Who Are The Bad Guys In Ukraine?

Russians have occupied more than a few NATO capitals including Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Berlin and even Paris. No one wants to see that happen again. And yet the West seems to be pushing Russia up against a wall right now with devastating sanctions that are crippling the Russian economy and roiling the country's politics. And nuclear-armed Russia is a lot stronger militarily than the U.K. Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Turkey and the rest of the European NATO allies combined.

After I broke a couple of ribs and punctured a lung, I had to have physical therapy to get back in some semblance of shape. Following a debilitating two week hospital stay I've been having a physical therapist come over twice a week to help with balance and strengthening exercises. He's an American, originally from Ukraine, and speaks fluent Ukrainian and Russian. He also listens to the radio and reads reports on what's going on there in both languages. "It's been," he told me a couple weeks ago, "a brilliant move by the CIA to destabilize Russia at no cost to America." That's certainly not the perspective you get from U.S. media. The mainstream media in the U.S., for example, doesn't let on how hated the Kiev regime is in the eastern parts of the country, nor even attempt to provide any historical context. Most American media consumers probably think Ukraine was once a country. It never was. Is Ukrainian a real language? We'll... Ukrainian is to Russian kind of like what California English is to Australian English.

Last last year we looked at the mounting evidence that the whole mess in Ukraine started with a CIA coup on behalf of a claque of anti-Russian fascists and oligarchs. Eric Zuesse: "How many Americans know that the current regime in Ukraine was installed in a very bloody February 2014 coup d'etat, that was planned in the U.S. White House, and overseen by an Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and run by the CIA, and carried out for the White House by one of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or nazi, political parties, whose founder and leader still controls Ukraine though not officially, even these many months after his coup, and which nazi party has been up to their elbows since then in a genocidal policy to exterminate the people in the region of Ukraine that had voted approximately 90% for the man whom Obama and those nazis overthrew in February?"

The video up top is former Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) voicing his own distrust of the American role in Ukraine. "I'm not pro-Russia, I'm not pro-Putin," he said. "I'm pro-facts." Unlike the CIA-- or a large bipartisan contingent of irresponsible saber-rattling Members of Congress, who are demanding that Obama arm the crumbling Ukrainian army.

My physical therapist told me some of the Russian political analysts are absolutely brilliant and that it's a shame we don't get to hear them here in English. In October, though, The Guardian published a Russian perspective on the conflict with an interview of former Russian spy chief Nikolai Patrushev by Ivan Egorov for Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Egorov starts with a question: "The last few months have witnessed a coup d’état in Ukraine, military operations by the Ukrainian authorities against the people of Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts and rabidly anti-Russian policies on the part of Kiev. Was it possible to predict this turn of events just a year ago?"

Nikolai Patrushev: Our experts warned that a worsening of the situation in Ukraine was likely under conditions of political and economic instability, particularly in the case of outside influence. But I have to admit that the possibility of a sudden seizure of power in Kiev, relying on armed units of self-proclaimed Nazis, hadn’t then been considered. It’s worth remembering that until that coup, Moscow fulfilled all its obligations to Kiev in full.

Without the material and financial help that we constantly supplied, Ukraine wouldn’t have been able to deal with its economic problems, which had become chronic. To help our neighbour, we marshalled material and financial resources worth tens of millions of dollars. For many people in Ukraine, this help came to seem so routine that they simply forgot how important it was for the survival of the country.

But if you’re talking about longer-term predictions, the Ukraine crisis was a totally predictable outcome of the actions of the US and its closest allies.

For the last quarter of a century, these actions were designed to wrest Ukraine and other former Soviet republics away from Russia and to redesign the post-Soviet space in America’s interests. The US created the conditions and pretexts for the coloured revolutions and financed them lavishly.

Victoria Nuland, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, has said that her country spent $5bn between 1991 and 2013 “supporting the aspirations of the people of Ukraine for a stronger, more democratic government.” Even open sources, such as congressional documents, show that government spent no less than $2.4bn on various American “aid” programmes to Ukraine between 2001 and 2012. That’s comparable to the annual budget of some small states. The US Agency for International Development spent around half a billion dollars, the State Department nearly half a million and the Pentagon more than $370m.

...[Egorov:] Some experts believe that the Ukraine crisis served simply as a pretext for the west to escalate relations with Russia. Is that true?

Nikolai Patrushev: Yes, if the catastrophe in Ukraine had not occurred, another pretext would have been found to activate the policy of “containment” towards our country. This policy has been followed religiously for many decades: only the forms and tactics by which it has been realised have changed.

It is well known that after the second world war, the confrontation between the Soviet Union and the west, headed by the US, took the form of a cold war. The military-political element of this conflict rested with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), which was established on 4 April 1949 at the initiative of the US. An analysis of Nato’s actions shows that, having created the alliance, the US pursued two main goals.

First, a military bloc formed under American leadership, aimed against the USSR.

Victoria Nuland-- a bridge too far

Second, Washington pre-empted the emergence in western Europe of an independent group of states that could have competed with the US. It is worth remembering that although, essentially, the US exerted unilateral control over its allies, its territory was not included in Nato’s sphere of responsibility.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which united the socialist countries of Europe and whose very existence was regarded by Nato as a grave danger, the bloc was not only not dissolved, it grew further, both numerically and militarily.

...The coup in Kiev, which was clearly carried out with the help of the US, conformed to a classical model worked out in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. But never before had such a coup impinged on Russia’s interests so directly.

Analysis shows that by provoking Russia into retaliatory measures, the Americans are pursuing the very same goals as in the 1980s vis-a-vis the USSR. Just like back then, they are trying to define our country’s “weak points.” At the same time, of course, they are neutralising economic competitors in Europe who have grown too close to Moscow, as they see it.

It’s worth remembering that Washington always strived to exert leverage over Russia. In 1974, the well-known Jackson Vanik amendment was passed, limiting trade with our country. To all appearances, it became obsolete the moment the USSR fell but it nevertheless remained in force right up until 2012, when it was replaced by the so-called Magnitsky list.



The current sanctions are part of the same trend. The actions of the American administration during the Ukraine crisis are part of a new current in White House foreign policy designed to preserve America’s position of leadership in the world by containing the growing power of Russia and other centres of power. What is more, Washington is actively using the possibilities that Nato offers to exert political and economic pressure on its allies and partners and thereby prevent them from wavering.

[Egorov:] Why is the American elite pursuing the right to control foreign (countries’) raw materials so tenaciously at a time when experts in the west are stressing the importance of developing alternative sources of energy that are supposedly capable of replacing oil and gas in double quick time?

Nikolai Patrushev: Specialists are convinced, in fact, that a real alternative to fossil fuels as the basis of energy production won’t appear in the next few decades. What is more, the dominant belief in the west is that the combined power generated by nuclear, hydro, wind and solar can satisfy no more than a fifth of world demand.

Don’t forget another important point. In the world today, there is a growing shortage of food and drinking water for the planet’s rising population. Lacking the most basic means of survival, desperate people turn to extremism, terrorism, piracy and criminality. This accounts, in part, for the sharp disparities between countries and regions, as well as for mass migration.

A shortage of water and irrigable land often causes discord, not least between the republics of Central Asia. Water represents an acute problem for a range of other countries in Asia and, especially, in Africa.

Many American experts, including the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, claim that Moscow ended up with such vast swathes of territory that it is incapable of exploiting it all: this territory does not, therefore, “serve the interests of humanity as a whole.” We continue to hear claims that (the world’s) natural resources were divided up “unfairly” and that (Russia) must grant foreign states “free access” to them.

The Americans are convinced that many other people reason in the same way, especially in the states bordering Russia, which are already banding together to support such claims on our country and will continue to do so in future. As in the case of Ukraine, they propose to solve problems at Russia’s expense and without taking its interests into account.

Even during periods of relative détente between Russia/USSR and the US, such statements always held true.

That is why, whatever the nuances of American behaviour, or that of its allies, this challenge will remain forever present before Russia’s leaders: to guarantee the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the homeland, to protect and multiply its wealth and to dispose of that wealth sensibly in the interests of the multinational people of the Russian Federation.

People ask how it's possible that so many Jews are in top positions in a Ukrainian government dominated by nationalists (and fascists) whose slogan is that they will drown Russians in Polish and Jewish blood.That they are Jewish or half Jewish takes a back seat to the corruption of oligarchy-- and the ability to loot the country-- which is what this whole mess, tragically, is really all about.




UPDATE: Victoria Nuland, A Dangerous Embarrassment To America

The Cold War throwback driving America's messed up policies in Ukraine is Victoria Nuland, Kerry's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. Her husband is notorious neocon Robert Kagan. In her glory days she was principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. Lately she's been in the news again for this phone call. CNN bleeped out "Fuck," as in "Fuck the E.U."

Greece and the European Project: What's Next?

The State Department's Victoria Nuland explains to Greek President Tsipras that there are certain lines he won't be permitted to cross.

by Gaius Publius

When it comes to coverage of the Greek crisis, there's no better source than Naked Capitalism. I'm going to quote from three recent (post-election) pieces hosted there, along with my own comments.

First, for the overview, something written by Joseph Stiglitz summarizes the situation going into the election perfectly. As quoted here, Stiglitz writes this about Greece (my emphasis everywhere):

Europe’s Attack on Greek Democracy

The rising crescendo of bickering and acrimony within Europe might seem to outsiders to be the inevitable result of the bitter endgame playing out between Greece and its creditors. In fact, European leaders are finally beginning to reveal the true nature of the ongoing debt dispute, and the answer is not pleasant: it is about power and democracy much more than money and economics.

Of course, the economics behind the program that the “troika” (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund) foisted on Greece five years ago has been abysmal, resulting in a 25% decline in the country’s GDP. I can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%.

It is startling that the troika has refused to accept responsibility for any of this or admit how bad its forecasts and models have been. But what is even more surprising is that Europe’s leaders have not even learned. The troika is still demanding that Greece achieve a primary budget surplus (excluding interest payments) of 3.5% of GDP by 2018.

Economists around the world have condemned that target as punitive, because aiming for it will inevitably result in a deeper downturn. Indeed, even if Greece’s debt is restructured beyond anything imaginable, the country will remain in depression if voters there commit to the troika’s target in the snap referendum to be held this weekend.

In terms of transforming a large primary deficit into a surplus, few countries have accomplished anything like what the Greeks have achieved in the last five years. And, though the cost in terms of human suffering has been extremely high, the Greek government’s recent proposals went a long way toward meeting its creditors’ demands.

Fast recap: After the crash of 2008, the government of Greece found itself increasingly unable to pay the interest on its debt. A crisis occurred in 2010 and again in 2012. A great deal of that debt was held outside the country and in private hands (think German and French banks, hedge funds, and the like).

The reasons for this inability to repay are many, only a few of which were the fault of the Greeks themselves. The worst of the Greek internal problems is the corruption of the Greek elite class, who have made tax evasion an art form. After the recession, the country went increasingly into recession and then depression, the economy shrank, and government revenues became insufficient to meet all demands on it. Various Greek governments have sought loans from the European "troika" as defined above, and those loans were granted, but with many cruel strings.

In a triangular arrangement, the troika would insure that the Greeks had enough money not to default on bankers and hedge funds (etc.), but in exchange the Greeks had to agree to "run a primary surplus" (have more revenue than expenses), cut spending drastically, including on social services and pensions, and sell off private property, like their airports.

Doing this allowed the troika — an assembly of European public elites very much allied with private elites like the aforementioned bankers — to accomplish two goals:

• Bail out all at-risk bankers and other investors with public money, so no big investor loses on a loan.
  
  Stiglitz: "We should be clear: almost none of the huge amount of money loaned to Greece has actually gone there. It has gone to pay out private-sector creditors – including German and French banks. Greece has gotten but a pittance, but it has paid a high price to preserve these countries’ banking systems. The IMF and the other “official” creditors do not need the money that is being demanded. Under a business-as-usual scenario, the money received would most likely just be lent out again to Greece."
   
• Advance the privatizing "neo-liberal project" in which everything owned by any country should be converted into a source of private profit (think Shock Doctrine in New Orleans and the privatization of the public school system).
  
  Stiglitz: "Many European leaders want to see the end of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s leftist government. After all, it is extremely inconvenient to have in Greece a government that is so opposed to the types of policies that have done so much to increase inequality in so many advanced countries, and that is so committed to curbing the unbridled power of wealth. They seem to believe that they can eventually bring down the Greek government by bullying it into accepting an agreement that contravenes its mandate."

For Western neo-liberal elites, that's a win-win. The only way this plan would fail is if Greece failed to knuckle under. Greece tried to knuckle under, but it hurt so much that they elected a "leftist," anti-austerity government, and the elites took offense (thus Stiglitz's analysis of the troika response as an attack on Greek democracy). The new leftist government also tried to knuckle under, but the demands became too great (and the government too wishy-washy).

So a referendum on the latest austerity offer was called, the Greek people rejected it 61%–39%, and here we are. The remaining choices are to default on the debt or to borrow on terms less punitive. In case of a default on some or all of it — in the business world, that's called a "restructuring via bankruptcy," but morality-neutral language applies only to corporate behavior — the Greek depression will continue, Greece may leave the E.U., and it seems increasingly likely that the drachma will return, perhaps first in an intermediate form, such as government IOUs.

Again, here we are. It's post-referendum, Greek banks are still closed as of last report, and ATMs are running out of money to dispense. For a look at the state of the Greece economy just prior to the referendum, Naked Capitalism offers this report. It's painful reading.

What comes next? Hard-hearted Germans and regime-changing Americans? Could well be.

Eurozone Leaders May Further Harden Their Hard Hearts

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism on the way European (and German) elites are handling this rejection:

[D]espite the responses of media outlets and many pundits that the Eurocrats will have to beeat a retreat and offer Greece concessions, it’s not clear that this event strengthens the Greek government’s hand with its counterparties. Remember, Tsipras enjoyed popularity ratings of as high as 80% and has always retained majority support in polls. And it’s all too easy to forget that “the creditors” are not Merkel, Hollande, Lagarde and Draghi. The biggest group of “creditors” are taxpayers of the 18 other countries of the Eurozone. The ugly design of the Eurozone means that the sort of relief that Greece wants most, a reduction in the face amount of its debt (as opposed to the sort of reduction they’ve gotten, which is in economic value, via reductions in interest rates and extensions of maturities) puts the interest of those voters directly at odds with those in Greece. Our understanding is that a reduction in principal amount, under the perverse budgetary and accounting rules of the Eurozone, would result in those losses showing up as losses for budget purposes, now. They would need to be funded by increased taxes. Thus a reduction in austerity for Greece, via a debt writeoff, simply transfers austerity from Greece to other countries. It’s not hard to see why they won’t go for that. And Eurozone rules require unanimous decisions.

Even though the ruling coalition had said it wanted to restart negotiations immediately upon getting a “no” vote, the lenders have asked Greece to send a new proposal, apparently deeming the one it submitted on June 30 to be out of date. It’s doubtful anything will happen before the Eurogroup meeting tomorrow [July 7].

The remarks from European leaders have been mixed.

Among those mixed responses, Smith notes these. First, from Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem:

I take note of the outcome of the Greek referendum. This result is very regrettable for the future of Greece.

For recovery of the Greek economy, difficult measures and reforms are inevitable. We will now wait for the initiatives of the Greek authorities.

And via the Financial Times, this from a high German government official:

Sigmar Gabriel, deputy German chancellor, said Mr Tsipras had “torn down the last bridges on which Greece and Europe could have moved towards a compromise”.

“With the rejection of the rules of the eurozone … negotiations about a programme worth billions are barely conceivable,” he told Tagesspiegel newspaper.

Shorter Eurozone: "The beatings will continue..." Good luck with that. The meetings will also continue, in what looks like a month of failed incremental half steps that nevertheless march to the sea.

And the American Reaction? Failed State or Vladimir Putin

Obama's U.S. government has been noticeably quiet as this plays out, but with Putin on their minds, you have to know they have thoughts. Smith on what some of those thoughts might be:

Nuland’s Nemesis: Will Greece Be Destroyed to Save Her From Russia, Like Ukraine?

Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have been far more quiet than you’d expect given their attentiveness to the needs of the investing classes and the threat that protracted wrangling with Greece might pose to that. Of course, they might believe that Draghi’s bazooka is more effective than Hank Paulson’s proved to be in the runup to the final phase of the financial crisis. But John Helmer indicates below that the Greek referendum has intensified the Administration’s interest in regime change in Greece. He confirms what we’d noticed, that Putin has been quite pointedly avoided being seen as meddling in Greece now; he can always pick up any pieces later. Also note that the anti-Greek government interests have connections to Hillary Clinton.

The rest of Smith's piece is an essay by John Helmer, "the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties" (full credits at the link). He starts:

A putsch in Athens to save allied Greece from enemy Russia is in preparation by the US and Germany, with backing from the non-taxpayers of Greece – the Greek oligarchs, Anglo-Greek shipowners, and the Greek Church.

You really want to read that twice. He's not speculating, but asserting. Then he continues:

At the highest and lowest level of Greek government, and from Thessaloniki to Milvorni, all Greeks understand what is happening. Yesterday they voted overwhelmingly to resist. According to a high political figure in Athens, a 40-year veteran, “what is actually happening is a slow process of regime change.”

Until Sunday afternoon it was a close-run thing. The Yes and No votes were equally balanced, and the margin between them razor thin. At the start of the morning, Rupert Murdoch’s London Times claimed “Greek security forces have drawn up a secret plan to deploy the army alongside special riot police to contain possible civil unrest after today’s referendum on the country’s future in Europe. Codenamed Nemesis, it makes provision for troops to patrol large cities if there is widespread and prolonged public disorder. Details of the plan emerged as polls showed the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ camps neck and neck.” Greek officers don’t speak to the Murdoch press; British and US government agents do.

“It was neck to neck until 3 pm,” reports the political veteran in Athens, “then the young started voting.”

Can the outcome — the 61% to 39% referendum vote, with a 22% margin for Οχι (No) which the New York Times calls “shocking” and a “victory [that] settled little” – defeat Operation Nemesis? Will the new Axis – the Americans and the Germans – attack again, as the Germans did after the first Greek Οχι of October 28, 1940, defeated the Italian invasion?

The U.S., via the State Department's Victoria Nuland, has been deeply involved, according to Helmer, both with Operation Nemesis and with warning off Tsipras. Helmer again:

What Nuland [photo at top] was doing with her hands is in the small print of the release. She told Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (right) not to break ranks with the NATO allies against Russia. “Because of the increasing rounds of aggression in eastern Ukraine” she reportedly said the US is “very gratified that we’ve had solidarity between the EU and the U.S., and that Greece has played its role in helping to build consensus.”

Nuland also warned Tsipras not to default on its debts to Germany, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Tsipras was told “to make a good deal with the institutions”. The referendum Tsipras called on June 27 was a surprise for Nuland. The nemesis in Operation Nemesis is the retribution planned for that display of Greek hubris.

All of this loops the Greek story into the Ukraine story, which most people still don't realize isn't just about Putin, though that makes a convenient (and cartoonish) Us vs. The Villain cautionary tale. It's about continuing the ... yes, neo-liberal project ... deeper into eastern Europe.

There's much more at the Naked Capitalism link, and it makes fascinating reading. Also, there's more about Victoria Nuland and her apparent revelations about U.S. meddling in Ukraine as well. Here's one relatively staid write-up; the google has many more.

The Hillary Clinton Connection

Yves Smith noted in her introduction to this piece that there was a Hillary Clinton connection. Near the bottom, after working through the myriad of corporate- and billionaire-funded think tanks (funding which comes from much of the real wealth of Greece, its predatory shipping billionaires), he notes this:

[Robert] Kaplan’s think-tank in Washington [Center for New American Security] reports that its funding comes from well-known military equipment suppliers, US oil companies, the governments of Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore; NATO; the US Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force; plus George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Chief executive of CNAS is Michele Flournoy, a founder of the think-tank which is serving as her platform to run for the next Secretary of Defense, if Hillary Clinton wins the presidential election next year. Flournoy is one of the drafters of a recent plan for the US to escalate arms and troop reinforcements in Ukraine and along the Russian frontier with the Baltic states. Here’s her plan for “What the United States and NATO Must Do” . For more on Flournoy, read this.

I personally have no trouble assigning Hillary Clinton, whatever else her virtues, to an inner circle of the "privatizing neo-liberal project," as previously noted here and here and here. Victoria Nuland is a State Department warrior when it comes to advancing that project, and CNAS is as well. For CNAS, the ties to the military-industrial complex are clear, implying military means — "boots on the ground," though preferably boots filled with other nations' soldiers.

Watch the name of that think tank — CNAS. It's come up before and will do again, especially if Clinton is elected president. Also, watch for the name Michele Flournoy. If she does become Secretary of Defense, she'll be sold as the "first woman Secretary of Defense" so you can cheer her on through confirmation.

Bottom Line — Remaking the World

There are two ways to look at the bottom line noted above. First, from the point of view of the Western ruling classes, the high-level servants of the neo-liberal project, the "war" in Greece is a war they feel they can win (by forcing regime change in the face of crushing economic chaos), or at least drive to a stalemate. I suspect they feel good, on the march, that they continue to remake the world. That's certainly the tone coming from the European elites quoted above, like Jeroen Dijsselbloem and Sigmar Gabriel.

But from the point of view of the Greeks and the resistance to Shock Docrine-style neo-liberal takeover, it's possible that the "standstill" in Greece will widen cracks in the glued-together European Union that will break apart Europe itself. That will remake the world.

As David Dayen, generally not given to editorials, put it in a piece called "The end of Europe as we know it":

[In the Euro or Drachma decision] I put myself firmly on Team Drachma ...

Eurozone nations don’t want to really stick together. The northern countries (read Germany) don’t want to pay for whom they regard as lazy, profligate southern countries; conversely, the southern countries don’t want to take dictation on their national policies. So the wars never really ended, they just transferred to the economic sphere, substituting bombs with bonds.

A No vote, therefore, reveals to European citizens an escape hatch, a way out of a terribly misbegotten currency union. The euro would no longer be irreversible.

I recently wrote that TPP was the biggest hot story in the country, and Greece was the biggest cold story. The cold story in Greece has just warmed up.

GP

U.S. Sanctions on Russia & The EU Market for Liquified Natural Gas

Russia's undersea Nord Stream pipeline, which carries LNG (liquified natural gas) to north European markets. The Nord Stream opening ceremony in November 2011 featured Angela Merkel, Dmitry Medvedev, Mark Rutte and François Fillon. Nord Stream 2, an expansion project that would double Nord Stream's original capacity, was agreed to and signed in June 2015 (source; click to enlarge).

by Gaius Publius

Are the U.S. sanctions on Russia just another pipeline war?

Like all large developed regions, the nations of the European Union are hungry for energy. Like all resource-rich countries, the Russian Federation is hungry for markets. One of the resources Russia is most rich in is oil and natural gas. Thanks in part to the Paris climate agreement, but also to the existing desire of Western European nations to transition from coal and oil to the so-called "bridge fuel" — methane or "natural gas" — there is an obvious interest in both parties, Russia and the EU, in reaching agreements for the sale of Russian natural gas to the west, and also agreements on funding and building pipelines to deliver it.

The graphic below shows the extent of those pipelines, both built and proposed, for delivery of LNG (liquified natural gas, its most transportable form) to European markets.

Major existing and planned natural gas pipelines supplying Russian gas to Europe (source; click to enlarge)

Three things are clear from looking at the map above. First, Russia is Western Europe's nearest neighbor, and energy purchases from Russia would by nature be less costly than purchases from farther way, from North America, for instance. LNG purchased from North America would have to be shipped by tanker.

Second, all pipelines from Russia to Western Europe go though NATO territory — except Nord Stream. Thus Nord Stream frees Russia from worrying about NATO threats to its land-based pipelines. Note also that if tensions between NATO (a U.S. proxy) and Russia heat up, Nord Stream gives Russia an alternate source of LNG revenue from Western Europe should the status of pipelines to and through Eastern Europe fall into dispute.

Third, Russia is almost completely surrounded by NATO nations on its western border, the two exceptions being Belarus and Ukraine. NATO has been steadily moving east since the breakup of the Soviet Union, and Ukraine, an ethnically divided nation with a large Russian minority population, is strongly considering joining the NATO alliance. The U.S. is currently considering arming Ukraine with U.S.-made anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, so tensions are clearly escalating, and the U.S. is a player in those escalations.

Is Nord Stream 2 the Target of the Latest Anti-Russia Sanctions?

One of the outcomes of the recently enacted sanctions on Russia is the closing off of Western funding and penalization of support for a major expansion of the Nord Stream pipeline (all emphasis mine):

Nord Stream (former names: North Transgas and North European Gas Pipeline; Russian: Северный поток, Severny potok) is an offshore natural gas pipeline from Vyborg in the Russian Federation to Greifswald in Germany that is owned and operated by Nord Stream AG. The project includes two parallel lines. The first line was laid by May 2011 and was inaugurated on 8 November 2011. The second line was laid in 2011–2012 and was inaugurated on 8 October 2012. At 1,222 kilometres (759 mi) in length, it is the longest sub-sea pipeline in the world, surpassing the Langeled pipeline. It has an annual capacity of 55 billion cubic metres (1.9 trillion cubic feet), but its capacity is planned to be doubled to 110 billion cubic metres (3.9 trillion cubic feet) by 2019, by laying two additional lines.

The expansion mentioned above has been labeled "Nord Stream 2," and the latest sanctions threaten to shut down further work on it. From the Financial Times (paywalled; quoted here):

Brussels [EU headquarters] has stepped up its diplomatic offensive against the US moves, warning that several oil and gas projects involving Shell, Eni and BP are at risk.

On Tuesday, officials said Brussels was “activating all diplomatic channels” in an effort to persuade lawmakers to dilute the bill’s impact on European companies and the continent’s energy security.

Note that Shell, Eni and BP are Dutch, Italian and British companies, respectively.

EU officials are concerned that the sanctions could damage multibillion-euro pipeline and infrastructure projects straddling Russian territory and beyond in areas as far apart as the Baltic and Black seas.

A list prepared for EU commissioners shows that projects at risk include the proposed Baltic liquefied natural gas plant on the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, in which the Anglo-Dutch group Shell has a stake alongside Russia’s Gazprom. The list also includes Blue Stream, the gas export pipeline linking Russia with Turkey in which Eni of Italy has a 50 per cent. The threat to this pipeline centres on penalties against the maintenance and repair of pipelines on Russian land or waters.

Documents seen by the Financial Times also state that BP “would not be able to engage” in its activities with Rosneft if the US penalties hit operations by European companies to maintain, repair or expand pipelines in Russia.

The last point is important. U.S. sanctions would penalize European companies that engage in projects to "maintain, repair or expand pipelines in Russia." This includes financing as well as construction:

The text of the Senate amendment, which was passed with 97 votes to 2 against, requires the imposition of sanctions against those who make an investment or sell, lease or provide "goods, services, technology, information, or support" to projects for the export of energy from Russia.

"It sanctions those who . . . invest or support the construction of Russian energy export pipelines," Mike Crapo, a senator from Idaho who co-authored the amendment, told the Senate.

Needless to say, more than just the Russians are upset about these sanctions. European foreign ministers are opposed as well (h/t Naked Capitalism for the link).

Germany issues stinging rebuke of US sanctions against Russia
By Johannes Stern
17 June 2017

Germany’s Foreign Ministry published a sharply-worded press release Thursday from Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democrats, SPD) and Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern (Social Democrats, SPÖ) denouncing the United States’ foreign and economic policies.

Note the American stated justification in the paragraph below, then the German and Austrian foreign ministers' rejection of that justification as describing what the bill was "really about":

Republicans and Democrats agreed almost unanimously, by 97 votes to 2, to impose new sanctions on Russia in the Senate on Wednesday. The Senate justified the measure as a punishment for Moscow’s alleged meddling in the US presidential election, the annexation of Crimea and its support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. ...

Gabriel and Kern brusquely rejected the US Senate’s measure. The bill was really about “the sale of American liquefied gas and the sidelining of Russian gas supplies in the European market,” according to the two social democratic politicians. That emerges from the text “particularly explicitly.” The goal was “to secure jobs in the American oil and gas industries.”

Angela Merkel stands behind her foreign ministry's statements: "German Chancellor Angela Merkel explicitly backed her Foreign Minister on Friday. There was 'very strong agreement in terms of content with Gabriel’s statement,' stated government spokesman Stefan Seibert. 'It is, to put it mildly, an unconventional action by the US Senate.' It was troubling that European businesses were being targeted by sanctions to punish Russian behaviour. 'That cannot be allowed,' added Seibert."

"Europeans Targeted to Punish Russia"

Whichever way the (sorry to say it, but highly propagandized) U.S. public sees the sanctions bill, European leaders — including Angela Merkel — see it quite differently. For them it's not only an economic attack on Europe by the U.S. It's also a cynical attempt to prop up a struggling U.S. sector of the U.S. energy industry at Europe's expense. That sector, of course, is the inventory-swollen, over-leveraged U.S. oil and gas sector involved in the recent fracking boom.

(A note about the "heavy propagandization of the U.S. public": Consider that, after all the screaming in the U.S. press about how Russia "hacked the DNC" to steal the election from Hillary Clinton, forensics on that supposed "hack" now show it to have been a leak after all. For more, read this definitive and completely underpublicized piece in The Nation by Patrick Lawrence. It's one thing to get rid of Trump; it's another to falsify the trail of evidence to do it.)

There's More Here Than Meets the Eye

The bottom line in all this isn't simple, since as usual with U.S.-Russia relations, there's much more here than meets the eye.

On the U.S. side, the attempt to punish Russia may play well in the national press, but it's driving a wedge between American and European leaders. Already in the articles about European reactions, one can hear strains of "we did what you asked in your other fights with Russia — like Ukraine and Crimea — so why are you hurting us now?"

In fact the conflict with Russia over the Ukraine and Crimea was never black-and-white to begin with. One aspect of the Ukraine story is that, unlike what was reported in the U.S. press, the U.S. was a major instigator of the internal conflict, and the EU had to be dragged to support it.

Amy Goodman in 2014 (emphasis mine)

A New Cold War? Ukraine Violence Escalates, Leaked Tape Suggests US Was Plotting Coup

A short-lived truce has broken down in Ukraine as street battles have erupted between anti-government protesters and police. ... At least 50 people have died since Tuesday in the bloodiest period of Ukraine’s 22-year post-Soviet history. While President Obama has vowed to "continue to engage all sides," a recently leaked audio recording between two top U.S. officials reveal the Obama administration has been secretly plotting with the opposition....

The top State Department official has apologized to her European counterparts after she was caught cursing the European Union, the EU, in a leaked audio recording that was posted to YouTube. The recording captured an intercepted phone conversation between the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, and Victoria Nuland, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe. Nuland expresses frustration over Europe’s response to the political crisis in Ukraine, using frank terms.

VICTORIA NULAND [on tape]: "So that would be great, I think, to help glue this thing and have the U.N. help glue it. And, you know, [bleep] the EU."

Victoria Nuland, Hillary Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, is a well-known neocon who during the campaign "figure[d] prominently among her current advisers" and is well known for her strong anti-Russian views. Her husband is Robert Kagan, another strong Clinton supporter during the campaign and co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, the neocon think tank that strongly advocated for the 2003 Iraq War.

The U.S. was a major player fomenting or adding to the conflict in Ukraine. However strongly the EU was in their public support, this current attack on Russia via the sanctions is too much even for them. Quoting the German Foreign Minister again:

the threat to impose extraterritorial sanctions which violate international law on European companies participating in the expansion of European energy supplies” could not be tolerated. Europe’s energy provision was “a European affair, and not one for the United States of America!”

It sounds like he means it.

The Players and the Game

As this evolves, keep the players and their interests in mind. The major players are:

• The U.S. foreign policy establishment, many of them Democrat-supporting neocons, most of them hardliners on Russia for decades

• Democratic Party leaders, eager to tar Donald Trump with the blackest brush they can find, in hopes that this will absolve them of the 2016 loss without having to make substantive policy changes going into 2018 and 2020

• The U.S. natural gas industry, desperate to open markets for product they are vastly oversupplied with

• The mainstream U.S. press, eager help the U.S. ruling establishment be rid of Trump, but also eager to cash in on the ratings that a years-long slow-motion Mueller-fueled train wreck will provide

• European leaders, turning away from U.S. international leadership as each day goes by — the Paris climate agreement and Trump's childish bellicosity toward North Korea are just two example of many — just as the U.S. is threatening Europe's right to make its own energy decisions

• Russia, which seems willing to patiently let all of this play out, knowing it doesn't need to drive a wedge between the U.S. and EU if the U.S. foreign policy establishment will drive that wedge for them

It's unlikely the U.S.-Russia conflict in Europe will end well. All of the American players listed above will continue to benefit from a ratcheting up of conflict with Russia over these sanctions, including the profit-hungry U.S. press.

Democratic Party leaders in particular will find an additional benefit to strong anti-Russia rhetoric and action — they can use it to further damage their strongest and most hated domestic opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was one of just two senators to vote against the sanctions bill. The mainstream Democratic Party, it seems, is determined to give just lip service, if that, to progressive policies while trying to position themselves as the only policy alternative to the Trump regime.

(In my view, their latest attempt at triangulation will fail in 2018, just as it did in 2016. There is more than one policy alternative to the Trump regime — the "Sanders wing" alternative — and the public knows it. If the Party won't offer that alternative, the public may just vote with their feet, by not voting.)

In the U.S. press, one hears a doubling down on worries that increased Russian LNG sales to Europe will make Western Europe "dependent" and vulnerable to Russia. Clearly the Europeans define independence differently than the U.S. establishment does. With Trump in the White House and both Merkel and Macron openly distrustful of U.S. world leadership, I don't see either side backing down.

The irony is that even if the U.S. foreign policy establishment succeeds in forcing Europe to buy LNG from American companies, the price is unlikely to rise enough to save those companies — though the added revenue may buy them a bit more time before the next round of bankruptcies. Stay tuned.

GP
  

Even If A Terminally Dishonest CIA Says So, We Don't KNOW If Trump Is A Putin Puppet-- But We Do Know He's A Fascist

With the CIA's utter lack of credibility, how will anyone ever know for sure if Putin really did steal the election for el Presidente-elect Señor Trumpanzee? You already read the Washington Post piece that set off the firestorm Friday, right? My gut tells me it could be true and that it probably is, but is there proof that the public will ever see? Or are we supposed to believe professional liars at the intelligence agencies who have been making up stories since inception?

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign.

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community’s findings about Russian hacking. “I don’t believe they interfered” in the election, he told Time magazine this week. The hacking, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

By Saturday morning Esquire ran a detailed analysis by King's College (London) professor Thomas Rid, How Russia Pulled Off The Biggest Election Hack In U.S. History. Putin, he implies may have been getting revenge on the U.S. for the hacking of Mossack Fonseca, the "Panama Papers," which, among other things, revealed the nature of the kleptocracy he heads. When asked, he said that the U.S. aim in surrepticiously releasing the hacked treasure trove of highly shady-- and criminal-- data was "to to spread distrust for the ruling authorities and the bodies of power within society." (Keep in mind as well, that many Russians feel-- there is no proof-- that the CIA somehow was complicit, through Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (and possibly Russian President Boris Yeltsin), in the dismantling of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

This sort of espionage was business as usual, a continuation of long-standing practice. And during the cold war, both the USSR and the United States subtly, and sometimes covertly, interfered with foreign elections. What changed over the past year, however-- what made the DNC hack feel new and terrifying-- was Russia's seeming determination to combine the two. For the first time, Russia used a hacking operation, one that collected and released massive quantities of stolen information, to meddle in an American presidential election. The inspiration and template for this new attack was a poisonous cocktail of fact and fabrication that the Russians call kompromat, for "compromising material."

Kompromat had been deployed by the Soviet Union since at least the 1950's, but in 1999 the Kremlin gave the tactic a high-tech update. With parliamentary elections fast approaching, and with post-USSR corruption at a peak, the government of president Boris Yeltsin used anonymous websites to sling mud at opposition candidates. One notorious kompromat repository was run specifically to slander the mayor of Moscow, a rising star in the opposition with his eyes on the presidency. In 2009, a senior British diplomat working in Russia was forced to resign after the appearance online of a four-minute video that showed him having sex with two blond women in a brothel.

One of the first American targets of kompromat was Victoria Nuland, who served as the top U.S. diplomat for Europe during Obama's second term. In February 2014, at the peak of the crisis in Ukraine, Nuland was surreptitiously recorded while speaking on the phone with the U. S. ambassador to Kiev. Frustrated with Europe's lackluster response to the Ukrainian crisis, Nuland said, "Fuck the EU." Shortly after, an aide to the Russian deputy prime minister tweeted a link to a recording of the intercepted phone call. The State Department called the leak "a new low in Russian tradecraft."

The Nuland leak prompted a minor diplomatic hiccup between the European Union and the United States. But the kompromat campaign of the past year appears to be aimed at much bigger game: the American electoral system. According to Reuters, the FBI first contacted the DNC in the fall of 2015, obliquely warning the Democrats to examine their network. It wasn't until May, however, that the DNC asked for help from a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike, which had experience identifying digital espionage operations by nation-states. CrowdStrike immediately discovered two sophisticated groups of spies that were stealing documents from the Democrats by the thousands.

CrowdStrike was soon able to reconstruct the hacks and identify the hackers. One of the groups, known to the firm as Cozy Bear, had been rummaging around the DNC since the previous summer. The other, known as Fancy Bear, had broken in not long before Putin's appearance at the St. Petersburg forum. Surprisingly, given that security researchers had long suspected that both groups were directed by the Russian government, each of the attackers seemed unaware of what the other was doing.

Meanwhile a mysterious website named DC Leaks was registered on April 19. In early June, a Twitter account associated with the site started linking to the private conversations of Philip Breedlove, who had been, until a few weeks earlier, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. DC Leaks was well designed, but nobody seems to have noticed it until early July.

On June 14, less than an hour after the Washington Post reported the breach at the DNC, Crowdstrike posted a report that detailed the methods used by the intruders. The firm also did something unusual: It named the Russian spy agencies it believed responsible for the hack. Fancy Bear, the firm said, worked in a way that suggested affiliation with the GRU. Cozy Bear was linked to the FSB.

The day after the Post story broke appeared that claimed to belong to a hacker who identified himself as Guccifer 2.0. (Guccifer was the nickname of a Romanian hacker who, among other things, broke into the email account of George W. Bush's sister.) The operators, posing as Guccifer 2.0, dismissed CrowdStrike's attribution, insisting instead that the DNC had been "hacked by a lone hacker." As proof, Guccifer published eleven documents from the DNC, including an opposition-research file on Donald Trump and a list of major Democratic donors. In the weeks that followed, Guccifer offered interviews and batches of documents to several journalists, but he wrote that "the main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to WikiLeaks."

Ultimately, more than two thousand confidential files from the DNC found their way to the public. Throughout the campaign, Guccifer maintained that he was the only person behind the hacking and leaking. "This is my personal project and I'm proud of it," he-- or they-- wrote in late June. But several sloppy mistakes soon revealed who was really behind the operation. The unraveling happened more quickly than anybody could have anticipated.

... On July 22, three days before the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, Wikileaks published the largest trove of files to date, which included nearly twenty thousand hacked emails. Press coverage of the release quickly centered on emails that suggested a bias among some DNC staffers in favor of Hillary Clinton. The leaked emails lent credence to a suspicion held by some Democrats that the party establishment had never intended to give Bernie Sanders, Clinton's opponent in the primaries, a fair shake. Protesters in Philadelphia held up signs that read election fraud and dnc leaks shame. One day before the convention, the Russian kompromat campaign took its first trophy: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair, resigned from the organization.

The episode shocked the Democratic establishment, not least because of what it augured for the future. As Clinton's lead in the polls widened after the convention, commentators began to speculate that a damaging leak late in the campaign might be the only chance for Donald Trump to win the election. Fears of a Russia-sponsored October surprise grew as it became clearer that the subversion effort was improving. When files appeared, they were now scrubbed of the sort of distinguishing metadata that had allowed analysts to trace the leak back to Russian intelligence.

The operators behind Guccifer and DC Leaks also appear to have recognized that American journalists were desperate for scoops, no matter their source. The Russians began to act like a PR agency, providing access to reporters at Politico, The Intercept, and BuzzFeed. Journalists were eager to help. On August 27, when part of the DC Leaks website was down for some reason, Twitter suspended the @DCLeaks account. The Daily Caller, a conservative news website, posted a story about the events, drawing an outcry from Trump supporters. Lou Dobbs, the Fox Business anchor, sneered that "leftist fascism" was throttling the last best hope for a Trump victory. Twitter soon reinstated @DCLeaks.

The most effective outlet by far, however, was WikiLeaks. Russian intelligence likely began feeding hacked documents to Julian Assange's "whistleblower" site in June 2015, after breaching Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry. A group called WikiSaudiLeaks, probably a Guccifer-like front for Fancy Bear, claimed that "WikiLeaks have been given access to some part of these documents." The so-called Saudi Cables showed princes buying influence and monitoring dissidents. They became a major news story, proving that the old methods worked even better in the twenty-first century.

...In mid-August, when Guccifer and DC Leaks were making near-daily news, a third mysterious social-media account popped up out of nowhere. A group calling itself the Shadow Brokers announced that it had published "cyberweapons" that belonged to the NSA on file-sharing sites such as Github. The group said that it would soon hold an auction to sell off a second cache of tools. After a security researcher posted a link to a repository of the supposed NSA software, analysts flocked to the dump. Security researchers quickly discovered that the tools, a collection of malware designed to steal data from their targets, were the real thing. Crucially, The Intercept, a media outlet with access to the NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden, found a sixteen-character string ("ace02468bdf13579") in the Shadow Brokers' tools that was referenced in a top-secret, and previously unpublished, NSA manual. The connection proved the provenance of the Shadow Brokers' find.

Robbing the NSA, of course, is not easy. The agency's elite hacking unit, called Tailored Access Operations, has an internal network known as the "high side" that is physically segregated from the Internet (the "low side"). Data diodes, devices that allow data to flow one way only, like water from a faucet, make it nearly impossible to hack high-side computers from the low side. When TAO hackers want to attack an adversary, they move their tools from the high side to a server on the low side, navigate through a series of addresses that make their tracks difficult to trace, and install malware on their target. To steal the NSA's malware, the Shadow Brokers had to compromise a low-side machine that the TAO was using to hack its targets. The Shadow Brokers likely got lucky: Some analysts believe that an NSA operator mistakenly uploaded a whole set of tools to a staging computer the hackers were already watching. The alternative theory: an old-fashioned mole passed on the tools.

After going to all that trouble, why publish the results? A possible answer is suggested by a surprising discovery made by the U. S. intelligence community around the time Putin was addressing the journalists in St. Petersburg. American investigators had long known that the Russians were doing more than spear-phishing, but sometime around April they learned that the intruders were using commercial cloud services to "exfiltrate" data out of American corporations and political targets. Cozy Bear, the hacking group believed to be affiliated with the FSB, used some two hundred Microsoft OneDrive accounts to send data from its victims back to Moscow.

Using cloud services such as OneDrive was a cleaver but risky move-- it was a little like taking the bus to make off with stolen goods from a burglary. Though the widespread use of the services by legitimate users offered a degree of cover for the hackers, data provided by Microsoft also helped America's elite digital spies identify the DNC intruders "with confidence" as Russian. It is even possible that the U. S. government has been able to identify the names and personal details of individual operators. The Russians knew they'd been caught. On July 30, an FSB press release announced that twenty government and defense organizations had been hit by high-powered spying tools.

Some intelligence analysts believe that the Shadow Brokers' publication of the NSA spy kit was a message from one group of professionals to another. "You see us?" the Russians seemed to be saying, perhaps in reference to ongoing U. S. efforts to investigate the DNC breach. "Fine, but we see you, too." Similarly, the announcement of an auction—all but certainly phony—was probably intended as a warning that the hackers were prepared to publish a key that would unlock an encrypted container holding a second batch of stolen tools. Like a severed ear in an envelope, the announcement told the Americans: Don't mess with us.

Meanwhile, the kompromat campaign proceeded apace. August and September each saw six data dumps, including files from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which had also been hacked. In October, as the presidential election drew near, Guccifer published a massive cache, more than twenty-one hundred files. Three days later, WikiLeaks began publishing thousands of emails stolen from John Podesta's account.

On the day WikiLeaks published the first batch of Podesta's emails, the U.S. government took the unprecedented step of announcing that it was "confident" Russia's "seniormost officials" had authorized the DNC hacks. So far U. S. investigators have not said publicly who was responsible for the Podesta hack, but the data harvested by SecureWorks makes it clear that Fancy Bear broke into the Clinton chairman's account as early as late March. The CIA briefed Trump about the origin of the kompromat, but he continued to cite the material, telling a Pennsylvania crowd, "I love WikiLeaks!"

On October 12, Putin appeared at another forum, this time with more than five hundred guests in Moscow. Sitting comfortably in front of a giant banner that said russia calling! he answered an audience question about the hacks. "Everyone is talking about who did it," Putin said. "Is it so important?" The former KGB officer, proving his full command of U. S. political intrigue, suggested that the Democrats had "supported one intraparty candidate at the expense of the other." Any talk of the hacks being in Russia's interest, he said, was "hysteria" intended to distract Americans from what the hackers discovered: "the manipulation of public opinion." When the audience applauded, a smirk returned to Putin's face. "I think I answered your question," he said.

Do you feel you know anything now? Knowing is different from suspecting or even believing. But as Michael Kinsley asserted in the Washington Post over the weekend, one thing that we do know is that Donald Trump is a fascist. And he meant it very precisely and "clinically" as a descriptor for el Presidente-elect. "Now that we’ve seen a bit of him in action," he wrote, "it seems that Trump actually does have a recognizable agenda that explains how he simultaneously can pander to big business generally while 'strong-arming' an air conditioning manufacturer to save a few hundred jobs for a while. Or how he can make nice with the authoritarian Vladimir Putin while making bellicose foreign policy noises in general. Or how he can blithely upset with a phone call the absurdly delicate balance of our relations with China and Taiwan. All this seemingly erratic behavior can be explained-- if not justified-- by thinking of Trump as a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world. He spent his previous career negotiating with the government on behalf of corporations; now he has switched teams. But it’s the same game. The game has several names: 'Corporate statism' is one. In Europe, they call it “dirigisme.” Those two other words for it-- 'Nazism' and 'fascism'-- are now beyond all respectability. It means, roughly, combining the power of the state with the power of corporations. At its mildest, it is intrusive regulations on business about parental leave and such. At its most toxic, it is concentration camps. In the 1930s, a few Americans (including a few liberals) bought into it. Pearl Harbor ended that argument. Even for Trump, 'fascism' itself now is a dirty word, not just a policy choice. Even Trump would not use it-- least of all about himself."

U.S and U.K. Sending Planes, Troops to Romania and Poland

Reversing our initial promise to Gorbachev not to advance NATO to the east, we now have Russia almost completely surrounded. What do they think we're planning to do? (Source)

by Gaius Publius

Before you read this piece, ask yourself, how likely is it that Russia would invade, with tanks and troops, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Would that not be the start of World War III? Yet that's the fear that's being passed around as an excuse for what you're about to read.

Reuters (emphasis mine throughout):

Britain, U.S. sending planes, troops to deter Russia in the east

Britain said on Wednesday it will send fighter jets to Romania next year and the United States promised troops, tanks and artillery to Poland in NATO's biggest military build-up on Russia's borders since the Cold War.

Germany, Canada and other NATO allies also pledged forces at a defense ministers meeting in Brussels on the same day two Russian warships armed with cruise missiles entered the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Denmark, underscoring East-West tensions.

One, the U.S. is much more a threat to bomb or invade another nation than Russia is. Two, why shouldn't armed Russian ships sail in international waters? Ours do all the time. Three, again, do you really think Russia would be crazy enough to invade a first-world (read, ethnically Caucasian) country on Europe's eastern doorstep? First-world countries only consider moves like this in third-world (read, ethnically darker) countries, like Syria, or Iraq, or ... you name it, there are plenty of examples.

Speaking of Syria, this may be a reason for the latest threatening moves. From the same article:

In Madrid, the foreign ministry said Russia had withdrawn a request to refuel three warships in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta after NATO allies said they could be used to target civilians in Syria.

The ships were part of an eight-ship carrier battle group - including Russia's sole aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov - that is expected to join around 10 other Russian vessels already off the Syrian coast, diplomats said.

(Did you catch that? Russia has one aircraft carrier, just one. One in its whole navy. Some military threat.)

This Baltic invasion stuff is nonsense. The article continues to announce even more Western military build-ups, including troops to be sent to Estonia — as "deterrence." The only thing I see being deterred is (a) Russian intervention in Syria, and (b) the sale of Russian natural gas to Europe, a market the U.S. wants to secure for U.S. companies.

Ginning Up Fear of a Baltic Invasion

The context, or excuse, for all this was laid down after the Russians retaliated for U.S. interference in Ukraine (for more on that, see here and here). And while we're on the subject of U.S. interference and Ukraine, watch for the name Victoria Nuland, the wife of neocon and Iraq War architect Robert Kagan, as the next administration's appointees are announced. Nuland was deeply involved in our Ukrainian adventurism and is expected to get a high-level appointment in the next Democratic administration, perhaps as Secretary of State or National Security Adviser.

Russia retaliated to Western interference in Ukraine by promoting a referendum in ethnically Russian Crimea that ended in Russian annexation. The West retaliated to Russian annexation of Crimea by ginning up fear of a Russian invasion in the Baltics.

Not kidding. Fears of a Russian invasion in Europe were widely circulated and carried for months in Western journals and papers. Newsweek, for example, from January 2016:

Counting Down to a Russian Invasion of the Baltics

Although Russia's economy is reeling and its military forces are increasingly engaged in Syria and Ukraine, NATO commanders, governments and analysts are concerned that Russian President Vladimir Putin's adventurism has not run its course. Most anxieties focus on the Baltic states as Russia's next potential military target.

Russia has many advantages in the Baltics. The situation of Russians there, particularly in Estonia and Latvia where many Russians remain non-citizens, provides Moscow with an issue with which to stoke tensions. ...

Furthermore, Russia's conventional and nuclear deployments cover the entire Baltic Sea area. From its fortified base at Kaliningrad, Russia can project power not only into the Baltic Sea but also to Poland and even Germany.

By all accounts, Russia enjoys a wide margin of conventional superiority over NATO. Indeed, NATO commanders publicly and privately profess that given the strength of Russia's capabilities on land, sea and air, NATO would suffer enormous casualties in any effort to defend the Baltic states from attack.

And given the publicly discussed defects in NATO and individual Western intelligence cited in Western media, it would be relatively easy for Moscow to launch an invasion during one of its vaunted "snap exercises" without the United States detecting it in time.

"Counting down"? It reads as if it were dictated from the State Department.

This will not end well. The U.S. wants the Russians out of Syria, wants Western natural gas to flow to Europe, and is apparently willing to rattle many sabres to do it. Also cages. Some of those cages contain bears.

This will not end well.

GP
 

Does A System Forcing A Choice Between A Trump And A Clinton Deserve Your Participation?

This is a real thing

There was a little brouhaha on Friday over Bernie supposedly telling CNN's Chris Cuomo that he wants a position in Hillary's administration. He doesn't. He's pushing for his policy positions-- not a position for himself. I don't want to see Donald Trump as president. And I don't want to see Hillary Clinton as president either. Unlike Bernie, I have no intention of voting for either one of them. Having known her personally and having watched her career unfold over the decades, I have no doubt that she's the wrong person for the presidency-- despite how unfit and utterly contemptible Trump is. Yes, he's worse than her. But, as I've said endlessly, the lesser of two evils, is still evil.

I'm pretty sure she's going to be president and, like everyone, I'll be glad that she shatters the ultimate glass ceiling for women. That means something; it means a lot. But, after that, every decision she makes will be a nightmare, starting with her personnel decisions. Friday the Platform Committee sessions ended in acrimony when the Clinton and Wasserman Schultz appointees blocked attempts to stop the TPP and to strengthen the party's position on a $15 minimum wage (watch the video below). AFSCME's Paul Booth, a penultimate party hack and Clinton appointee, helped kill the strong $15 minimum wage proposal. Yeah, AFSCME is a kind of union. I wonder if their members know Hank Paulson, Bush's Mr. TARP, has hopped into bed with them to make Clinton president.



At this point one can only imagine what kind of human garbage she has in mind for cabinet positions. Remember Victoria Nuland, the longtime neocon aide to Dick Cheney who seamlessly moved into Hillary's state department and who engineered the coup in Ukraine, putting in place a rouge's gallery of fascists and neo-nazis? She's rumored to be a top contender for secretary of state. Another victory for... feminism?

And if Nuland makes it into the cabinet, she's not going to be the only monstrosity-as-bad-as-anything-Trump-would-pick in there. Wall Street has already paid in advance for the Treasury Secretary position. Larry Fink (of BlackRock) has been rumored to be in position for the job. And nightmare rumors of her cabinet picks include Michele Flournoy as Secretary of Defense. It would be hard to find anyone worse. Glenn Greenwald:

Flournoy, the former Defense Department official whom Defense One calls “the woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton,” this week advocated for “sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.” In an interview with that outlet, Flournoy “said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region.” She had previously “condemned the Obama administration’s ISIS policy as ineffectual,” denouncing it as “under-resourced.”

This week, Flournoy specifically advocated what she called “limited military coercion” to oust Assad. In August 2014, Obama announced what he called “limited airstrikes in Iraq”-- and they’re still continuing almost two years later. Also note the clinical euphemism Flournoy created-- “military coercion”-- for creating a “no-bomb zone” that would entail “a declaratory policy backed up by the threat of force. ‘If you bomb the folks we support, we will retaliate using standoff means to destroy [Russian] proxy forces, or, in this case, Syrian assets,’” she said. Despite D.C. conventional wisdom that Obama is guilty of “inaction” in Syria, he has sent substantial aid, weapons, and training to Syrian rebels while repeatedly bombing ISIS targets in Syria.

Even U.S. military officials have said that these sorts of no-fly or no-bomb guarantees Flournoy is promising-- which Hillary Clinton herself has previously advocated-- would risk a military confrontation with Russia. Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, told a Senate hearing last December that the policy Clinton advocates “would require ‘substantial’ ground forces and would put the U.S. military at risk of a direct confrontation with the Syrian regime and Russian forces.” Nonetheless, the Pentagon official highly likely to be Clinton’s defense secretary is clearly signaling their intention to proceed with escalated military action. The carnage in Syria is horrifying, but no rational person should think that U.S. military action will be designed to “help Syrians.”

It’s long been beyond doubt that Clinton intends to embark upon a far more militaristic path than even Obama forged-- which is saying a lot given that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner has bombed seven predominantly Muslim countries in seven years. Repeatedly, Clinton has implicitly criticized Obama for excessive hostility toward Israel, and she has vowed more uncritical support for Israel and to move closer to Netanyahu. Just yesterday, Clinton surrogates battled Sanders’s appointees in the Democratic Platform Committee meeting over Israel and Palestine, with Clinton’s supporters taking an even more hard-line position than many right-wing Israeli politicians. Clinton was the leading voice that successfully convinced a reluctant Obama to involve the U.S. in the disastrous intervention in Libya.

Her past criticisms of Obama’s foreign policy were based overwhelmingly in her complaints that he did not use enough military force, including in Syria. As the New York Times put it in 2014: “That Mrs. Clinton is more hawkish than Mr. Obama is no surprise to anyone who watched a Democratic primary debate in 2008... She favored supplying arms to moderate Syrian rebels, leaving behind a somewhat larger residual military force in Iraq and waiting longer before withdrawing American support for President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt during the historic protests in Cairo.”

...But the fact that Hillary Clinton has a history of advocating more war and killing and support for heinous regimes and occupations is the one thing Democratic pundits have, with remarkable message discipline, completely ignored. From Bernie Bros to Sanders’ Secret Service costs to Hillary’s kick-ass, mic-dropping, slay-queen tweets, they’ve invented the most embarrassingly childish and trivial distractions to ensure they don’t have to talk about it. But now Clinton’s almost-certain defense secretary is already-- months before she’s in power-- expressly advocating more war and bombing and dangerous interventions. That makes the costs of a Clinton foreign policy-- at least for those who assign any value to lives outside of American soil-- much harder, and more shameful, to ignore.