RussiaGate is Dead! Long Live Russiagate!
Now that Mueller’s
$40 million Humpty Trumpty investigation is over and found wanting of
its original purpose (to retire Trump), perhaps the ruling class can
return without interruption to the business of destroying the world with
ordnance, greenhouse gases, and regime changes. A few more
CIA-organized blackouts in Venezuela (it’s a simple trick if one follows
the Agency’s “Freedom Fighter’s Manual”),
and the US will come to the rescue, Grenada style, and set up yet
another neoliberal regime. There is a small solace that with Trump,
Pompeo, and Bolton, there is at least a semblance of transparency in
their reckless interventions. The assessed value of Guaido and Salman,
they forthrightly admit, is in their countries’ oil reserves. And
Russians better respect the Monroe Doctrine and manifest destiny if they
know what’s good for them. Crude as they may be, Trump’s men tell it
like it is. And when Bolton
speaks of “the Western Hemisphere’s shared goals of democracy,
security, and the rule of law,” he is of course referring to US-backed
coups, military juntas, debt bondage, invasions, embargoes,
assassinations, and other forms of gunboat diplomacy.
That the US is not already formally at war with Russia (even with
NATO forces all along its borders) has only to do with the latter’s
nuclear arsenal deterrent. Since World War II, a period some describe as
a “a period of unprecedented peace,”
the US war machine has wiped out some 20 million people, including more
than 1 million in Iraq since 2003, engaged in regime change of at least
36 governments, intervened in at least 82 foreign elections, including
Russia (1996), planned more than 50 assassinations of foreign leaders,
and bombed over 30 countries. This is documented here and here.
Despite unending US and US-supported assaults on Africa and western
and central Asia, the authors who see postwar unprecedented peace argue
that it Russia and China, not the US, that represent the real threats to
peace and deserve to be treated as “outcasts.” That NATO has warships
plying the Black Sea and making port calls at the ethnically Russian
Ukraine city of Odessa and is conducting war games from Latvia to
Bulgaria and Ukraine represents unprecedented peace? While NATO, which
together has 20 times the military spending of Russia and includes
member states along virtually the entire perimeter of Russia, in Western
propaganda Russia is the aggressor.
Although the US corporate media may have missed the news, the rest of
the world gets the fact that the greatest threat to peace on the planet
is Uncle Sam. In 2013, a WIN/Gallup International poll
of 66,000 people in 65 countries found that the US was considered by
far the most dangerous state on earth (24% of respondents), while Russia
didn’t even register statistically on that poll. In 2017, a Pew
poll found the same perception of US power and that such a view had
increased to 38% and had grown in 21 of 30 countries compared to 2013.
Even America’s neighbors, Canada and Mexico, see the US as a major
threat to their countries, worse than either China or Russia. The
mainstream media (MSM) stenographers’ myopia in failing to cover this
story is not an oversight. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate exposé fame, documented in 1977 the fact that from the early 1950s to the late 1970s, the MSM (New York Times, Washington Post,
NBC, ABC, CBS, and the rest) had regularly served as overseas informers
for the CIA. It would be hard to believe that those ties are not still
intact given the level of collaboration among the CIA, the MSM, and the
Democratic Party in the Russiagate conspiracy drama.
Context is everything. In blaming others for the instability of the
Middle East, it is important to bear in mind that for 36 years since
Reagan launched air attacks on Beirut and parts of Syria, the US, and
its ally Israel, has been using the greater Middle East region as a
testing ground for its weapons systems. This has meant repeated bombing
and droning of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Yemen,
Kuwait, and Sudan, and increased weapons sales to the region to assure
continuous instability and profits. The US has “special forces”
operating in two-thirds of the world’s countries and non-special forces
stationed in three-quarters of them, altogether over 800 military bases
and installations in as many as 130 countries (the Pentagon refuses to
give the exact number). By comparison, apart from several bases in some
of the former Soviet republics, Russia has a naval resupply facility in
Vietnam and small temporary leased naval and airport stations in Syria.
China opened a combined naval and army base in Djibouti in 2017 and an
“unofficial military presence” in Tajikistan. There is nothing remotely
close to equivalence.
We can expect a continuing outcasting of Russia, either under a
second Trump presidency or, if the long dark shadow of the Clintons
prevails, a Joe Biden White House. Biden claims without the benefit of
evidence that currently “the Russian government is brazenly assaulting the foundations of Western democracy around the world,”
as if the huge imbalance of military forces and the long history of US
interventions against liberal democracies and socialist states were
unknown or irrelevant. In his (and the establishment’s) heavy-handed
uses of propaganda, Biden has learned well the tactics of Goebbels –
repeat the lies often enough to make the imperial state appear as the
victim.
With regard to a brazen assault on democracy, Biden might take a cue
from Clinton, who knew how to capitalize on her power position by
signing off on huge arms sales to the Saudis (e.g., a $29 billion sale
of fighter jets to that country to be used against Yemen) and other
Gulf States while securing tens of millions of dollars in donations from
the sheikhs ($25 million from Saudi Arabia alone) to her private
foundation, run by her husband. This is all the more contemptuous given
that she acknowledged
in 2013: “The Saudis and others are shipping large amounts of weapons…
clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical
Sunni groups in the region…and pretty indiscriminately – not at all
targeted toward the people that we think would be the more moderate,
least likely, to cause problems in the future.”
In other words, she knew the Saudis and other Gulf dictators were
arming ISIS (ISIL) and other caliphate actors but continued to keep them
as allies and patrons. She also took $800 thousand for her 2016
campaign (almost double what Trump received) and some $3 million for her
private foundation from oil and gas companiesafter
approving lucrative gas pipeline in the Canadian tar sands. Part of the
foundation staff’s business was to arrange meetings of top donors
meetings with the then secretary of state. Following Clinton and Obama’s
lead and without a second thought, Trump has authorized US energy
companies to sell the Saudi monarchy nuclear power technology and
assistance.
In foreign policy, indeed, it’s hard to see any meaningful difference
between Republican and Democratic administrations. Obama and John Kerry
sent Undersecretary of State for Europe and Eurasia Victoria Nulandto
Kiev’s Maidan to cheer on the 2014 coup, hand out sandwiches to
protesters, and give marching orders to her ambassador there to arrange
for Yatsenyuk to be prime minister and to “fuck the EU.” Poroshenko, a
regular informer at the US embassy, as WikiLeaks revealed, was already
in the bag for president. Biden was brought in to “midwife” and “help
glue this thing” by pressuring the still-ruling Yanukovych to step down
in favor of the US-designated coup leaders. Along the same lines,
Trump’s then ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, joined Venezuelan
protesters outside UN headquarters in New York, using a megaphone to
publicly call for a coup against Maduro. “I will tell you,” she told the
group, “the U.S. voice is going to be loud.”
Both the Ukraine and Venezuela interventions are in part a grand
strategy to isolate Russia. However, the orchestration of a new Cold War
against Russia and to implicate Trump as a Kremlin puppet has failed,
and the problem for Russiagate propagandists is how to keep the
conspiracy theory alive now that Mueller’s unsuccessful hunt for 5thcolumnists is in the dustbin. The leading Russia scholar, Stephen Cohen,
who has been professionally marginalized because of his skepticism
toward the CIA narrative, sees the impact of a larger scandal – the
corruption of the Democratic Party and its minions in the media that
formed an alliance with the spooks. He asks: “what about the legions of
high-ranking intelligence officials, politicians, editorial writers,
television producers, and other opinion-makers, and their eager media
outlets that perpetuated, inflated, and prolonged this unprecedented
political scandal in American history…?”
Another question is, how would the mainstream media financially
survive an ending of Russiagate, if indeed the media moguls allow it to
end? This spectacular failure of the “fourth estate” in covering the
Clinton and Democrats’ defeat in 2016 greatly weakened their trust
status, which has been in quite steady decline since the 1970s,
especially among Republicans. Democrats tend to look more favorably on
the largely partisan liberal MSM for obvious reasons. However, as of
December 2018, according to an IPSOS/Reuters poll,
only 44% of Americans has much (16%) or some (28%) confidence in the
MSM, compared to hardly any (48%). On whether MSM news organizations are
more interested in making money than telling the truth, 59% agreed with
the former assessment. No known organization has published findings on
MSM trust since the completion of the Mueller debacle.
What is to be made politically of the Russia obsession? Russiagate,
which Matt Taibbi calls “this generation’s WMD,” can be seen as serving
three broad major purposes. It has given the Democratic Party leadership
and its partners in the CIA and MSM a cause célèbre inorder to salvage
the status and image of the party and distract from its disastrous
electoral defeats from 2008 to 2016. It thereby serves as an alternative
reality to the widespread recognition that the ruling forces in the
party have no genuine popular agenda and represent corporate, banking,
neoliberal, and neoconservative militarist projects designed under Bill
Clinton’s New Democrat agenda.
On foreign policy, Russiagate puts the Democrats to the right of the
Republicans, similar to the way that John Kennedy in the 1960 campaign
accused the Eisenhower (and VP Nixon) administration of weakening
America’s defenses, which presently enables the energy and defense
industries and their lobbyists to unduly influence the perception of
international threats and flashpoints. Democrats in the House and Senate
voted overwhelmingly for the 2019 $716 billion defense budget, over and
above what even Trump requested. In 2018, five military contractors –
Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and
Raytheon – provided key political leaders in both parties with $14.4
million in addition to $94 million spent on lobbying efforts that year.
Oil & gas spent $89 million on the election campaign and $125
million on lobbying. And, third, it serves to stifle the political left
in and outside the party and the demands for progressive legislative
changes activated by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and by newer members like
Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Tulsi Gabbard.
Where is the center of public political confidence these days?
Certainly not with the mainstream media, which is even lower than that
for Trump. Even in terms of its vaunted claims of press freedom, the US
fares quite badly. Reporters Without Borders ranked the US number 45th
worldwide (of 180 countries cited) in press freedom in its 2018 report.
Tory-led Britain slid from 33rd in 2014 to 40th–
only Italy and Greece were behind the UK among western European
countries. And although Trump hasn’t helped with his attacks on the
media (and more than reciprocated by the media’s extraordinarily hostile
coverage of the president), the situation wasn’t much better under
Obama, who threatened whistle blowers in the press with enforcing the
1917 Espionage Act. This is law that may be pressed against the
journalist Julian Assange. There still exists no “shield law”
guaranteeing journalists the right to protect their sources’ identities.
Journalism students should be concerned for another reason as
well:Newspaper employment between 2001 and 2016 has been cut by more
than half, from 412,000 to 174,000, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
William Arkin, who quit NBC News as a political commentator last
January, accused the station of peddling “ho-hum
reporting” that “essentially condones” an endless US war presence in the
Middle East and Africa. He also took the network to task for not
reporting “the failures of the generals and national security
leaders,” and essentially becoming “a defender of the government against
Trump” and a “cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering.”
In his parting comments, he wrote: “I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is
to mechanically … be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict
and more war.… Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the
brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation,
do we really yearn for the Cold War?”
It may be whistling in the wind, but there are more important things
to worry about than whether “the Russians” exposed the DNC’s perfidious
behavior in 2016. It would be more worthwhile for Democrats to demand
programs that eliminate child poverty, which is at 20% in the US,
compared to an OECD average of 13%. It might also be useful to
concentrate a bit more on the white working class and working poor that
went to Trump in 2016, whose kids make up 31% of the child poverty
bracket (black children are 24%, and Latino children are 36%).
And while they’re at it, they might try to change the fact that the US ranks 25thout
of 29 industrialized countries in investments in early childhood
education or the fact that the disgraceful American infant mortality
rate at 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births is 50% higher than the OECD
average (3.9%). Many of the parents of these less privileged children
are serving long sentences in prison for non-violent crimes, the
discarded citizens who form the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Overall, the Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranked the US
18th out of 21 wealthy countries on measures of labor markets, poverty
rates, safety nets, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. On the
other hand, the US has more than 25% of the world’s 2,208 billionaires.
This is American exceptionalism at its worst.
The corporate-run market system and the calamities it is bringing to the world depends on such distractions. As the New York Times journalist
and defender of US global supremacy, Thomas Friedman, has noted, “The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of
the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe
for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army,
Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.” In his view, the system needs
protecting, for which his “journalism” and most of the MSM are certainly
doing their part.
Unless the rather soft left within the Democratic Party can somehow
capture the public imagination, the Democrats’ political agenda, the MSM
and their cohorts in the deep state will likely continue to report fake
Russian conspiracies around the world. Russiagate is a propaganda
industry that keeps on giving. In the longue durée of American
elections, the question is what discourse will dominate the next
campaign – social justice and a rational foreign policy or more
aggressive polemics about Russia aimed at a steady pathway to nuclear
war?
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