.
It is the task of these PR (read as “Propaganda”) firms to spin up the deceit that will help convince supporters of one Party or the other that the Neoliberal reforms and the constitutional restructuring that are being imposed on our nation are in our best interests when in fact they actually only benefit the interests of the banks or those of various corporations, at our expense. Think of agencies like Burston-Marstellar as the steering committee for the not-for-profit 501 (3)(c) the “Neoliberal War on Democracy Foundation” and you start to get an idea of what I am talking about.
But what is “neoliberalism” and why is it’s allure become so attractive to such a large percentage of our elected representatives who have either willingly signed on to its highly destructive and ultimately un-American mandate or simply stand by silently watching it happen… to us?
The Road to Neoliberalization: The Infection
Neoliberalism is an extreme and malevolent form of ultra-capitalist predatory globalization which is probably best exemplified by the socially crippling ”structural reforms” imposed on many nations over the past several decades by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. By far and away the best expose written so far on the disastrous consequences of these IMF structural reforms is without a doubt, Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism“.
Within her book, Naomi Klein chronicles the destructive pattern of the neoliberal structural reforms across the span of several continents and over the course of many decades. In its wake, neoliberalization has left starvation, disease, poverty, unprecedented levels of unemployment, desperation, death squads, assassinations, systemic torture, ravaged school systems, pillaged resources, foreclosures, prostitution, sweatshops, child exploitation, ghettos, shantee towns, and the general degradation of the standards of living for quite literally a billion human beings all across the world.
With all that in its wake there is one more thing that the neoliberalization process creates; vast and nearly immeasurable sums of wealth.
Think of the process as the worst parts of the mergers and acquisitions profession being mercilessly applied on a national level. The targeted country is assessed like Wall Street tycoon would assess a corporation he intends to devour, the juicy parts are singled out for consumption while the rest is bled dry for as long as possible then discarded like so much waste at a pork processing plant.
Back in 1973, on Sept. 11th to be exact, the democratically elected government of Salvador Isabelino Allende was overthrown and replaced by the military dictatorship of the tyrant, Augusto Pinochet.
The coup had been planned and aided by the Nixon administration under the direction of Henry Kissinger. The reason was simple; Allende was a populist who was working to address issues of unfair wealth distribution and worker’s rights in his country. Allende had nationalized some key industries like copper mines and the central bank of Chile. All this was too much for the neoliberals in Washington to take. They couldn’t allow the disease of populism to spread throughout Latin America, so they took action. They had tried to recover control of the nation by running a puppet candidate in the election, but the people chose Allende by a landslide. After the election, after the people of Chile “voted the wrong way”, Nixon imposed crippling sanctions on Chile in the hopes that the desperate situation would motivate the people to remove Allende from power. That didn’t work either.
It didn’t work in Cuba, it didn’t work in Iraq, and it won’t work in the next target of the Global Free Market Wars, Iran.
After the coup and the murder of the freely elected president, and after Pinochet secured control of the general population by means of a brutal dictatorial reign of merciless oppression, Nixon and Kissinger sent Milton Friedman down to Chile to impose his “shock therapy” version of what would later be called by the IMF, “Structural Adjustment Programs“. It was the first time they had been imposed on a grand scale in broad daylight and thus it became known as the “Chilean Experiment”.
It’s important to note that Friedman and his aides that went with him down to Chile were from the University of Chicago School of Economics. His staff later would become known as the “Chicago Boys”. Keep paying attention; Chicago will pop up again and again.
Though Chile was the first grand scale experiment of this type of economic model, organizations like the CIA and USAID had been implementing small-scale versions of it for decades prior to 1973. The first was probably 1953 in Iran when we overthrew the democratically elected president, Mohammad Mosaddegh. That one was a little less bloody but it was still for the direct benefit of certain corporations at the direct expense of the people of the nation. And again, we had to install a dictator who would rule without mercy or justice; the Shah of Iran.
Though Iran wasn’t a full on version of the “shock therapy” Milton Friedman model of neoliberal reforms like Chile was, its important to our understanding of Chile by way of context. Friedman’s economic model didn’t come out of thin air. There were historical equivalencies which he drew from.
Neoliberalization is a scheme like no other before it, to redirect the wealth and natural resources of a nation, any nation, to a very small number of politically connected families and businesses within the nation, and to an equally small number of international banks and corporations. John Perkins describes the early version of the process in his book “Confessions of an Economic Hitman”, as less of an ongoing ”conspiracy” as much as it was simply an ideology of what he called “corporatocracy”.
Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly-paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. John Perkins
Again, pay attention to USAID… you will see them mentioned again as well.
In summation of this section, it isn’t enough to point out all the various ills this economic theory has caused the people of the targeted nations. It not enough to say we are in fact largely responsible for them.
We have to use this history to address current events and the political ideologies that motivate them.
The neoliberals targeted governments of freely elected populist leaders. To the neoliberal, the problem wasn’t the people, though they voted the wrong way, the problem was always the government itself; or more specifically, the role that the targeted governments chose to play.
Government that protected the people, upheld their rights and individual freedoms were the problem for the neoliberal, they were an obstacle that had to be overcome by any means necessary.
Compare that to what is happening today, not just in America, though the similarities are obvious, but also in the nations that we call our “allies” in the “Global War on Terror” (read as “the Global Free Market Wars”). India is engaged in an all out ethnic cleansing of the “Maoists” in the southern part of their nation on behalf of the mining industries. Pakistan is also weeding out their resistance at an alarming rate. Yemen is waging internal conflict on two fronts, the separatists from the south and the revolutionaries in the north who are revolting in opposition to the austerity programs imposed by their neoliberal puppet president. Palestine, Columbia, now Honduras and Haiti, Nigeria, Somalia, the entire European Union, our puppet regimes installed in Iraq and Afghanistan, South Vietnam… the list of “infected” nations goes on and on.
You can add Venezuela and Iran to the targeted ”soon to be infected” list if you like.
The Road to Neoliberalization: It’s in the Blood
It’s easy to see how the presidency of George W. Bush was simply an extension of a developing oligarchical system of neoliberalism in America. His father was a CIA operative and eventually ran the CIA. His father’s presidency was simply a continuation of the Reagan administration’s neoliberal mandate, and that is understandable when you consider that G. H. W. Bush really ran the Reagan administration after Reagan was shot only 3 months into his first term by the son of a man who had contributed heavily to Bush’s primary campaign just a year before. His son, George W. Bush, was selected to be president after the neoliberal regime of Bill Clinton, mainly because they knew he wouldn’t rock the boat and that he would go along with the plan as his father, George P. Shultz, Dick Cheney and others continued the process of the neoliberalization of America.
It’s not as easy though to see how President Obama was also born to his task; the task of being the last stage in the 5 president, 30 year plan of the neoliberalization of America.
For that we have to look at his early years and the people who had the greatest influence on him. Specifically, his mother.
Indonesia factors into this story a great deal, both then and now. William Black, former financial regulator and investigator of the Savings and Loan scandal, in a recent interview on Real News, said that if you want to understand the economic model that this country is being made into, you should basically look at Indonesia under Suharto. General Suharto was the military dictator “friend of the West” who ruled neoliberalized Indonesia for 32 years. General Suharto’s “New Order” regime oversaw one of the most brutal tyrannies in modern-day history while enforcing IMF and World Bank structural reforms. It’s interesting to note that the previous president had kicked organizations like USAID out of the nation and General Suharto promptly allowed them back in when he took over.
General Suharto was directly responsible for the invasion and occupation of East Timor, what Noam Chomsky called the greatest genocide since the holocaust. Prior to that invasion, Suharto met with Henry Kissinger who gave him the go-ahead to do it.
General Suharto’s totalitarian neoliberal regime was purely class based and a living nightmare for the vast majority of the people of his nation. But he and his elites of the country didn’t care. They were mud-people to him;peasants at best. It’s important to understand this atmosphere because it has produced the current president of the United States of America.
You see, Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was right in the middle of it all dragging little Barack right along with her.
Ann Dunham, mother of Barack Obama and daughter of a leading banker in Hawaii, had just married Lolo Soetoro in 1967. He was a government relations consultant working for Mobil Oil company. After the 1968 military coup in Indonesia which brought General Suharto and his neoliberal regime to power, Dunham and Soetoro moved to Jakarta to serve it in different capacities.
Barack Obama’s adaptive father served one of the oil companies that moved in to take advantage of the privatization of the reserves on Indonesia, while his mother actually worked for USAID. Now remember, USAID was well-known then, and it is now, as a front operation for the CIA. Their task was to get into underdeveloped nations in the guise of humanitarian aid, then set up highly profitable industries such as garment factories (sweatshops). Ann Dunham had worked for the Ford Foundation developing what they called “microfinancing” plans; her focus was on “rural development championing women’s work” in garment related industries… you can read that as sweatshops.
It’s unclear whether or not Ann Dunham was in Indonesia while General Suharto was wiping out an estimated 100,000 people in East Timor, but she did return in 1975 and she and her government relations consultant husband stayed on for many years to come during some of the most repressive decades Indonesia would ever see.
As an interesting side note, William Black also talks about the amazing “failures” of people like Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner in their roles as regulators during the run-up to the economic crash of 2007-2008. The fact is, as is becoming clearer and clearer, these weren’t failures at all, as is demonstrated over and over again by the constant promotion of the very people who “failed” to regulate or stop the pending economic collapse.
Geithner was especially negligent in his role as head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. For his “failure” he was promptly promoted to the role of Treasury Secretary by Barack Obama, but that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Ann Dunham worked for Tim Geithner’s daddy at the Ford Foundation and USAID…
While at the Ford Foundation she developed a model of microfinance which is now the standard in Indonesia, a country that is a world leader in micro-credit systems.[38] Peter Geithner, father of Tim Geithner (who later became United States Secretary of the Treasury in her son’s administration), was head of the foundation’s Asia grant-making at that time.
Peter Geithner oversaw the Ford Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia being developed by Ann Dunham Soetoro, President Barack Obama’s mother, and they met in person at least once.
When young Barack Obama was shipped out of Indonesia to attend an exclusive private school in Hawaii, he lived with his maternal Grandmother who paid for the education. She was the vice president of the Bank of Hawaii. His mother remained in Suharto’s “New Order” Indonesia till she became sick in 1994 or so. Suharto’s neoliberal regime went from 1967-1998. Ann Dunham lived in Suharto’s Green Zone for nearly the entire duration of his tyrannical neoliberal rule.
Barack Obama comes from a long line of Green Zone inhabitants. He was brought up in the shadow of bankers, oil industry representatives, and neoliberal free market “reformers”. In short, he was bred for this role he serves now and that process continues to this day.
Take Chelsea Clinton for instance.
Chelsea was raised by the neoliberal “New Dem” / NAFTA creating Clinton family and thought you might start to feel sorry for her at first, Chelsea has acclimated to the neoliberal game plan just fine.
(Chelsea) took a job working for a hedge-fund company that was a major Clinton donor. They work in collateralized debt obligations, you know, the kind that helped crush our economy? Chelsea got an even bigger payday when her investment banker boyfriend sealed the deal for yet another politico-class merger with a massive diamond engagement ring, probably paid for with our bailout money in one way or another.
Chelsea’s soon to be husband is none other than Marc Mezvinsky, son of ex-politico class member Edward Mezvinsky: convicted felon for fraud, supposedly linked to those Nigerian Banker scams, pled quilty to 66 counts of FRAUD, including PONZI SCHEMES….
and where, you ask, does Hillary Clinton’s soon to be son-in-law work? You really want to know? Really? Goldman Sachs Creighton
If you take the time and you look just barely beneath the surface chances are you will find an unpleasant connection the likes of which most “respected” news agencies would never, ever print. That’s because in this new oligarchy we have, the privileged class is doing everything they can to ensure that they stay in power. And that means that they raise their children to despise the filthy masses (ever see the video where Bush wipes his hand on Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with Haitians?) then they empower them to rule over the next generation and in some cases, like that of Barack Obama and Tim Geithner, to play an important role in the neoliberalization of America.
The Road to Neoliberalization: Endgame
The end result of the neoliberalization process produces something very similar to a feudal caste system, or a pre-industrial feudal system, where you will have the ruling class, the warrior class, and the lowly worker class. Wealth distribution will be enormously one-sided favoring the ruling class, which is composed of both political figureheads and corporate/banking leaders. Likewise, individual rights will also be class based, with the workers enjoying the least possible civil rights protects of any of the classes.
If you don’t think this is happening right now in this country, think again.
The wealth redistribution process is pretty obvious. All you have to do is pick up a paper or click on any MSM website and you see it happening every single day. Even under the administration of “CHANGE”.
But when you look closer, like when you examine most viruses under a microscope, their typically invisible lethal influence becomes all together too clear. Take for instance President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan’s “Renaissance 2010? program and Obama’s “Race to the Top” education reform. It’s a purely neoliberal assault on public education on a scale that would make Ronald Reagan blush.
Duncan was never an educator. His background is that of a basketball player turned political animal. He was appointed as “CEO” of the Chicago School system in 2001 by Mayor Daily and from that moment on, Duncan worked diligently to privatize as much of Chicago’s school system as he possibly could no matter what the cost to the taxpayer or the students. It’s interesting to note that Duncan grew up in and around the University of Chicago, he attended their “Laboratory” school then went on to Harvard.
The system Arne Duncan is trying to set up all across the nation on behalf of the neoliberal Obama adminstration is a reproduction of the “class based” Chicago model, free market, public/private schools. As was pointed out Friday on Democracy NOW!, not only is the Duncan created for-profit model in Chicago extremely unfair, it’s also what can only be described as neofeudal in its design. No other city in the country has more militarized schools. That means that certain students are being molded into the warrior class by determinations made at a very young age.
There are very few choice schools, and by this I mean schools that primarily educate with the intention of preparing their students for advanced post secondary educations in leading universities. These schools are difficult to get children into and from what Azam Ahmed disclosed in his recent article and interview on Democracy Now!, positions within those schools are being handed out on a “who do you know” basis at the highest levels. Some schools produce soldiers, others produce leaders of industry, while still more, the vast majority, will be dedicated to filling corporate needs. In one privately owned school system, kids are actually sent to work at Walmart for school credits.
And this is the system Barack Obama is trying to implement all across the country. A for-profit school system that pre-determines the role you children and grandchildren will fill in their new neofeudal vision for America and then makes massive profits off taxpayer dollars for doing you this service.
The privatization of the public school system is just a small part of the overall process. We have already seen a healthcare “reform” bill that simply emboldens and empowers institutionalized corporations at the cost of the working men and women of this country for very little actual “reform”.
We see that Obama is continuing the Global Free Market Wars and even expanding them, without congressional mandate mind you, to nations like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia… with Iran and Venezuela on the not-so-distant horizon.
The secrecy of the Bush administration, a promise that candidate Obama made to end, is not only continuing under the Obama regime, but it is actually getting worse.
The assault on personal liberties is continuing under the not so successful veil of the “progressive” Obama administration as they now claim the right to not only arrest and detain persons on the basis of suspicion, but they actually claim the right to kill U.S. citizens in service to the Global War on Terror. The amazing rational they give for that little privilege is that some people can’t be arrested and tried because the “evidence’ won’t stand up in court, so they claim the executive authority to just kill them instead.
Social Security will be gutted soon enough and Obama already has a bunch of proven neoliberals working on America’s new “austerity measures” program similar to the typical Predatory Globalization of the IMF/World Bank “structural reform programs”.
Now keep in mind that the reason this nation is in the shape its in isn’t because of some accident or an economic cycle swinging back. We are here because these bankers and regulators put us here and then they got bailed out so that the act of economic terrorism wouldn’t cripple their “too big to fail” institutions.
We are here because the Neoliberal Party needed an economic disaster in order to implement the final stages of the neoliberalization of America. They planned for it, they created it, they put the players in place and now we are being forced to pay for it just as our children will have to live in it.
The Road to Neoliberalization: They Hate You for Your Freedom
Within the “about” pages for the organizations that I have listed above, you can find code words and phrases which indicate to other followers of the neoliberal doctrine that the organization is a member of a very specific team. These code words (like “privatization”, “market liberalization”, “pro-business”, “free market”) hint that the organization shares the neoliberal ideology and therefore signals to the reader that they are in the globally “viable” club.
Naomi Klein, in her book “Shock Doctrine”, dispels the mythology that neoliberal reforms were brought about in targeted nations by any kind of remotely democratic way and in fact it was usually quite the opposite. Through the use of subterfuge or coups, rigged elections or downright violence, since 1973 the large-scale neoliberal reformers always had to follow some shock inducing disaster which would provide a sufficient cover for them to introduce their pestilence of an economic model.
Some might argue that our nation will be one of the first to have actually voted into power this rapacious neoliberal policy, but they would ultimately be wrong. Unlike Bush before him, Obama was elected. But his immediate shift to a purely Clinton and Bush holdover administration was a genuine surprise to some (not all). Nearly every single neoliberal “reform” that has taken place since has done so in the face of massive resistance and in spite of very little actual public support. From the FISA Bill to the neoliberal “healthcare reform”, along the way, each and every one of these measures meets with strong public opposition.
Yet the process moves on.
That’s because as we have seen throughout the history of the development of this type of political and economic model, the vast majority of the subjugated people adamantly oppose them. In fact, we are seeing a rising of a kind of conciousness in this country right now. While pro-neoliberal institutions like Fox News and MSNBC work diligently to rebrand the anger and desperation the people are feeling so as to redirect their wrath, some institutions like Democracy Now! , Salon, and FireDogLake are beginning to directly confront the nature of the current transition being forced upon this nation.
We must be careful not to confuse this neoliberal process with what has previously been called “Globalization”. That’s why I make a point to call it Predatory Globalization.
The world is getting smaller; that is a fact. The notion that we are an interconnected body, a “brotherhood of man” if you will, is undeniable. In fact, it might be our salvation. All across the globe there are pockets of legitimate resistance to this neoliberal onslaught, lessons that we can learn from our neighbors to the south as well as those across the pond.
Globalization can be a beneficial thing and it can be a powerful motivational force that helps drive us to stop this inhuman process called Predatory Globalization.
If the problem is global, if the infection is global, then the solution, and the cure must therefore also be global.
Look at Ireland, look at Greece. Look at Venezuela and Bolivia. Look at the resistance forming in India, Honduras, the UK and the EU. All across the world an ideological war is taking place but none of them, none of them, stand a chance if we don’t do our part. We have a responsiblity to the people of the world to set this right. We have allowed this disease to spread unchecked from the great halls and corporate institutions of our fragile republic for far too long. We cannot sit idly by any longer.
In order to do this, we must first call it what it is. We must identify its agents and constantly expose them for what they are. We must reject the propaganda which would confuse and undermine the will of the people here in America. We must be relentless in this pursuit, to educate and inform, because was is at stake is not merely the sum total of our healthcare system or our Social Security administration or even our civil liberties…
What is at stake is nothing short of the global right to rule by self-determination. At one time, the United States stood as a shining example of democracy. We were the promise and the hope of oppressed people everywhere. What we are witnessing the beginning of the last stages of the exact opposite of that. It can change, it must change. We must reclaim our heritage and in so doing free ourselves from the pre-ordained serfdom destiny the Neoliberal Party has chosen for us, and in so doing, we can quite literally, liberate billions of people all across the world.
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Letter From Britain: An Establishment Blinded By Russophobia
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| https://consortiumnews.com/2018/06/15/letter-from-britain-an-establishment-blinded-by-russophobia/ |
Hostility to Russia is one of the most enduring, as well as one of the most destructive, realities of British life. Its persistence is illustrated by one of the most interesting but least reported facts about the Skripal affair.
This is that Sergey Skripal, the Russian former GRU operative who was the main target of the recent Salisbury poisoning attack, was recruited by British intelligence and became a British spy in 1995, four years after the USSR collapsed, at a time when the Cold War was formally over.
In 1995 Boris Yeltsin was President of Russia, Communism was supposedly defeated, the once mighty Soviet military was no more, and a succession of pro-Western governments in Russia were attempting unsuccessfully to carry out IMF proposed ‘reforms’. In a sign of the new found friendship which supposedly existed between Britain and Russia the British Queen toured Moscow and St. Petersburg the year before.
Yet notwithstanding all the appearances of friendship, and despite the fact that Russia in 1995 posed no conceivable threat to Britain, it turns out that British intelligence was still up to its old game of recruiting Russian spies to spy on Russia.
Britain’s Long History of Russophobia
This has in fact been the constant pattern of Anglo-Russian relations ever since the Napoleonic Wars.
Brief periods of seeming friendship – often brought about by a challenge posed by a common enemy – alternating with much longer periods of often intense hostility.
This hostility – at least from the British side – is not easy to understand.
Russia has never invaded or directly threatened Britain. On the only two occasions when Britain and Russia have fought each other – during the Crimean War of 1854 to 1856, and during the Russian Civil War of 1918 to 1921 – the fighting has all taken place on Russian territory, and has been initiated by Britain.
Nonetheless, despite its lack of any obvious cause, British hostility to Russia is a constant and enduring fact of British political and cultural life. The best that can be said about it is that it appears to be a predominantly elite phenomenon.
British Russophobia Peaks
If British hostility to Russia is a constant, it is nonetheless true that save possibly for the period immediately preceding the Crimean War, it has never been as intense as it is today.
Moreover, not only has it reached levels of intensity scarcely seen before, but it is becoming central to Britain’s politics in ways which are now doing serious harm.
This harm is both domestic, in that it is corrupting British politics, and international, in that it is not only marginalising Britain internationally but is also poisoning the international atmosphere.
Why is this so?
Elite British Consensus
For Britain’s elite, riven apart by Brexit and increasingly unsure of the hold it has over the loyalty of the British population, hostility to Russia has become the one issue it can unite around. As a result hostility to Russia is now serving an essential integrating role within Britain’s elite, binding it together at a time when tensions over Brexit risk tearing it apart.
To get a sense of this consider two articles that have both appeared recently in the British media, one in the staunchly anti-Brexit Guardian, the other in the equally staunchly pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph.
The article in the Guardian, by Will Hutton and Andrew Adonis, is intended to refute a narrative of British distinctiveness supposedly invented by the pro-Brexit camp. As such the article claims (rightly) that Britain has historically always been closely integrated with Europe.
However when developing this argument the article engages in some remarkable historical misrepresentation of its own. Not surprisingly, Russia is the subject. Just consider for example this paragraph:
“…..note for devotees of Darkest Hour and Dunkirk: Britain was never “alone” and could not have triumphed [in the Second World War against Hitler] had it been so. Even in its darkest hour Britain could call on its then vast empire and, within 18 months, on the Americans, too.”
Russia’s indispensable contribution to the defeat of Hitler is deleted from the whole narrative. The U.S., which became involved in the war against Hitler in December 1941, is mentioned. Russia, which became involved in the war against Hitler in June 1941, i.e. before the U.S., and whose contribution to the defeat of Hitler was much greater, is not.
Whilst claiming to refute pro-Brexit myths about the Second World War the article creates myths of its own, turning the fact that Russia was an ally of Britain in that war into a non-fact.
The article does however have quite a lot to say about Russia:
“Putin’s Russia is behaving like the fascist regimes of the 1930s, backed by sophisticated raids from online troll factories. Citizens – and ominously younger voters in some European countries – are more and more willing to tolerate the subversion of democratic norms and express support for authoritarian alternatives.
Oleg Kalugin, former major general of the Committee for State Security (the KGB), has described sowing dissent as “the heart and soul” of the Putin state: not intelligence collection, but subversion – active measures to weaken the west, to drive wedges in the western community alliances of all sorts, particularly Nato, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people of Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs. To make America more vulnerable to the anger and distrust of other peoples.”
History is turned on its head. Not only is the fact that Russia was Britain’s ally in the war against Nazi Germany now a non-fact, but Russia it turns out is Nazi Germany’s heir, a fascist regime like Nazi Germany once was, posing a threat to Britain and the West like Nazi Germany once did.
Moreover who does not agree, and who does not see facing up to Russia as the priority, is at best a fool:
“In Brexit-voting Weymouth, Captain Malcolm Shakesby of Ukip is unruffled by Putin or European populism. He inhabits the cartoon world of British exceptionalism, and his main concern today is Mrs May’s “sellout” of the referendum result.”
Compare these comments about Russia in the staunchly anti-Brexit Guardian with these comments about Russia by Janet Daley in the staunchly pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph.
Janet Daley does not quite say like Hutton and Adonis that Russia is a “fascist regime”. However in her depiction of it she comes pretty close:
“The modern Russian economy is a form of gangster capitalism largely unencumbered by legal or political restraint. No one in the Kremlin pretends any longer that Russia’s role on the international stage is to spread an idealistic doctrine of liberation and shared wealth.
When it intervenes in places such as Syria, there is no pretence of leading that country toward a great socialist enlightenment. Even the pretext of fighting Isil has grown impossibly thin. All illusions are stripped away and the fight is reduced to one brutal imperative: Assad is Putin’s man and his regime will be defended to the end in order to secure the Russian interest. But what is that interest? Simply to assert Russia’s power in the world – which is to say, the question is its own answer.”
Though Moscow has made clear in both word and action that intervention in Syria at Syria’s invitation was to prevent it becoming a failed state and a terrorist haven, Russia it turns out is focused on only one thing: gaining as much power as possible. This is true both of its domestic politics (“gangster capitalism largely unencumbered by legal or political restraint”) and in its foreign policy (“what is that [Russian] interest? Simply to assert Russia’s power in the world – which is to say, the question is its own answer”)
As a result it must be construed as behaving in much the same way as Nazi Germany once did:
“…..we now seem to have the original threat from a rogue rampaging Russia back on the scene, too. A Russia determined to reinstate its claim to be a superpower, but this time without even the moral scruples of an ideological mission: the country that had once joined the respectable association of modern industrialised nations to make it the G8, rather than the G7, prefers to be an outlaw.”
On the question of the threat from Russia both the pro and anti-Brexit wings of the British establishment agree. Standing up to it is the one policy they can both agree on. Not surprisingly at every opportunity that is what they do.
Intolerance of Dissent Construed as a “Threat from Russia”
In this heavy atmosphere anyone in Britain who disagrees risks being branded either a traitor or a fool.
Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, who is known to favour dialogue with Russia, recently had to endure an ugly media campaign which insinuated that he had been recruited as in effect a Communist agent in the 1980s by Czech intelligence.
That claim eventually collapsed when a British MP went too far and said openly what up to then had only been insinuated. As a result he was forced to retract his claims and pay compensation under threat of a law suit. However the question mark over Corbyn’s loyalty is never allowed to go away.
During last year’s general election Corbyn also had to endure an article in the Telegraph by none other than Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s external intelligence agency MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA). Dearlove also insinuated that Corbyn had been at least a Communist sympathiser or fellow traveller during the Cold War whose sympathies were with the Eastern Bloc and therefore with the various anti-Western and supposedly Communist backed terrorist groups which the Eastern Bloc had supposedly supported:
“Today, Britain goes to the polls. And frankly, I’m shocked that no one has stood up and said, unambiguously, how profoundly dangerous it would be for the nation if Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister. So let me be clear, the leader of the Labour Party is an old-fashioned international socialist who has forged links with those quite ready to use terror when they haven’t got their way: the IRA, Hizbollah, Hamas. As a result he is completely unfit to govern and Britain would be less safe with him in No 10.
I can give an indication of just how serious this is: if Jeremy Corbyn was applying to join any of this country’s security services – MI5, GCHQ or the service I used to run, MI6 – he would not be cleared to do so. He would be rejected by the vetting process. Far from being able to get into MI5, in the past MI5 would actively have investigated him. And yet this is the man who seeks the very highest office, who hopes in just 24 hours time to run our security services.
Young people in Britain have been terribly affected by recent terror attacks. It is only natural that they should be desperately worried about security problems, and to me it is just such a great shame that they don’t understand the political antecedents of the Labour leader. It is these young people, in particular, I am keen to address. I want to explain just what Corbyn’s whole movement has meant.
During the Cold War the groups he associated with hung out in Algeria, and moved between East Germany and North Korea. It is hard, today, to understand the significance of that. When I talk to students about the Cold War, they assume I am just talking about history. But it has a direct bearing on our security today. Only a walk along the armistice line between North and South Korea, with its astonishing military build up, might give some idea of what was at stake.
……Jeremy Corbyn represents a clear and present danger to the country.”
In light of this the crescendo of criticism Corbyn came under during the peak of the uproar in March following the Salisbury poisoning attack on Sergey and Yulia Skripal is entirely unsurprising.
Corbyn’s call – alone amongst senior politicians – for the investigation to be allowed to take its course and for due process to be followed, simply confirmed the doubts about his loyalty and his sympathy for Russia already held by the British establishment and previously expressed by people like Dearlove. His call was not seen as an entirely reasonable one for proper procedure to be followed. Rather it was seen as further proof that Corbyn’s sympathies are with Russia, which is Britain’s enemy.
Corbyn is not the only person to be targeted in this way. As I write this Britain is in the grip of a minor scandal because the right-wing businessman Arron Banks, who partly funded the Leave campaign during the 2016 Brexit referendum, is now revealed to have had several meetings with the Russian ambassador and to have discussed a business deal with a Russian businessman.
Though Banks claims to have reported these contacts to the CIA, and though there is not the slightest evidence of impropriety in any of these contacts (the proposed business deal never materialised) the mere fact that they took place is enough for doubts to be expressed about Banks’s reasons for supporting the Leave campaign. Perhaps even more worrying for Banks is that scarcely anyone is coming forward to speak up for him.
Even a politically inconsequential figure like the pop singer Robbie Williams is now in the frame. Just over a year ago Williams gained wide applause for a song “Party like a Russian” which some people interpreted (wrongly in my opinion) as a critique of contemporary Russia. Today he is being roundly criticised for performing in Russia during the celebrations for the World Cup.
Russophobia Undermining British Democracy
The result of this intolerance is a sharp contraction in the freedom of Britain’s public space, with those who disagree on British policy towards Russia increasingly afraid to speak out.
Since establishment opinion in Britain conceives of itself as defending liberal democracy from attack by Russia, and since establishment opinion increasingly conflates liberal democracy with its own opinions, it follows that in its conception any challenge to its opinions is an attack on liberal democracy, and must therefore be the work of Russia.
This paranoid view has now become pervasive. No part of the traditional media is free of it. It has gained a strong hold on the BBC and it is fair to say that all the big newspapers subscribe to it. Anyone who does not has no future in British journalism.
This is disturbing in itself, but as with all forms of institutional paranoia, it is also having a damaging effect on the functioning of Britain’s institutions.
Amid Growing Influence of Intelligence
One obvious way in which this manifests itself is in the extraordinary growth in both the visibility and influence of Britain’s intelligence services.
Historically the intelligence services in Britain have operated behind the scenes to the point of being almost invisible. Until the 1980s the very fact of their existence was in theory a state secret.
Today, as Dearlove’s article about Corbyn in the Daily Telegraph shows, their leaders and former leaders are not only public personalities, but the intelligence services have come increasingly to fill the role of gatekeepers, deciding who can be trusted to hold public office and who cannot.
Corbyn is far from being the only British politician to find himself under this sort of scrutiny.
Boris Johnson, some time before he became Britain’s Foreign Secretary, made what I am sure he now considers the mistake of writing an article in the Telegraph praising Russia’s role in the liberation of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria from ISIS.
The result was that on his appointment as foreign secretary, Johnson had a meeting with British intelligence chiefs who ‘persuaded’ him of the need to follow a tough line with Russia. He has in fact followed a tough line with Russia ever since.
Russophobia Infects the Legal System
Establishment hostility to Russia is also enabling interference by the intelligence services in the British legal process.
There is a widespread and probably true belief that the British intelligence services actively lobbied for the grant of asylum to the fugitive Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who they seem to have considered some sort of ‘agent of influence’ in Russia. This despite the fact that it is now widely acknowledged that Berezovsky’s background and activities in Russia should have denied him asylum in Britain.
However what is still largely rumour in Berezovsky’s case is indisputable fact in the Alexander Litvinenko case and in the Skripal cases.
I have previously explained how in the Litvinenko case the claim of Russian state involvement in Litvinenko’s murder made by the British public inquiry is not supported by the publicly available evidence.
What has now become clear is that the main evidence of Russian state involvement in Litvinenko’s murder was not the publicly available evidence, but evidence provided to the public inquiry in private by the British intelligence services. This evidence was seen only by the Judge who headed the inquiry, but seems to have had a decisive effect in forming his view of the case and shaping his report.
American readers may be interested to learn that this evidence was put together by none other than Christopher Steele, the person who gave us the “golden showers” dossier, which has played such an outsized role in the Russiagate affair.
How strong or reliable this evidence is it is impossible to say since, as it is secret, it cannot be independently scrutinised. All I would say is that on two other occasions when Steele is known to have produced similar reports about Russian state activities subsequent enquiries have failed to support them. One is Steele’s “golden showers” dossier, which the FBI has admitted it cannot verify, and which scarcely anyone any longer believes to be true. The other is a report produced by Steele which alleged that Russia had bought the 2018 World Cup by bribing FIFA officials, which subsequent investigation has found was untrue.
It turns out that the evidence used to support the British claim of Russian guilt in the Skripal case is the same: evidence provided in private by British intelligence, which is not subject to independent scrutiny. As in the Litvinenko case, the British authorities have nonetheless not hesitated to use this evidence to declare publicly that Russia is guilty. This whilst a police investigation is still underway and before any suspect has been identified.
Indeed in the Skripal case the violation of due process has been so gross that it is not even denied. Instead articles have appeared in the British media which say that due process does not apply in cases involving Russia.
That there can be no rule of law without due process, and that excluding cases involving Russia from the need to follow due process is racist and discriminatory appears to concern no one.
Discrimination in Britain Against Russians
Where the intelligence services have led the way, others have been keen to follow.
Recently a House of Commons committee published a report which openly puts pressure on British law firms to refuse business from Russian clients. The best account of this has been provided by the Canadian academic Paul Robinson:
“……that leads me onto the thing which really struck me about this document [The House of Commons committee report – AM]. This was a statement about the British law firm Linklaters, which managed the flotation of EN+. Shortly before this, the report says ‘Both the EN+ IPO [Initial Public Offering] and the sale of Russian debt in London appear to have been carried out in accordance with the relevant rules and regulatory systems, and there is no obvious evidence of impropriety in a legal sense.’Yet, it then goes on to say the following:
“We asked Linklaters to appear before the committee to explain their involvement in the flotation of EN+ … They refused. We regret their unwillingness to engage with our inquiry and must leave others to judge whether their work at ‘the forefront of financial, corporate and commercial developments in Russia’has left them so entwined in the corruption of the Kremlin and its supporters that they are no longer able to meet the standards expected of a UK-regulated law firm.”
This is quite outrageous, and also cowardly. The committee in effect accuses Linklaters of corruption, while avoiding complaints of libel by use of the weasel words ‘we leave to others to judge’ – a way of making an accusation while claiming that one hasn’t. What’s so outrageous about the statement is that comes straight after a confession that the EN+ flotation was completely above board. Linklaters didn’t do anything wrong, and the House of Commons committee knows it. Nevertheless, it sees fit to suggest that the company is ‘no longer able to meet the standards expected of a UK-regulated law firm.’
The implication here is that any company which has extensive dealings with Russian enterprises is ‘entwined in the corruption of the Kremlin’and so unfit to do business. I cannot interpret this as anything other than an attempt by the committee to threaten British companies and intimidate them into dropping their lawful activities. I consider this disgraceful.
The committee’s attitude can be seen again towards the end of the report, when it writes that ‘instead of participating in the rules-based system, President Putin’s regime uses asymmetric methods to achieve its goals, and others – so-called useful idiots – magnify that effect by supporting its propaganda. So, there you have it. People who do with business with Russia are to be publicly shamed as unworthy of the standards expected of the British people, while those who would dare to point this sort of thing out are to be denounced as ‘useful idiots’. Having any dealings with Russia makes one a Kremlin stooge.”
Taking their cue from the House of Commons committee, identical pressure on British law firms to refuse to act for
Russian clients is now coming from the media, as explained in this article by the Guardian’s Nick Cohen, which talks of potential Russian clients in these terms:
“In this conflict, it’s no help to think of oligarchs as businessmen. They are closer to the privileged servants of a warlord or mafia boss. Their wealth is held at Putin’s discretion. If they are told to buy influence in the Balkans or fund an alt-news website, they obey. Companies that raise funds on the London markets or oligarchs who move into Kensington mansions may look like autonomous organisations and individuals but, as Garry Kasparov told the committee: “They are agents of a rogue Russian regime, not businessmen. They are complicit in Putin’s countless crimes. Their companies are not international corporations, but the means to launder money and spread corruption and influence.”
To which I would add that in law-governed states even criminals have the right of legal representation and advice. In Britain, if the House of Commons committee and Nick Cohen gets their way, Russians – whether criminals or not – will be the exception.
What is so bizarre about this is that the spectre of massive Russian economic penetration of Britain conjured up by the House of Commons committee is so far removed from reality. The Economist (no friend of Russia) provides the actual figures:
“….the high profile of London’s high-rolling Russians belies the relatively small role that their money plays in the wider economy. Foreigners hold roughly £10 trillion of British assets. Russia’s share of that is just 0.25%, a smaller proportion than that of Finland and South Korea.
Parts of west London have acquired many new Russian residents, and shops to serve them (including an outfitter of armoured luxury cars). Yet even in “prime” London – that is, the top 5-10% of the market – buyers from eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union account for only 5% of sales, according to data from Savills, a property firm. Outside the capital’s swankiest districts, Russians’ influence is minuscule. The departure of oligarchs might affect prices on some streets in Kensington, but not beyond.
The same is true of Britain’s private schools. Some have done well out of Russian parents. But of the 53,678 foreign pupils who attend schools that belong to the Independent Schools Council, only 2,806 are Russian. China, by contrast, sends 9,008 pupils from its mainland, and a further 5,188 from Hong Kong.
Looking at these figures it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is the mere presence of Russians, not their number or their wealth or the illicit way in which some of them supposedly came by their money, which for the British establishment is the problem.”
Quite simply, Russians are not welcome, not because they are wealthy or because they are corrupt, but because they are Russians.
Against Russian Media
The same discriminatory approach appears to inform the persistent attacks launched by the British authorities against the Russian television broadcaster RT.
Over the last two years RT has had to repel an attempt by the British authorities to close down its British bank account, has been forced to respond to a succession of complaints from the British media regulator Ofcom, has faced threats of having its British broadcasting licence withdrawn, and has had to endure a campaign of vilification aimed in part at dissuading British public figures from appearing as guests on its programmes.
As to what exactly RT has done – other than vague and unspecific claims that it is a ‘propaganda’ channel – which justifies this treatment, has never been fully explained.
Again it is difficult to avoid the impression that the British establishment’s fundamental problem with RT is that it is simply a Russian channel broadcasting in Britain that scrutinizes establishment policies and actions – a fundamental responsibility of journalism, which is largely missing in British media.
Free speech is a human right in Britain except apparently for Russians.
This discriminatory approach towards Russia and Russians replicates the increasingly ugly and frankly racist way in which Russians are regularly depicted in Britain today.
As to the general effect of that on British society, I repeat here what I wrote back in 2016:
“Racial stereotyping is always something to complain about. It is dehumanising, intolerant and ugly. It is racist and profoundly offensive of its target. This is so whenever it is used to mock or label any ethnicity or national or cultural group. Russians are not an exception.
A society that indulges in it, and which tolerates those who do, forfeits its claim to anti-racism and interracial tolerance. The fact that it is treating just one ethnic group – Russians – in this way, denying them the moral and legal protection which it accords others, in no way diminishes its racism and intolerance. It emphasises it.”
British society is not just the poorer for it. It is deeply corrupted by it, and this corruption now touches every aspect of British life.
Britain Becoming Marginalised
If the result of the British establishment’s paranoia about Russia is deeply corrosive within Britain itself, its effect on British foreign policy has been entirely negative.
At its most basic level it has meant a total breakdown in relations between Britain and Russia.
British and Russian leaders no longer talk to each other, and summit meetings between British and Russian leaders have come to a complete stop. Boris Johnson’s last visit to Russia is universally acknowledged to have been a complete failure, and following the Skripal affair British officials and members of Britain’s Royal Family are now even boycotting the World Cup in Russia.
Indeed British public statements about the World Cup have been all of a piece with the British establishment hostility to Russia, with Johnson recently comparing it to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics and with another House of Commons committee warning British fans of the supposed dangers of going to to Russia to watch them.
This complete absence of dialogue with Russia is a serious problem for Britain as some British officials quietly acknowledge.
Russia is after all a powerful nation and any state which still wishes to exercise influence on world affairs must engage with Russia in order to achieve it. The British establishment’s hostility to Russia however makes that impossible.
The result is that major international questions such as the Ukrainian crisis, the Syrian conflict and the gathering crisis in the Middle East caused by the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear deal – in all of which Russia is centrally involved – are being handled without British involvement.
Where Angela Merkel of Germany and Emmanuel Macron of France talk to Russia and have thereby managed to carve out for themselves important roles in world affairs, Britain’s Theresa May is a bit player.
However, instead of drawing the obvious conclusion from this, which is that refusing to talk to the Russians is the high road to nowhere, the British have doubled down, seeking to regain relevance by leading an international crusade against Moscow.
The strategy – which bears the unmistakeable imprint of Johnson – was set out in grandiose terms in a recent article in The Guardian:
“The UK will use a series of international summits this year to call for a comprehensive strategy to combat Russian disinformation and urge a rethink over traditional diplomatic dialogue with Moscow, following the Kremlin’s aggressive campaign of denials over the use of chemical weapons in the UK and Syria.
British diplomats plan to use four major summits this year – the G7, the G20, Nato and the European Union – to try to deepen the alliance against Russia hastily built by the Foreign Office after the poisoning of the former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March.
“The foreign secretary regards Russia’s response to Douma and Salisbury as a turning point and thinks there is international support to do more,” a Whitehall official said. “The areas the UK are most likely to pursue are countering Russian disinformation and finding a mechanism to enforce accountability for the use of chemical weapons.”
Former Foreign Office officials admit that an institutional reluctance to call out Russia once permeated British diplomatic thinking, but say that after the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, that attitude is evaporating…..
Ministers want to pursue a broad Russian containment strategy at the coming summits covering cybersecurity, Nato’s military posture, sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs and a more comprehensive approach to Russian disinformation.”
It has taken no more than a few weeks since that article appeared on 3 May 2018 for this whole grandiose strategy to fall apart.
Not only have Merkel and Macron each visited Russia since the article was published, but Italy now has a new Russia-friendly government, and Spain may soon do so also. Adding insult to injury, Germany is now casting doubt on Britain’s actions following the Salisbury poisoning attack,
All of this however is eclipsed by Donald Trump’s comments at the G7 saying that Russia should be readmitted to the G7 and having his officials inform the British media that he is becoming increasingly irritated by the British prime minister’s lectures.
In the event not only did Trump fail to meet May one-to-one at the G7 summit, but he refused to agree the summit’s final communique, which criticised Russia.
Needless to say, amidst the collapse of the summit, the plan May had apparently intended to unveil at the summit for a new international rapid response unit to respond to Russian-backed assassinations and cyber attacks fell by the wayside.
Far from gaining relevance by leading an international crusade against Russia, the British are increasingly finding that no one else is interested and that May’s and the British establishment’s obsession with Russia instead of enhancing Britain’s importance is making Britain increasingly irrelevant.
Poisoning the International Atmosphere
The British establishment is in fact making the fundamental mistake of thinking that other countries not only share their obsession with Russia, but that they necessarily value their relations with Britain more than with Russia.
This is a strange view given that Russia is arguably a more powerful nation than Britain.
It is nonetheless true that the British establishment’s anti-Russian fixation is having an internationally damaging effect.
Many Western governments have their own issues with Russia, and in such a situation it is not surprising that British paranoia about Russia finds a ready echo.
The most recent example of this is of course the orchestrated expulsion by various Western governments of Russian diplomats in the immediate aftermath of the Salisbury poisoning attack.
However the most damage has been done in the U.S.
Britain and Russia-gate
The full extent of the British role in the Russiagate scandal is not yet clear, but there is no doubt that it was both extensive and crucial.
The individual who arguably has played the single biggest role in generating the scandal is Christopher Steele, the compiler of the “golden showers” dossier, who is not only British but who is a former British intelligence officer.
It is now becoming increasingly clear – as Joe Lauria wrote last year in Consortium News– that the dossier has played a key role in the whole scandal, being accepted for many months by U.S. investigators – including it turns out by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators – as providing the ‘frame-narrative’ for the case of alleged collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign.
The Steele dossier is in fact very much of a piece with the paranoid conception of Russia which has taken hold in Britain, though (as I have pointed out previously) the dossier’s description of how government decisions are made in Russia is absurd.
Critics of the dossier in the United States rightly draw attention to the fact that it is ‘research’ paid for by Donald Trump’s political opponents in the Hillary Clinton campaign, whilst there is also a view popular amongst some Republicans (wrongly in my opinion) that it is a provocation concocted by Russian intelligence in order to disrupt the U.S. election process and embarrass Trump.
By contrast, insufficient attention is paid, in my opinion, to the fact that it is a British compilation put together in Britain by a former British spy at a time when Britain is in the grip of a particularly bad bout of Russia paranoia.
Steele himself is someone who by all accounts has fully bought into this paranoia. Indeed his previous role in preparing reports about Russia’s supposed role in Litvinenko’s murder and the World Cup bid, and also apparently in the Ukrainian crisis, suggests that he has played no small role in creating it.
Steele is not however the only British official or former official to have played an active role in Russia-gate.
Steele himself is known for example to have a close connection to Dearlove, the former MI6 Director who called Corbyn “a clear and present danger.” It seems that Dearlove and Steele discussed the “golden showers” dossier at a meeting in London’s Garrick Club at roughly the same time that Steele was in contact about it with the FBI.
Another far more more important British official to have taken an active role in the Russiagate affair was Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ – Britain’s equivalent to the NSA – who visited the U.S. in the summer of 2016 to brief the CIA about British concerns over alleged contacts between the Russians and Trump’s campaign.
Though Hannigan’s trip to Washington in the summer of 2016 was first spoken of in April 2017, it has never been confirmed that the Steele dossier, which he brought with him to show to the CIA, was part of the evidence of supposed contacts between the Russians and Trump’s campaign. That it was, however, is strongly suggested by an article in The Washington Post on June 23, 2017, which amongst other things said the following:
“Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.
Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.
But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump…..
The CIA breakthrough came at a stage of the presidential campaign when Trump had secured the GOP nomination but was still regarded as a distant long shot. Clinton held comfortable leads in major polls, and Obama expected that he would be transferring power to someone who had served in his Cabinet.
The intelligence on Putin was extraordinary on multiple levels, including as a feat of espionage.
For spy agencies, gaining insights into the intentions of foreign leaders is among the highest priorities. But Putin is a remarkably elusive target. A former KGB officer, he takes extreme precautions to guard against surveillance, rarely communicating by phone or computer, always running sensitive state business from deep within the confines of the Kremlin.”
This almost certainly refers to the early entries of Steele’s dossier, which is the only report known to exist which claims to have been “sourc[ed from] deep inside the Russian government [and to have detailed] Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the US Presidential race”.
The Washington Post says that the CIA’s report to Obama drew on “critical technical intelligence on Russia provided by another country”.
That points to Hannigan being the source, with Hannigan being known to have visited the U.S. and to have briefed the CIA at about the time the CIA sent its report to Obama.
Hannigan likely provided the CIA with a mix of wiretap evidence and the first entries of the dossier.
The wiretap evidence probably detailed the confused but ultimately innocuous contacts the young London- based Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos was having at this time with the Russians. It is highly likely the British were keeping an eye on him at the request of the U.S., which the British would have been able to do for the U.S. without a FISA warrant since Papadopoulos was based in Britain.
Taken together with the first entries of the dossier, the details of Papadopoulos’s activities could easily have been misconstrued to conjure up a compelling case of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Given the paranoid atmosphere about Russia in Britain it would not be surprising if this alarmed Hannigan.
Needless to say if extracts from the dossier really were provided to the CIA by the head of one of Britain’s most important intelligence agencies, then it becomes much easier to understand why the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community took it so seriously.
Then there is the case of Stefan Halper, an American academic lecturing at Cambridge University, who is friends and a business partner with Dearlove. Halper was inserted by the FBI into the Trump campaign in early July 2016 to befriend Papadopoulos in London. In 1980, the CIA inserted Halper into Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign to help the Reagan camp by stealing information, including a Carter briefing book before a presidential debate.
Suffice to say that just as the British origin of the dossier has in my opinion been overlooked, so has the extent to which it circulated and was given credence in top circles within Britain before it made its full impact in the United States.
Overall, though the extent of the British role in the Russiagate affair is still not fully known, what information exists points to it being very substantial and important. In fact it is unlikely that the Russiagate scandal as we know it would have happened without it.
As such the Russiagate scandal serves as a good example of how British paranoia about Russia can infect the political process in another Western country, in this case the U.S.
Campaigning against Russia
Russia-gate is in fact only the most extreme example of the way that Britain’s anti-Russian obsession has damaged the international environment, though because of the effect it has had on the development of domestic politics in the United States it is the most important.
There have been countless others. The British have for example been the most implacable supporters amongst the leading Western powers of the ongoing sanctions drive against Russia. Britain for instance is known to have actively – though so far unsuccessfully – lobbied for Russian banks to be cut off from the SWIFT interbank payments system, which were it ever to happen would be by far the most severe sanction imposed by the West on Russia to date.
Beyond the effect on the international climate of the constant anti-Russian lobbying of the British government, there is the further effect of the ceaseless drumbeat of anti-Russian agitation which pours out of the British media and various British-based organisations and NGO.
These extend from well-established organisations like Amnesty International – which misrepresented the case against the Pussy Riot performers by claiming that they had been jailed for “holding a gig in a church” – to other less established organisations such Bellingcat and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, both of which are based in Britain. As it happens, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is known to have received funding from the British government, as apparently have the White Helmets.
In addition Bill Browder, the businessman who successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, and who has since then pursued a relentless campaign against Russia, is now also based in Britain and has British citizenship.
The great international reach of the British media – the result of the worldwide use of the English language and the international respect some parts of British media such as the BBC still command – means that this constant stream of anti-Russian publicity pouring out of Britain has a worldwide impact and is having an effect that has to be taken into account in any study of current international relations.
The Price of an Obsession
The British establishment’s obsession with Russia is something of a puzzle.
Britain today is not a geopolitical rival of Russia’s as it was in the nineteenth century and as the U.S. is today. British antagonism to Russia cannot therefore be explained as the product of a geopolitical conflict.
Russia is not a military or political threat to Britain. There is no history of Russia threatening or invading Britain. Russia is not an economic rival, and Russian penetration of the British economy is minimal and vastly exaggerated.
It is sometimes said that there are things about modern Russia that the British find culturally, ideologically or politically distasteful, and that this is the reason for Britain’s intense hostility to Russia. However Britain has no difficulty being best of friends with all sorts of countries such as the Gulf Monarchies or China which are culturally, ideologically and politically far more different from Britain than Russia is. Logically that should make them more distasteful to Britain than Russia is, but it doesn’t seem to do so. In these cases economic interests clearly take precedence over any concerns for human rights.
Ultimately however the precise cause of the British establishment’s obsession with Russia does not actually matter. What does matter is that it is an obsession, which should be recognised as such, and that like all other obsessions is ultimately destructive.
In Britain’s case the obsession is not only corrupting Britain’s domestic politics and the working of its institutions.
It is also marginalising Britain, limiting its options, and causing growing exasperation amongst some of its friends.
In addition it blinds the British to their opportunities. If the British were able to put their obsession with Russia behind them they might notice that at a time when they are quitting the European Union Russia potentially has a great deal to offer them.
It is sometimes said that Britain produces very little that Russia needs, and it is indeed the case that trade between Russia and Britain is very small, and that most of Russia’s import needs are met by countries like Germany and China.
However Britain is able to provide Russia with the single thing that Russia arguably needs most at this stage in its development. This is not machinery or technology, all of which it is perfectly capable of producing itself, but the one thing it is truly short of: investment capital.
In the nineteenth century British capital played a key role in the industrialisation of America and in the opening up of the American West. There is no logical reason why it could not do something similar today in Russia. Indeed the marriage between Europe’s biggest financial centre (Britain) and Europe’s potentially most productive economy (Russia) is an obvious one.
In the twentieth century Britain’s long history of economic involvement in the U.S. paid handsome political dividends. Perhaps the same might one day be the case between Britain and Russia. Regardless of that, economic engagement with Russia would at least provide Britain with a plan for an economic future outside the EU, something which because of Brexit it urgently needs but which currently it completely lacks.
For anything like that to happen the British will first have to address the reality of their obsession, and the damage it is doing to them. At that point they might even start to do something about it. Britain’s relative success since the 1960s in overcoming other forms of racism and prejudice which had long existed in Britain shows that such a thing is possible if the problem is recognised and addressed. However I have to say that there is no sign of it happening at the moment.
In the meantime the rest of the world needs to understand that when it comes to Russia, the British are suffering from a serious affliction. Failing to do that risks the infection spreading, with the disastrous consequences we have seen with the Russia-gate scandal in the US.
There is even a chance that refusing to listen to the British about Russia might have a good effect on Britain. If the British realise that the world is no longer listening to them then they might start to understand the extent of their own problem.
If so than the world would be doing Britain a favour, even if at the moment the British cannot see it.
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