Ukraine-O-Mania: Kerry Does Kiev

So on Tuesday (a.k.a. Kill List Day in the White House) John Kerry did the helicopter hustle in Kiev (cue the Pictures at an Exhibition music in the previous post), a bag of bribery cash in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other. Nobody does subtle like the secretary of state:

 

And nobody does propagandistic bathos like the New York Times:

Trudging through a damp mist, Mr. Kerry stopped first for an emotional visit to improvised memorials where protesters were gunned down last month as they voiced opposition to what was then Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin government.

Mr. Kerry placed a lighted candle at one of the shrines, which were draped with flowers and photographs of some of the victims; met with religious leaders; and listened to Ukrainians who beseeched him for help.

Later, warm and dry, the mist wiped from his eyes, Kerry yawned out the bland indignation that makes him so famous, sure to strike fear into the hearts of fellow authoritarians who would never dare tell other nations what to do, let alone invade their countries and drone their citizens to death without so much as a by-your-leave:

"It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of a gun dictate what you are trying to achieve,” Mr. Kerry said. “That is not 21st-century, G-8, major-nation behavior.”

The centerpiece of the American aid package is the $1 billion loan guarantee. It is intended to cushion Ukrainian households as the new government undertakes wrenching economic changes that are expected to be demanded by the International Monetary Fund, and as it contends with the reduction of energy subsidies from Russia, which has challenged the new government’s legitimacy.

A billion bucks is mighty cheap, when you factor in the Ukrainian population of 45.6 million souls. So let's see.... that amounts to about $20 a person. It certainly would tide them over... right into the drowning pool, while the IMF imposes those Greek-like "wrenching economic changes" designed to crush the regular people caught in the middle of this epic battle of oligarch vs. oligarch, corporation vs. corporation. It's the same old neoliberal song: heads they win, tails we lose. So yes, we are all Ukrainians now, just not in the way that war-mongering friend to war-mongerers John McCain means.

And Kerry really looks like a cheap date with his IOU and his dripping flowers today, now that the EU just upped the bribery ante and offered the Ukrainian "people" $15 billion in aid. The Ukrainians are holding out for $35 billion. Do I hear $20 billion? Somebody call Christie's so we can auction off another 45 million disposable people!

Okay, so now that F-bombing Neocon Victorian Nuland and her pals at least partially succeeded in their "destabilization" efforts by fomenting the coup, it's now on to Act Two in Disaster Capitalism Theater. The global banking plutocrats will generously proffer a "stabilization" loan and demand such "hard changes" as making it too expensive for the average Ukrainian to drive. The unseemly lavish lifestyles of the hoi polloi must end, forthwith!

Meanwhile, Kerry jetted off to Paris to meet with his Russian and Ukrainian counterparts. It seems there were no five-star restaurants open in Ukraine. No word yet if Chicken Kiev was on the Paris menu.

I guess the folks from the IMF were not invited to the Paris dinner. They're still in Kiev, whetting their appetites, "poring over the menu books" to determine the who, what, when, where -- but never the "why" -- of massive pain infliction. The mystery cure of austerity dies hard, even after it's been exposed as snake oil.

A team from the International Monetary Fund is in Kiev to study the books and consider a stabilization loan. The fund is expected to demand difficult changes, including the reduction of lavish subsidies on gas prices, so the American and European money is intended in part to help cushion the blow to Ukrainian voters before new elections in May.

Can't you see the ladders of opportunity already? Working in tandem with the IMF, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and the gang are no doubt feverishly working on manipulating gas prices and hoarding stockpiles for fun and profit even as the shadow governments speak and the plebeian pawns weep.

Update: Who could ever have predicted? Fracktopolis now rears its ugly head instead of Sarah Palin's idea of Putin: 

Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and major oil companies have urged the Obama administration to speed up the nation’s first exports of natural gas. Although environmentalists, some Democrats and American manufacturing companies that depend on the competitive advantage of cheap domestic natural gas oppose the effort, they have fallen to the sidelines in the rush to export the gas.

At the State Department, an initiative to harness a natural gas boom in the United States as a lever against Russia, underway since 2011, intensified this week as Gazprom, Russia’s state-run natural gas company, said it would no longer provide gas at a discount rate to Ukraine. Russia supplies 60 percent of Ukraine’s natural gas, and the move was reminiscent of Russia’s previous moves, in 2006, 2008 and 2009, to shut off natural gas supplies to both Europe and Ukraine.

Before you know it, we'll be undercutting Madura and sending fracked gas down to "unstable"Venezuela, and John McCain can proclaim "We are all South Americans now!"

Nobody ever said that you had to be smart and circumspect to succeed at greed. As a matter of fact, it's surprising how utterly and publicly grasping and brazen they are about their real agenda. I guess because nobody ever said the American people had to be paying attention to the world outside. Bare survival is keeping most of us busy enough.