Dominants, Discord and Dogs -- Oh My!

We are shocked, shocked that the alleged leaker of secret war documents is a misogynistic racist gun nut who works at, of all the inappropriate and unexpected places, a military base.*

From the Washington Post's alliterative lede:

United by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God, the group of roughly two dozen — mostly men and boys — formed an invitation-only clubhouse in 2020 on Discord, an online platform popular with gamers. But they paid little attention last year when the man some call “OG” posted a message laden with strange acronyms and jargon. The words were unfamiliar, and few people read the long note, one of the members explained. But he revered OG, the elder leader of their tiny tribe, who claimed to know secrets that the government withheld from ordinary people.

Was he also a Trump acolyte? The Post doesn't say. But the Leaker, according to the guy who leaked about him to the newspaper, certainly sounds sexier than Trump. In fact, he sounds like something out of a John Le Carre spy novel, an immature James Bond wannabe, or even a CIA plant:

The young member was impressed by OG’s seemingly prophetic ability to forecast major events before they became headline news, things “only someone with this kind of high clearance” would know. He was by his own account enthralled with OG, who he said was in his early to mid-20s.

“He’s fit. He’s strong. He’s armed. He’s trained. Just about everything you can expect out of some sort of crazy movie,” the member said.

The mysterious cache is a veritable smorgasbord of international dishing. The menu features everything from the usual relentless but bland US spying upon global enemies and "partners" (cowed lapdogs) alike,  to detailed battle plans for the US proxy war in Ukraine, to the drama of elite hand-wringing that not enough lapdogs are supplying enough ammo to Ukraine so as to obfuscate the full spectrum-dominant role that the biggest arms dealer in the world ( USA) has awarded itself into perpetuity. 

How can this faltering Superpower foment World War III without getting a good chunk of the world enthusiastically behind it? It wouldn't do for the US to be seen as a playground bully, or at least as a playground bully lacking a full complement of toadies.

French President Emmanuel Macron, only recently lauded by the corporate-sponsored US press for his "courage" in ramming through an increase in the retirement age of his country's "coddled" workforce, is relegated to the doghouse just a week later for his vocal refusal to be Joe Biden's French poodle in the buildup to a war against China. At least for the moment, he's flagrantly peeing all over American hegemony.

CNN, one of the most trusted names in warmongering propaganda, frames the story of one lone European leader trying to give peace a chance this way:

French President Emmanuel Macron might have hoped to focus this week on what may prove the biggest domestic test of his leadership, as France’s Constitutional Council prepares to rule Friday on whether or not he can push ahead with controversial pension reforms. 

Instead, he finds himself grappling with international blowback from last week’s friendly visit to China – and in particular from comments that have made him rather unpopular both in Washington DC and with some of his allies in Europe.

On his flight home from Beijing, Macron gave an interview to POLITICO Europe. In it, he said that Europe must not become “just America’s followers” when asked about the prospect of China invading Taiwan.

“The question Europeans need to answer … is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” Macron said, adding that Europe must not get “caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy.”

Notice how CNN conflates American chagrin into a galloping case of "international blowback" against peace from all the alleged war-loving nations of the planet. There is nothing like international blowback to make a leader "somewhat unpopular" among his peers! Almost as ironic as the leak from the gun-loving dude who exposes war and possible war crimes is the elite former banker Macron actually saving the working class cannon fodder of all nations even as he forces his own constituents to toil for two extra years on the domestic front.

As for Joe Biden, he plays his own senescently sanguine part in the Narrative, gushing that even though the leaker is the target of a "full-blown" investigation, most of the information released online is also so outdated as to be meaningless, not to mention mind-blowingly blowback-proof. After all, if Biden's friends and allies and partners don't know it by now, post-Snowden, that their full-spectrum dominant is listening in on all their phone calls and private meetings, than they've been asleep for the last decade. As partners, they should know their submissive place.

Or as Biden tried to explain it from both sides of his orifice:

"I'm not concerned about the leak, I'm concerned that it happened but there is nothing contemporaneous that I'm aware of."

Conveniently enough, the cache of leaked documents also contains possible evidence that China and Russia are in cahoots. The ever-reliable New York Times reports:

The cache of classified documents that has leaked online reveals one source that may have at least reinforced the suspicions in Washington about China’s plans: intercepted communications in mid-February indicating that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service reported the approval of such aid by China’s top military body, the Central Military Commission.

Talk about convenience! There is nothing like a controlled leak by a pathetic loser of a low-level military worker to make the case for World War III. No wonder that Biden is so carefree. When you're a doddering dominant girded with the full faith and credit of the USA in the form of a discreet Depends, all leaks can be absorbed into the matrix, losing their initial stench after a short while. Meanwhile, one can always blame the occasional unsightly puddle on one's disgruntled ,un-housebroken military puppy. One can pretend to be very, very shocked and worried but yet not worried about it.

But back to Biden's diplomatic journey to find his Irish roots and mark  the 25th anniversary of peace after the Troubles. He's been there, done that. Now it's on to war. From the Times:

 President Biden will thank the Irish people for their support of Ukraine in its battle against Russia when he speaks to a session of Ireland’s Parliament on Thursday, part of a three-day trip that is both a personal journey and diplomacy.

The president’s national security aides said Mr. Biden intended to continue his efforts to shore up the global alliance on behalf of Ukraine. They said he would highlight Ireland’s humanitarian assistance and its acceptance of some 80,000 refugees who have fled the war-torn country.

Many of those refugees are being lodged in hotels throughout Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland, a country where housing is scarce and expensive.

Before addressing Parliament, Mr. Biden met on Thursday with Leo Varadkar, the prime minister of Ireland, and thanked him for welcoming Ukrainians to his country.

“I know it’s not easy,” Mr. Biden said.

In turn, Mr. Varadkar told Mr. Biden he “never thought, in my lifetime, that we would see a war of this nature happen in Europe again.”

“If it wasn’t for American leadership, and if it wasn’t for American and Europe working together, I don’t know what kind of world we would live in,” he added.

No word as to whether the Irish leader had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek as he uttered those last words. But to hear the Times tell it, Leo Varadkar was acting every inch the sleek Irish Setter with a severe drooling problem who also labors under the delusion that he is small enough to sit in his owner's lap. But not to worry. The master not only welcomes the devotion, he gets off on the slobber.

*Update: The leaker has now been identified by the New York Times as a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman based in Massachusetts. He was yet to interviewed by the Pentagon or FBI, according to the report.

War Is Peace

Since that satiric Orwellian nostrum does sound a bit trite after all these years, the New York Times tried mightily to put a more modern original gloss on it with the headline "Biden Announces 31 Abrams Tanks For Ukraine, But Says the Move Is Not Meant To Escalate the War." 

If it seems that it was only last week that he was balking at sending the tanks because it would be viewed as more provocative evidence of US involvement in its proxy war, it's because it was only last week. The U.S. hegemon's browbeating Germany to unilaterally send its own tanks didn't work, so Uncle Joe had no other choice but to cross his own phony red line in the sand and cave to his increasingly skittish NATO ally.

 And miracle of miracles: what was a provocation last week has been magically transformed into an olive branch constructed of tons and tons of military metal this week!

That is heavy stuff. The  critical term "mission creep" cannot possibly apply in this latest escalation, coming as it does after the more discreet and even stealthy procession of billions of dollars and grenade launchers and guns and CIA "advisers" and NGOs and private mercenaries and freelance arms dealers.  As creepy as these monster tanks are, they definitely can't be delivered stealthily.

Therefore, the language of war itself must be rendered ever more stealthy. Star Times correspondent Peter Baker once again does the obsequious, power-serving honors:

“These tanks are further evidence of our enduring, unflagging commitment to Ukraine and our confidence in the skill of Ukrainian forces,” Mr. Biden said, flanked by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III.

But he emphasized that the buildup was not meant to expand the war into Russia. “It is not an offensive threat to Russia,” he said. “There is no offensive threat to Russia. If Russian troops return to Russia, where they belong, this war would be over today.”

They are described in contradictory, magical-thinking terms, both as harmless little toys and lethal killing machines, these Abrams tanks. Ukrainian troops may not be qualified to actually operate them, but Biden is confident in their innate skills. 

The Pentagon itself is slightly less sanguine than the president, but still euphemistically optimistic: Per the  CNBC coverage:

“The M1 (Abrams) is a very capable battlefield platform and it’s also a very complex capability. And so, like anything that we’re providing to Ukraine, we want to ensure that they have the ability to maintain it, sustain it, to train on it,” Pentagon press secretary U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters Tuesday.

What about the mission-creep of American boots on the ground to provide those driver training courses and issue the learning permits before the Ukrainian soldiers finally pass their road tests and get their licenses and their advanced degrees in tank maintenance? To hear the military and the White House and their corporate media partners spin it, hundreds of Ukrainian troops will be required to forsake their own embattled homeland for prolonged periods, to get their training on "neutral" ground, including on US military bases.

  Have the sticklers for details never heard of dual controls?  Have they never learned that presidents can say something one week and then abruptly shift into reverse gear the next? It's called defensive driving, people!  Sheesh.

The Abrams tank is manufactured by General Dynamics, which reported Wall Street gains just as Biden made his announcement on Wednesday. However, the business press reports that these gains are from increased revenue from its other contributions to the Ukraine war rather than from  investors copiously salivating over billions more in profits from the looming tank and related hardware sales.

"This is about freedom," as Joe Biden so originally and lyrically reminded his audience today. "Freedom for Ukraine, freedom everywhere."

He could have made his Orwellian newspeak remarks downright Oscar-worthy, and elevated Freedom to "everything everywhere all at once." 

But that would have been a lie too far for Biden's carefully crafted media image as a "decent" man.  He doesn't make promises he can't or won't keep. He has been there and done that, by way of reneging on a health insurance public option, keeping tax hikes for the wealthy purely aspirational, and only verbally "shutting down" the pandemic. The citizen-consumers of America know, or should know, that the freedom of record windfall war profits is always reserved for the very select few at the very tippy-top of the finance-capital hierarchy. That's how they keep us safe.

Meanwhile, despite assurances that Biden's tank gift to Ukraine might come too late to be anything other than one more head-fake, the announcement has at least enabled more squeamish NATO allies to send their own tanks to Ukraine. ETA's would be weeks to months for the first few shipments from the more Ukraine-adjacent allies.

 “Sending the Abrams appears to have been the key to unlocking the (German) Leopards, which will probably get to Ukraine much faster,” said Sofia Besch, an expert on European defense issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Andrew Carnegie, the robber-baron philanthropist who funded the "think tank" bearing his name and who championed the United States' entry into World War I in order to make the world "safe for democracy" (but which spawned more than a century of global conflict), the Orwellian "war for peace" thinking permanently chiseled into the brains of the Best and the Brightest doesn't come as so much of a shock.

Pathocrats At Play

Even calling it a proxy war is starting to get a little bit precious. In case we needed any more evidence that the United States is simply using Ukrainian bodies and Ukrainian real estate for its war with Russia, no longer bothering to hide the fact that Ukraine is naught but its Cold War 2.0 vassal state, comes news that US Attorney General Merrick Garland personally traveled to Ukraine on Tuesday to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Russian war crimes.

Apparently, there is no official in Ukraine, either presidential, judicial or parliamentary, who is capable of appointing special prosecutors. The United States is in full charge and in full control of its puppet regimes.

In a buried paragraph of exquisite understatement, the New York Times casually mentions, almost in passing, that

His overseas travel comes at a particularly tense moment in his tenure at the Justice Department, on a day of dramatic congressional testimony about the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that prompted many Democrats to renew their call for him to prosecute former President Donald J. Trump and his allies.

When a nation's top cop is being spread this thin, making him the personification of American "policeman of the world" exceptionalism, it kind of makes you suspect anew that the Trump Show Trial is totally just for show. The testimony elicited Tuesday from the various targets of Trump's coup attempt was, you have to admit, rather compelling, with a whole parade of GOP election officials and politicians swearing that they feared for their very lives as they were so terribly torn between appeasing Trump and thwarting him.

 Merrick Garland  certainly picked a good day to skip town and meddle in the war crimes of others. Then again, the congress-critter (Bennie Thompson) in charge of  the Show Trial has already signaled that he would not be forwarding the panel's findings to the Justice Department, which is said to  be conducting its own casual investigation into what they're touting as the biggest, most horrible alleged threat to our "democracy" in the history of American history. All this, while Trump still plays golf with impunity.

Of course, the Ukraine prosecutor whom Garland is taking it upon himself to appoint has the requisite deep ties to the American security state and its NGO cutouts. What the Times doesn't report is that, before becoming the top cop in her own country,  Irina Veneditkova was a faculty advisor at the Pennsylvania-based Leavitt Institute For International Development, which is funded by what it calls "private donations." In other words, it is very possibly a CIA front organization dedicated to regime change and capitalistic plunder.

 Its founder, David Leavitt, is also currently Utah's Republican county attorney.

But just like Garland, Leavitt doesn't let his job fighting malfeasance in The Homeland take away from his ongoing work in Ukraine, to which he personally traveled earlier this year, ostensibly to find American homes for refugees, and otherwise "spreading democracy, ethics and the rule of law" to that country and its Eastern European neighbors. 

He and other beneficiaries of the neoconservative/ liberal interventionist model of war are not spreading themselves too thin at all. They are simply spreading democracy in the form of suctioning up the wealth of nations to line their own bottomless pockets or those of their clients. Or as the glossy Leavitt website more delicately spins it:

Organized in 2005 by David and Chealthlom Leavitt, TLI operates under the premise that seasoned legal professionals can share their experience and knowledge in order to help push democratic reforms.

TLI began with private donations from the Leavitt family and friends and a small handful of volunteers. Today, TLI operates in multiple cities in eastern Europe, teaching and shaping the minds of the next generation of leaders.

As part of its efforts, TLI involves some of the brightest international relations specialists and legal minds throughout the world to teach democratic principles, rule of law, and ethics. TLI teachers are experienced judges, prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, and legal counselors from the United States and Canada. They lecture on a variety of subjects and make a lasting impression on the minds of their students.

Among the board of directors of TLI is Natalie Jaresko, an American who has previously worked with the State Department, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Treasury Department - in other words,  the "Blob" -  who was integral in the neoliberalization of the former Soviet Union. In other words, she was a player in the 90s "Harvard Boys" collective, enabling a group of oligarchs to impoverish the Russian people after the Soviet Union collapsed.

As Ukraine's US-installed finance minister, her mammoth task was imposing austerity on regular Ukrainians once the US-manufactured coup in 2014 was a done deal.  Jaresko later brought her economic talents to the US territory of Puerto Rico with her management of the Oversight and Management Board and the subsequent imposition of crushing austerity programs for the regular residents of that particular territory.

It's a big club, as George Carlin used to say. You ain't in it, but Merrick Garland, David Leavitt, Natalie Jaresko and new US-appointed "war crimes prosecutor" Veneditkova certainly are. When you consider that they're all just part of the same big fat blob-club, then it doesn't seem  so weird for Merrick Garland to be calling the legal shots in a foreign country. How could the US possibly be meddling in what is its own conquered territory? They are imperialists, after all, and it behooves them, for democracy appearance's sake, to utilize the requisite number of native experts to do their bidding.

Of course, neither the US nor Russia have signed official international war crimes treaties. The US even has a law on the books requiring it to rescue any of its own club of accused war criminals (think of Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Obama, Biden et al) should any of them ever find themselves on trial in The Hague.

So while the Times and other establishment media clutch their pearls over the Trump Show Trial and Garland's absence from The Homeland, they don't even pay lip service to Julian Assange, the imprisoned exposer of American war crimes who is currently under orders by a complicit British official to be extradited to the United States for prosecution under the archaic "espionage act." That law was a fraud right from its World War I start. It was enacted as a means for persecuting antiwar activists and whistleblowers then, and it's being used as such now.

As much as the purveyors and beneficiaries of predatory capitalism choke on their own hypocritical excesses, it will never stop them from gorging themselves till they burst. They're relying on public apathy and the efforts of the courtier establishment press to either maintain it, or to redirect citizen ire against an outside enemy. Think about the scourge of Putinflation, for example.

Maybe the constant exposure of the pathocrats and their foul deeds by what remains of our free press will amount to a forced dietary intervention. As exhausting as this task is, giving up simply doesn't seem like the best option, not even in this, the terminal phase of civilization.

A Blob Divided Against Itself Can Only Replicate

 The US foreign policy establishment, often described as The Blob by Washington insiders, was suffering a rare attack of indigestion last week. It seems that the reach of a few of its slimy tentacles had exceeded their grasp. So replete was the Blob upon the gourmet feast known as Ukraine, so giddy was it from the bubbly champagne of public approval for its propaganda campaign to effectively transform Ukraine into an emotionally appealing 51st state, that it forgot that bragging too much about bloodthirsty gluttony does have consequences. It makes people queasy just having to listen to it spewing its gastronomic excess.

Some supposedly renegade individual replicants ventured out from the Blob Proper last week and dished to the New York Times  that it was the Blob itself which had steered its Ukrainian proxy fighters toward some soon-to-be assassinated Russian generals. It was the Blob itself which had targeted the location of the flagship of the Russian fleet for its blowing-up by same proxy fighting force.

This ill-advised chest-thumping, this direct provocation of a fellow nuclear power, was so over the top that it even prodded the latest designated nucleus of the Blob - President Joe Biden himself - into dishing to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that he would not tolerate any of his tentacles ever going rogue in such an unseemly manner, ever again. He apparently even used the F word or worse while  threatening to hunt them down. But this is so moot, because cutting them off will only make them stronger. Slime molds of such superior quality can easily regenerate themselves. Just as the Washington war/security establishment has long used fellow Blobster Friedman to sell its wars of aggression and related regime changes for the benefit of American capitalism  so too does it now use Friedman as journalistic damage control.  Friedman is the ultra-soft washcloth to gently but firmly dab away the blood from Biden's hands, in the process also disguising the fact that these expensively manicured hands are really the giant tentacles of one great big engorged slime mold.

After Friedman ludicrously praises Times reporters for their intrepid digging for spoon-fed goodies from their government partners, he writes: 

At the same time, from everything I have been able to glean from senior U.S. officials, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, the leaks were not part of any thought-out strategy, and President Biden was livid about them. I’m told that he called the director of national intelligence, the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of defense to make clear in the strongest and most colorful language that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately — before we end up in an unintended war with Russia.

This is the same president, mind you, whose own notion of diplomacy  for the prevention of nuclear destruction of the whole world is the reckless goading of Vladimir Putin, calling him a war criminal and a genocidal maniac who must be removed from power. The very idea that Biden is even remotely upset about the unseemly chest-thumping by the lesser tentacles in his administration is therefore laughable on its face.

Even so, this is the delicate stage in the US war on Russia where sympathy for everyday Ukrainians must be maintained at a fever pitch so that the American public will not rebel once the Blob takes an even more direct role in the war. It was only a few weeks ago that independent critics of the proxy war were being dismissed as Kremlin stooges, when they pointed out the factual truth that there is a proxy war going on here.  

But as quick as a slime mold replicates in the woods, the official narrative now acknowledges that this is indeed a proxy war - but only because Biden and the Blob have been "dragged into" one by the evil Putin. It is still a heresy to place the actual beginning of this war against Russia to 2014, when the Obama administration orchestrated regime change in Ukraine.

The Blob (which very much includes the corporate media in its body) is still selling the narrative that the war had its beginning with Putin's own invasion of Ukraine, that it has occurred in a vacuum, and that the incursion of NATO up to Russia's own border in defiance of an agreement made in the 1990s not to do so has nothing to do with it, that the Minsk Accord calling for a diplomatic solution to territorial disputes around eastern Ukraine were never ignored by the "West," that Biden's  economic sanctions, pre-Putin invasion, to make ordinary Russians suffer were a provocation if not an act of war itself.

As much as US political leaders pretend to bemoan the "divisiveness" of the domestic culture wars, which they've played such an integral in promoting for much profit to their corporate sponsors, they also love to pretend that their periodic internal agonizing and spirited debates are proof of a healthy functioning democracy. They pretend that they're wringing their hands over the tragedy of a war they had no part in creating. What they're really doing is flailing their slimy tentacles like whips, striving to manufacture our consent for yet another endless war.  And this particular war may well live up to the 1914 hype of being the "war to end all wars" - but only because the use of nuclear weapons will ensure that never again will humans be able to fight another war, let alone win one.

To hear Friedman tell it, the Blob is naught but a hapless collection of iron filings being inexorably drawn into the maw of a Blob with an irresistible magnetism in its own tentacles. 

"The staggering takeaway from these leaks is that they suggest we are no longer in an indirect war with Russia but rather are edging toward a direct war — and no one has prepared the American people or Congress for that," Friedman disingenuously writes.

Well, consider yourselves gently prepared if you haven't been paying attention up till now.  As for Congress, their unquestioning appropriation of tens of billions of dollars to enrich the weapons industry, in the space of only a few months, for waging the "proxy war" has already implicated them in full knowledge of what they do. The so-called progressive caucus in the lower House apparently never dreamed of leveraging its own bellicose vote in order to force passage of the social welfare programs and Covid relief bills currently stalled in the Senate. People can suffer indefinitely, but war is always time-sensitive. At least that's what Speaker Nancy Pelosi grotesquely implied.

The view of Biden and his team, according to my reporting," Friedman concludes, "is that America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty and beat the Russians back — but not let Ukraine turn itself into an American protectorate on the border of Russia. We need to stay laser-focused on what is our national interest and not stray in ways that lead to exposures and risks we don’t want."

Um... Ukraine has been a protectorate, or at least a beholden client state, of the US at least since 2014. Much of its own mainstream media is directly funded by NATO and USAID, which themselves are funded by weapons manufacturers and oil companies. 

Until Ukrainians were fetishized by the Blob as worthy freedom fighters and trendy cultural icons even deserving of a Bono concert, Joe Biden displayed his true colors. As vice president, he traveled to Ukraine and informed them they'd have their pensions reduced, their retirement ages raised, their costs for fuel increased -  in a country where the average salary is $775 a month - as IMF punishment for official corruption. This is while his son Hunter was making tens of millions of dollars sitting on the board of a corrupt Ukrainian gas company.

Another fun fact about slime molds is that they pride themselves on their diversity. Even in nature, they come in every color except green. So it's only natural that the Washington variety of the Blob is so adverse to a green new deal, not least because the military is the biggest fossil fuel polluter in the entire world.

 For a creature lacking a brain, the slime mold that inspired "The Blob" movie that in turn inspired the folksy moniker for what used to be called the Military-Industrial Complex, it is marvelously efficient at finding food, traveling ridiculous distances, and of course, constantly evolving and shifting its shape and replicating itself and growing without limit almost at the speed of light. As one scientist so vividly put it in a PBS News Hour segment about the species,

 They form strange and sophisticated shapes – some resemble honeycomb lattices, others blackberries. And then there’s the slime mold known as “dog vomit,” because it looks just like the stuff. Some remain microscopic, and others grow rogue, forming bulbous masses, as long as 10 to 13 feet. Yet humans largely ignore them.

“Very few have been consumed as food. You can’t build a house with them. They escape our noses most of the time,” (Professor Steve) Stephenson said. 

Slime mold is a lot like war -  what is it good for?

 

 

The Global Class War Is Getting Really Ugly

The economic war declared on Russia by the US and its NATO client-states is, on the surface, payback for Vladimir Putin's attack on Ukraine. But this intra-global war of oligarchs is at its very essence a war of rich against poor. It's all about which oligarchy gets to extract the natural resources of one of the poorest nations on earth.

The 2014 US-backed coup against Ukraine's democratically elected president, Victor Yanukovich. was a victory not just for NATO, but for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose historical core purpose is to "open up" distressed nation-states for looting ("investment") by multinational corporations. Yanukovich had to go, because he was reneging on his agreement to impose austerity on his constituents as the price for borrowing money from the global financial system. Even worse as far as "the West" was concerned, he thought that he could get a better financial deal from Putin.

 Among the conditions that the IMF had imposed upon Ukraine for loaning it billions of dollars was raising the retirement age of Ukrainians to 60. This may sound like a reasonable demand, until you consider that Ukraine ranks a dismal 99th in the world in terms of life expectancy, and that at the time of the coup, the average Ukrainian male would be dead by the age of 67. Raising the retirement age was tantamount to a massively cruel cut in benefits.

Even so, one year after the coup, the Ukrainian government was still balking at "reforming" its pension program and raising the retirement age. It already had complied with such  IMF loan conditions as drastically increasing domestic gas prices to consumers and reducing energy subsidies.

As economist Michael Hudson noted in 2014, the US-backed coup's ensuing austerity policies, administered by the US and the IMF, would not only turn Ukraine into another Greece or Spain, they'd make Ukraine (already being even poorer than Greece and Spain) "a lot more miserable":

 German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble told the press last month, with all the sensitivity of a Cliven Bundy or Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling, that Greece could serve as a model for Ukraine. This is like saying that the United States’ Great Depression could serve as a model for Ukraine.

But we don’t have to look to Greece or Spain to see the risks of signing on to a program of fiscal austerity and “reforms” run by the IMF and its European directors at this time. Ukraine has had its own experience not that long ago: in just 4 years from 1992-1996, Ukraine lost half of its GDP as the IMF and friends took the wrecking ball to both the Russian and Ukrainian economies . Ukraine’s economy didn’t start growing again until the 2000’s. For comparison, the worst years of the U.S. Great Depression (1929-1934) saw a real GDP loss of 36 percent.

Enter then-Vice President Joe Biden, the Obama administration's designated "point-man" for Ukraine, who brayed a year later that the austerity-driven Obama administration itself could also serve as an inspiration for Ukraine. 

 Much, actually over-much, has been made of Biden's putative task of "rooting out corruption" and punishing the "bad" oligarchs who had been looting Ukraine's treasury since the fall of the Soviet Union. (His son Hunter's own lucrative gig with a newly privatized energy sector in Ukraine was brushed off as working for a "good oligarch" who allegedly did not have a corrupt bone in his whole body.)

But when Biden showed up to give a hectoring speech to the Ukrainian Rada, or parliament, right before Christmas 2015, it was not only to inveigh against the ongoing corruption, it was also to demand that ordinary Ukrainians continue to bear the brunt of both the corruption and the predatory IMF debt.

Once Biden got through all the preliminaries, moving to soften up the the assembled politicians with the carrot of more financial aid, and the obligatory flattery for their allegiance to democracy, freedom, and human rights, he finally went full hit man and wielded his big stick: 

Yesterday I announced almost $190 million in new American assistance to help Ukraine fight corruption, strengthen the rule of law, implement critical reform, bolster civil society, advance energy security.  That brings our total of direct aid to almost $760 million in direct assistance, in addition to loan guarantees since this crisis broke out.  And that is not the end of what we're prepared to do if you keep moving. 

But for Ukraine to continue to make progress and to keep the support of the international community you have to do more, as well.  The big part of moving forward with your IMF program -- it requires difficult reforms.  And they are difficult.  Let me say parenthetically here, all the experts from our State Department and all the think tanks, and they come and tell you, that you know what you should do is you should deal with pensions.  You should deal with -- as if it’s easy to do.  Hell, we're having trouble in America dealing with it.  We're having trouble.  To vote to raise the pension age is to write your political obituary in many places. 

Don't misunderstand that those of us who serve in other democratic institutions don't understand how hard the conditions are, how difficult it is to cast some of the votes to meet the obligations committed to under the IMF.  It requires sacrifices that might not be politically expedient or popular.  But they're critical to putting Ukraine on the path to a future that is economically secure.  And I urge you to stay the course as hard as it is.  Ukraine needs a budget that’s consistent with your IMF commitments.

Anything else will jeopardize Ukraine’s hard-won progress and drive down support for Ukraine from the international community, which is always tenuous.  It’s always tenuous.  We keep pushing that support.

Whenever neoliberal politicians inflict their pain on the masses, they love to insist that it hurts them as much as it hurts you. They are altruistic enough to risk their own careers for you! After all somebody has to save you from yourselves.  And so with the class war, as with any kind of  war, they appeal to your patriotism, asking that you "share the sacrifice" with the rich, who are being ever so politely asked to pay a bit more in taxes. You then will feel so much better about waiting a few more years to collect your Social Security, just so long as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk also have to pay reasonable capital gains taxes. Of course, despite all of this neoliberal posturing and gaslighting, the oligarchs eventually come out as the only winners. There are always a few useful idiots or bad cops like Joe Manchin or Mitch McConnell around to willingly take the blame.

So when Biden was so delicately urging Ukraine to raise its retirement age, or risk "losing the support of the international community," he was also implicitly bragging about the ultimately failed "Grand Bargain" with Republicans that he and Obama had pursued to raise both the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages in the United States, thereby imposing a massive cut in lifetime benefits. Biden tried to paint his administration as a role model for the Rada, having been so politically courageous in its own pursuit of austerity for the masses of people. 

It was not for nothing that Obama had a plaque on his Oval Office desk reading "Hard Things Are Hard." 

To make the hard things less painful, the impending doom less noticeable or more akin to the proverbial frog boiling to death at a low temperature, Ukraine politicians have tried to salvage their own careers by raising the retirement age in six-month increments until 2025, while at the same time gradually increasing the work requirement years for people to qualify for a pension. 

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are fleeing their country by the millions, and their current president is begging the "international community" for fighter jets, ammo and bulletproof vests. And Joe Biden's domestic approval rating and positive media coverage have gotten just the boost that you might expect. Because hard things and hard people are hard!

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is deep in the throes of one of its periodic fever dreams. This current one is even more intense and xenophobic than the pandemic of paranoia and jingoism that we witnessed after 9/11. As The Guardian newspaper, for just one example of the war hysteria afflicting us these days, gushed in its Sunday edition:

 Just as Biden’s empathy was seen as ideal for meeting the moment of the coronavirus pandemic, and just as his record of bipartisanship was thought to be well suited to healing America’s divisions, so his storied foreign policy experience and faith in multinational institutions appear to bode well for this test.

That is certainly the view of Democrats who believe that Biden, who at 79 lived every moment of the cold war, including its gnawing dread of nuclear annihilation, has risen to the occasion. Last month he authorised $350m of military equipment – the biggest such package in US history – to bolster Ukraine’s courageous fighters who have exceeded all expectations.

Who needs an adequate pension, and freedom from poverty, and cancellation of onerous IMF debt when you can be pawned in their game as a courageous freedom fighter?

The Psy-Ops Blob Does Ukraine

Svengali-ized in the Name of Freedom!

In the US proxy war for regime change in Russia, it is important that the American public be convinced that this war is strictly limited to the stalwart Ukrainian people defending their democracy, against all odds, from the latest incarnation of Hitler. 

And by the millions, we are swiftly getting with the Unity Program. For when it comes to defending and expanding the US hegemon and enriching our own domestic oligarchs, there is no Republican Party, and there is no Democratic Party. There is only the one, true, all-American Party of Blob. You can't really call it the Deep State any more, given that the partying parties of the Hegemon no longer bother to hide what they do.  As long as the American people can get most or even all their news from only five or six corporate entities which insist, over and over and over again, that they are the only thing standing between you and an evil pandemic of disinformation and misinformation and even "mal-information" infecting the Internet, then the battle for your hearts and minds to support the proxy war on Russia is as good as won.

It helps, too, that the country chosen as the battleground for this latest war is populated by white people, and that its president is such an entertaining and telegenic former comic actor. It's so much easier to get Western celebrities and other professional concern trolls to "stand with" beleaguered people who are not brown and poor and Muslim. You will never, for example, see the Saturday Night Live cold opening of their latest show with a hymn for the Somalis or Yemenis being blasted to smithereens by US drones. 

You just know it's springtime for wartime whenever the establishment media subsidiary of the Blob joins together in a rare spirit of elite solidarity, putting aside all their petty partisan allegiances in the quest to engage eyeballs and ear-holes in united hatred for a common enemy. The domestic culture wars miraculously have taken a back seat in the past week in order to saturate us with lockstep coverage by outlets blaring the same scare headlines and the same war footage, which may or may not emanate from any actual scenes of battles in Ukraine. You can no longer see any difference between the deep black scare headlines of the right-wing New York Post and the "center-left" New York Times.

For just one example of the bipartisanship of this propaganda war for land, for fossil fuels, for sheer Superpower power, see the latest Times column of Michelle Goldberg. This liberal opinion writer, whose subject matter usually involves pumping up Democrats and dissing Republicans, today glowingly cited a poll commissioned by a corrupt, money-soaked GOP-controlled propaganda mill, purporting to show that most Ukrainian citizens are convinced that "they" can defeat Russia. Goldberg doesn't mention the Republican provenance of the survey, however. She does not reveal that this Ukrainian polling agency gets its commissions from the International Republican Institute (IRI) in Washington, which in turn gets its own money from the multibillion-dollar US Agency for International Development, the State Department, and donations from such entities as the government of Canada, the Bush Institute, the AFL-CIO, the American Bar Association and a whole panoply of NGOs and foundations and think tanks. Therefore, liberal-minded Times readers of Goldberg's column never get to find out that there is a direct propaganda line to the Ukrainian pollster straight from the IRI Board, which consists mainly of hawkish GOP senators currently sitting on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The IRI got its start during the Reagan years, and has a long sordid history of fomenting and orchestrating regime change coups and wars throughout the world, under the usual rubric of human rights, a free press and the general all-purpose spreading of democracy for the enrichment of the military-industrial complex. It has employed the notorious Blackwater/XE  security firm to guard both its headquarters and its personnel.

Goldberg also doesn't reveal in her column that the heroic newspaper editor-philosopher hawking the IRI's poll results, the man she placed at the very center of her column, is also on the payroll of USAID, as well as of NATO. Of course, his publication is aimed more at war-weary English-speakers in the West, rather than at the people who actually live in Ukraine, the people who are actually caught in the middle of the proxy war between Russia and the United States and its NATO clients and could use some reliable news to help them in their immediate existential plight.

In 2019, Michelle Goldberg recounts, when she last visited Ukraine to explore the zeitgeist of these everyday citizens, she interviewed this very same publisher, Volodymyr Yermenko of UkraineWorld. The subject that time around was not so much the alleged desire of Ukrainians to join NATO and effect regime change in Russia  as it was to sell the narrative to Times readers that everyday Ukrainians were disgusted that Donald Trump and the right-wing Republicans were falsely accusing their government of corruption. Again, the American public needed to be convinced that since the rest of the world was in danger from Trump, it is up to us to defeat Trump and thereby save the rest of the world. (for, I reckon, the preferred set of oligarchs funding the IRI and its donors and subsidiaries). Engendering worldwide anti-Trump feeling was at that time a primary task of the #Russiagate franchise. No matter that Trump, despite being an embarrassing vocal critic of NATO and an unabashed admirer of authoritarian strongmen, did end up bowing to Blob pressure and sending financial aid to Ukraine, not to mention trashing a nuclear treaty with Russia. Putin, who is now being portrayed as off his rocker, has taken to openly threatening to use nukes. (Thanks a lot, Donald!)

Adding to the tangled webs being woven by the mainstream media, IRI board member Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is adamantly refusing to respond to liberal media goading and patriotically "condemn" Trump for praising Putin at the very same time that he and his neocon cohort are commissioning anti-Russia pro-"democracy" propaganda in service to the profiteers of the proxy war.

Surprisingly, the Times published my comment to Goldberg which, in truncated form, outlined the sleazy provenance of both the commissioned poll she cited as well as her Ukrainian publishing source's own direct funding by the US hegemon. My comment was greeted with the equivalent of a group yawn, and two recommendations from fellow readers. One person did respond with the retort, "So what! Frankly, our side needs effective propaganda right now. It goes along with fighting wars; in this one, our propaganda effort is essential in getting the publics of the democracies to get behind the effort to both isolate the Russian Republic, and to keep up the supply of war materials to the Ukranians (sic), neither of which will be free of risks, and especially for our European allies, of significant costs, economically speaking. So if the vast right-wing conspiracy wants to devote some of their talents and treasure to these goals, more power to them, I say..."

USA! USA! USA!

Meantime, let's all stay tuned for tonight's State of the Onion address by Joe Biden. Or not. I'll cover it here either tomorrow or the next day.... that is, if I haven't choked on my popcorn.

A Ukraine Primer

 I'll be the first to admit that I was not up to speed on the background of the Ukraine-Russia-US-NATO conflict.  I think that even those who are or were up to speed were shocked by Putin's full-scale invasion, That is understandable, given how many times the "intelligence community" has screamed that the sky is falling. If it wasn't the  Russian nukes in the Cold War, it was the constant threat from what George W. used to so folksily call "those terrorist folks."

So, many thanks to reader Valerie for sharing this excellent lecture by political science and foreign policy scholar John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. Not only is it well worth an hour or so of your time, it should also serve as an antidote to all the jingoism and fear-mongering propaganda bombarding us from the mainstream media, or rather the five corporate entities which control more than 90 percent of everything we see, hear, and read. 

Geld Vlad Better

 My fellow Americans, your government must sanction the oligarchs over there so we don't have to tax them over here.  

If only Joe Biden would expand his sanctimonious sanctioning of a few Russian billionaires in Vlad's inner circle into actually converting their "frozen" or "seized" real estate holdings in the United States into permanent, federally subsidized housing for poor people! Just think of how many people could be sheltered in the empty luxury penthouses and mansions they've been vacuuming up here since the fall of the Soviet Union, using them not as homes but as money-laundering banks.

 Then Biden finally might even start clawing his way back into positive poll territory.  After all, if he can unilaterally seize the frozen assets of the Afghan people and use them to settle lawsuits with the 9/11 survivors, then he can seize the myriad ill-gotten assets that Putin has no way of preserving for himself and his oligarchic pals. Even better, such seizure and allocation to the needy would not lead to the deaths of innocent civilians through starvation, disease and exposure to the elements. For once in the violent hegemonic history of these United States, what our leaders euphemize as their "responsibility to protect" through "humanitarian interventions" will be the real deal, and not just a fig leaf for mass destruction and violence.

And if he gets a good public response from real estate seizures from Russian oligarchs, he and the Congress he reveres might even want to expand it further with punitive taxes on the wealth of such sociopathic American tycoons as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

  But then again, the US municipalities which host the Russian oligarchs' real estate holdings could very well balk at losing their tax bases through such a federal seizure and redistribution. It would also mightily disappoint the private equity vultures doing their own predatory part of buying up homes and apartment complexes, forcing people to rent them at exorbitant rates. I assume that the foreign owners do pay some property taxes through their shell companies, despite all the sweetheart deals for concessions for buyers or developers in exchange for, as an example, allowing a little green space and one or two "affordable" apartments for the hoi polloi.

And as for the US-based zillionaires, cities are actually vying for their presence because it allegedly creates jobs, despite the fact that the municipalities themselves are on the hook for building the infrastructure and the helipads and other perks for the job-creators.

For when push comes to shove, capitalism knows no national boundaries, despite all the intra-oligarchic bickering and land grabs among the globe's nation-states. Vlad Putin's "invasion" of a small part of Ukraine the size of New Jersey is thus far limited* to diplomatically recognizing a region historically populated by ethnic Russians. There will be much bombast and posturing on both sides, with probably the biggest winner being the US military-industrial complex, standing to reap a windfall from weapons sales to a disorganized Ukraine military populated largely by neo-Nazi freedom fighters.

Speaking of freedom, official Washington is also "bracing" for the convoy of big rigs driven, allegedly, by white supremacist fascists whose only desire is to be freed from mask and vaccine mandates. Never mind that our leaders can't seem to rid themselves of the mask mandates fast enough to placate all manner of individual, ad hoc dissidents and private militias in official or unofficial service to the US-based oligarchs.  How else can the surveillance state ever use its facial recognition technology to surveil and arrest all the necessary suspects? 

The timing of the remake of Smokey and the Bandit, meanwhile, could not be more exquisite, with the arrival of the convoy of truckers coinciding with Joe Biden's State of the Union speech next week before the Congressional Joint. What a relief it must be to his own beleaguered party that he'll get away with a few whispered regrets about the failure of his Build Back Better social welfare package. He will drown them right out with a jingoistic emasculation of Vlad the Impaler! Geld Vlad Better, if you will. Can't you already hear the raucous bipartisan yells of USA! USA! USA! echoing through the hallowed halls? Can't you envision democracy itself rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the January Sixth sacrilege?

But just to keep the fear alive along with the exaltation, to maintain the free-floating anxiety so necessary for a resurgence of the Cold War if not a hotter one, the TV audience will also be regaled by at least a thousand National Guard troops policing the Capitol to supplement its actual encirclement by the same forbidding barbed wire which protected the ruling elites from the people at Biden's inaugural last year.

Biden is taking no chances. He is selling us on not just one Enemy Outside, but two. There is Putin over there, and there is the threatening convoy of Trumpy Truckers converging on Washington from all over the wild hinterlands of Outside Over Here.

We'll no doubt be hearing many plaintive cries for national unity from elites all over the political spectrum in the coming days and weeks and months. The spectrum of which I speak spans all the way from A to B, with myriad pinpoints and occult cracks in between for just a little surface variety.

It's a democracy, my fellow Americans. You have the freedom to pick from two options. Vote on which scenario will inspire, scare or disgust you the most in the latest propaganda battle for your hearts and your minds.

Is it this?

 

Or maybe this:

If, as Samuel Johnson opined, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then the appeals for "unity"  and "civility" and "bringing the country together" are its partners in psychopathy.

We should avoid this cant like the plague, whose cruel reality and human cost is what the political scoundrels themselves are working like mad to avoid addressing.

*2/24 It is now a full-scale invasion. US intelligence has been vindicated, says US. They got exactly what they wanted. The neocon and liberal interventionist hawks must be in heaven, and Biden's poll numbers from the Dems will probably soar skyward as well, in the spirit of elite solidarity. And with Trump praising Vlad, it makes one wonder if the normally war-hungry Republicans will have no choice but to disown him. It would be quite an about-face if any anti-war movement in the US ends up being led by right-wing factions.