Thanks to Barak Obama’s most recent expression of his low character and a foreign policy weirdly akin to fantasy-baseball gone bad, thirty-five U.S.-resident Russian diplomats and their families targeted for rapid deportation feared a frantic search in the holiday crunch for open seats on flights to Moscow.
On Friday, Russia sent an Ilyushin 11-96 to collect everyone and the families’ panic that they might not make their deportation deadlines receded. The embassy’s two retreats, one in New York and another in Maryland, were closed on schedule. Thus was the Obama administration’s maximally-inconvenient timing accommodated.
Everybody was home again on New Year’s Day, and America was Russkiifrei!
That’ll fix it, Team Obama thought, “it” being the lack of traction propaganda-wise that the administration’s unsubstantiated claim that President-elect Trump owed his victory to Russian hacking of DNC and Hillary Campaign Chairman John Podesta emails.
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It cannot be said that Vladimir Putin’s response was anything but stylish. Instead of booting American diplomats out of Russia in retaliation, he invited everybody and their kids to a party! Well, to several in fact, which the Kremlin stages annually in celebration of the New Year and the coming Orthodox Christmas.
No need to retaliate now, Putin told his foreign minister, and perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary at all. Why spoil the holidays? For what? A political corpse?
Then the Russian “thug” Putin really rubbed everybody’s nose in it, and sent holiday good wishes to Obama and his family, to Donald Trump, and – can you believe the nerve? – to the American people.
Team Obama was bewildered. And tongue-tied.
Even John McCain, semi-isolated in the Baltics on a special Christmas warmongering tour of Ukraine, the Baltics, and Georgia, piped down once someone got word to him that the Russians were stalling on the return serve.
It only got worse for the White House once the public had a chance to examine the codicil-ridden mess of speculation and innuendo the CIA and the FBI had assembled as evidence for U.S. charges of Russian interference in the American presidential election to President-elect Trump’s advantage. Talk about no there there. Not a single private sector computer security expert supported the intelligence agencies’ allegations.
After Washington found its voice and held congressional hearings on the matter, it was clear the dud report didn’t and won’t crimp the media or the intel agencies. The Washington Post and the New York Times will keep reporting, restating and rewriting key segments of the report until those same speculations are reported as fact. This is how we know the Russians invaded Georgia in 2008 and intimidated Crimea into submitting to reunification with the motherland in 2014 while simultaneously invading Ukraine’s Donbas.
But other than a cheap attempt to delegitimize President-elect Trump, what led the Obama administration to pursue a gambit that delivered them a very public humiliation?
Team Obama’s Russian election hacking allegations had three additional short term goals:
- To get President-elect Trump crosswise regarding foreign policy with a still largely neocon-aligned U.S. Congress. First came the abstention from voting on the U.N. Security Council’s resolution condemning Israeli settlements as illegal, which was followed by the Russian holiday hacking operetta with a view to next inserting Iran as a rough wedge between the two. (U.S. insistence on Russia forsaking Iran – or China – will make short work of any progress Trump and Rex Tillerson might manage in the U.S.-Russian relationship.)
- To provide Hillary Clinton with a smokescreen to escape the calumny of having spent over a billion and a half dollars of other people’s money on a self-designed electoral bust, which, in turn, is meant to discourage a future Attorney General Jeffrey Sessions from further investigation into the Clinton Foundation’s criminal pay-for-play set-up, the initial attack on F.B.I. director James Comey having been judged unwise and therefore scuttled.
- To have the theme of Russian interference at the ready for Angela Merkel’s re-election campaign later this year. (A glance at the German press will show that this one’s already afoot.)
Those are the short-term goals of what will prove to be an ongoing neo-con vilification of Russia. What then is the long term goal of reanimating cold war nonsense 25 years after the Soviet Union’s demise?
There’s too much money and favor riding on the theme Majority Leader McConnell’s statement that “Russia is not your friend” so neatly summed up to back off now.
The military-congressional-industrial-academic-media complex needs an enemy the public can identify with. Guys wearing what appear to be 400 thread count bed sheets driving around vast deserts in Toyotas armed with guns, swords, knives, and suicide belts just don’t cut it.
With a proper enemy, one capable of organizing, deploying and supplying a well-armed army, the government can establish the fear necessary to squeeze the home team for the money needed to keep the U.S.’s war machine economy, seven decades in the making, turning over.
The key to a war machine economy is to never actually fight an organized army, which would be dangerous. Best are proxy wars. A war machine economy – not an actual Stalin-like war economy – is the goal.
The chief advantage of a war machine economy is that it is not necessary to win wars; in fact, winning is a detriment, a threat to the machine. Contrarily, in a war economy, not winning is not an option, a proposition best avoided.
Ugly truth: Cut back weapons manufacturing and defense jobs now and the entire American enterprise might collapse.
To the individual congressman or Senator, talk of cutting back defense contracts is anathema. Every one of those pocket-stuffing political birds has some defense-related manufacturing in his district, a trick defense contractors learned from the railroads. In the late 19th century after decades of state-subsidized railroad building, there wasn’t hardly a congressional district without a railroad and railway workers, and those workers got what their unions wanted, as did the owners of the railroads.
So there’s all that.
But there’s something more, something even bigger the globalists want so bad out of Russia that they’re willing to risk provoking a nuclear war through encirclement and targeted terrorist intrusions into Russian lands.
When John McCain says Russia is just a gas station, he’s projecting not describing.
What McCain and his ilk really want is to turn Russia into the war machine’s gas station.
The U.S. military is the largest consumer of energy on the planet. If the globalists can supply the armies of the West with Russian oil, then they can eliminate Russian influence in Europe after having gained control of Middle Eastern oil on the cheap. The Mideast’s oil and pipelines under U.S. control are destined to fuel Europe. Mexico, Venezuela, Canada and the U.S. domestic fracking industry will fuel North and South America.
Somewhere along the way to world empire, Africa, and its energy endowment will collapse into imperial hands, and even now the African nations are being slowly undermined by U.S-nurtured shadow wars.
Russian oil is destined to fuel the globalists’ armies, campaigns, and occupations, and the Anglo-American empire will then be secure even in the face of a currency switcheroo (or collapse), and the New World Order in a position to absorb Asia. China will then be in pole position for energy-starvation. Gee, it’ll be FDR’s scheming against 1930s Japan all over again!
Control over Russian energy has been the overarching goal of the entire post-Cold War years. In the 1990s, the Americans tried to get control of Russian gas and oil through the share market they themselves built. But Russian-IMF operation of the domestic bond market the Fed built, crashed that scheme in 1998. American finance lost heart and retreated just prior to the steeply rising price of oil whose proceeds benefited the Russian treasury and not themselves. Bad luck, eh?
That this misfortune to the globalists’ grand scheme coincided with the retirement of the eminently pliable Boris Yeltsin and the emergence of a nationalist-minded and determined Vladimir Putin underlined their setback in red.
Worse, the Russian president has spent the intervening years clawing back the energy sector from the country’s oligarchs and their pals in the West while restoring the Russian people’s legacy of oil, gas, and pipelines. And he has done it without engaging in over borrowing Western capital, which undermined one of the West’s most potent, sovereign-busting weapons, i.e. debt. Unfortunately, Russian companies were not as prudent as the Russian state and were as beguiled by cheap dollar loans as was everybody else.
Thus, two initiatives are explained:
The first is the economic sanctions the US imposed on Russia in 2014, which were meant to bankrupt those Russian firms with large western loans so that the lenders might lay claim to the defaulting firms’ assets. Putin deployed various schemes and subsidies successfully to prevent just such a debacle, which has only led to the piling on of more and more sanctions, some of the country and some of individuals said to be part of Putin’s inner circle.
The second initiative is the nonstop vilification of Vladimir Putin as an individual, which began many years ago and has now grown shamefully loud. The world of diplomacy is traditionally an inordinately polite one, and the U.S.’s personification of Putin as the end all of the Russian evility is extraordinary. Attaching “thug” “murderer,” and “dictator” to every mention of the Russian president speaks to the likelihood that the globalists believe they have agents in place who are eager to betray Putin to reclaim their former cash flows with the assistance of their western allies.
It is this misunderstanding of the country and the people that is the most dangerous to the rest of us. What’s that old saw? “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”
The Russians will not be fooled twice.
