The problem appears to be, as I've thought all along, that Trump has been
involved in some very dirty financial business with some very unpleasant
criminals, some of whom are Russian, and are people that the US actually helped
amass their fortunes during the 90's and that is what he doesn't want made
public. People appear to believe that Mueller, who comes from our trusted and
so very ethical FBI, will dig up all the dirt. But apparently, there are also
some people who are confusing what Russia is now with the Communist Soviet
Union. It's also interesting that there is something called the Steele case,
that no one is writing about, but what it is, is that Republicans opposed to
Trump becoming President and some Democrats, paid Russians for dirt on Trump.
This is a parallel to what people are confusing the Trump campaign of doing,
getting dirt from Russia on Hillary. There's more. Bill Clinton gave a speech
in Russia for which he received $500,000 after which Hillary stated her
opposition to that law sanctioning Russia in 2012 that made Russia so angry
that they stopped the adoption of Russian children by Americans. Read what I
said again, slowly. I heard it on the interview with Taibbi today.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Friday, July 21, 2017 5:45 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians?
Not since George II set on the throne in the oval office, have the War Lords
been seen salivating and drooling down their chins as they are right now.
Remember, I'm the guy who keeps yapping that this government has always been an
oligarchy, Always, that is, until now.
The Ruling Class is in the process of making the same mistake Ruling Classes
have made since we first poked our hairy heads out of the Cave. The Trumpsters
are feeding the lion, the Pentagon in the belief that they are in control.
Hasn't anyone told Donald Trump that the fellow with the weapons has the power?
The Corporate Capitalist Empire has, in its greedy rush to control everything,
forgotten that, over fed and untended, the Pentagon will take control and
establish a General as the head of state.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/21/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In addition to this article, he has a fantastically informative
interview on The Real News Network.
Miriam
Russian president Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. (photo: Russian
Presidential Press and Information Office/Anadolu Agency/Getty)
What Does Russiagate Look Like to Russians?
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
21 July 17
Russia isn't as strong as we think, but they do have nukes - which is
why beating the war drum is a mistake
Last Wednesday, former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton Paul Begala
stepped out of his usual milquetoast centrist costume and made a
chest-thumping pronouncement on CNN.
"We were and are under attack by a hostile foreign power," he said.
"We should be debating how many sanctions we should place on Russia,
or whether we should blow up the KGB."
Begala's is the latest in a string of comments from prominent pols and
pundits suggesting we are (or should be) in a state of war with
nuclear-armed Russia.
Former DNC chair Donna Brazile tweeting this week, "The Communists are
dictating the terms of the debate" - and not bothering to delete the
error
-
is another weird example of what feels like intense longing in the
Beltway to reignite the Cold War. (Begala wanting to blow up the
long-dead KGB is
another.)
James Clapper this spring saying Russians are "genetically driven to
co-opt, penetrate, gain favor" also recalled the Sovietology era, when
Russians were cast as evil, emotionless manipulators, cold as their
icy homeland. CNN reporter Michael Weiss casting suspicion on people
with Russian spouses is another creepy recent example.
For journalists like me who have backgrounds either working or living
in Russia, the new Red Scare has been an ongoing freakout. A lot of
veteran Russia reporters who may have disagreed with each other over
other issues in the past now find themselves in like-minded
bewilderment over the increasingly aggressive rhetoric.
Many of us were early Putin critics who now find ourselves in the
awkward position of having to try to argue Americans off the ledge, or
at least off the path to war, when it comes to dealing with the Putin regime.
There's a lot of history that's being glossed over in the rush to
restore Russia to an archenemy role.
For one, long before the DNC hack, we meddled in their elections. This
was especially annoying to Russians because we were ostensibly
teaching them the virtues of democracy at the time. We even made a
Hollywood movie on the topic (Spinning Boris, starring Jeff Goldblum
and Anthony LaPaglia!).
After Boris Yeltsin won re-election in 1996, Time magazine ran a
gloating cover story - YANKS TO THE RESCUE! - about three American
advisers sent to help the pickling autocrat Yeltsin devise campaign
strategy. Picture Putin sending envoys to work out of the White House
to help coordinate Trump's re-election campaign, and you can imagine how this
played in Russia.
Former Yeltsin administration chief Sergei Filatov denied that the
three advisers did anything of value for Yeltsin. But even if Filatov
is right, American interference throughout the Nineties was extensive.
For one thing, the privatization effort under Yeltsin, much of which
was coordinated by Americans, helped lead to a little-understood
devil's bargain that sealed Yeltsin's electoral victory.
Essentially, Yeltsin agreed to privatize the jewels of Russian
industry into the hands of a few insiders - we call them oligarchs now
- in return for their overwhelming financial and media support in the
'96 race against surging communist Gennady Zyuganov. The likes of
Vladimir Potanin, Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky were
gifted huge fortunes before bankrolling Yeltsin's re-election bid.
How much of a hand we had in that infamous trade has never been explained.
But Americans surely helped usher in the oligarch era by guiding
Russia through its warped privatization process. In some expat circles
back then, you found Americans who believed that by creating a cadre
of super-wealthy Russians, we would create a social class that would
be pre-motivated to beat back a communist revival.
This may have prevented a backslide into communism, but a by-product
was accelerating a descent into gangsterism and oligarchy.
The West also aided Yeltsin during that election season by providing a
$10.2
billion IMF loan that just happened to almost exactly match the cost
of Yeltsin's vicious and idiotic invasion of Chechnya. (Yeltsin had
been under fire for the cash crunch caused by the war.) Le Monde
called the timely giganto-loan "an implicit vote in favor of candidate
Yeltsin."
What most Americans don't understand is that the Putin regime at least
in part was a reaction to exactly this kind of Western meddling.
The Yeltsin regime, which incidentally also saw wide-scale
assassinations of journalists and other human rights abuses, was
widely understood to be a pseudo-puppet state, beholden to the West.
The conceit of the Putin regime, on the other hand, was that while
Putin was a gangster, he was at least the Russians' own gangster.
It's debatable how much success Putin really had at arresting the
flight of Russian capital abroad that began in the Yeltsin years. But
the legend that he would at least try to keep Russia's wealth in
Russia was a key reason for his initial popularity.
Russians also have an opposite take on their "aggression" in Ukraine
and Crimea, one that is colored by a history few in America know or
understand.
When asked about the roots of the current Russian-American divide,
former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman, the author of excellent books like
Whistleblower in the CIA and Failure of Intelligence, points to a 1990
deal struck between Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet foreign
minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
The two men brokered a quid pro quo: The Soviets wouldn't oppose a
re-united Germany, if the Americans promised not to "leapfrog" East
Germany into the Russians' former sphere of influence.
Goodman later interviewed both men, who confirmed the key details.
"They both used the word 'leapfrog,'" he says. "The Russians think we
broke that deal."
Russia believes the U.S. reneged on the "leapfrog" deal by seeking to
add the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Georgia and even
Ukraine to the NATO alliance.
To Russia, American denunciations of Russian adventurism in Crimea and
eastern Ukraine seem absurd, when all they see is NATO leapfrogging
its way ever-closer to their borders.
This is not to say that the Russians were right to move into Crimea or
Eastern Ukraine. But it's easy to see why Russians would be frosty
about America trying to put border states under the umbrella of NATO,
or wigged out by Americans conducting war games in places like Latvia.
Imagine, for instance, the response here in the States if the Russians
conducted amphibious military exercises in the Baja Peninsula after
promising to honor the Monroe doctrine.
As Goodman and others have pointed out, failing to predict the Soviet
collapse was probably the biggest intelligence failure in our history.
While
Ronald Reagan and his cronies politicized intelligence and overhyped
the Soviets as a mighty and monolithic force, the on-the-ground
reality was that the Soviet Union was a crumbling third-world state
besotted with crippling economic and infrastructural problems.
We missed countless opportunities for easier, safer and cheaper
relations with the Russians by consistently mistaking their
disintegrating Potemkin Empire for an ascendant threat.
It's not exactly the same story now, but it's close. Putin's Russia
certainly has global ambitions, just as the Soviets did. But the game
now is much more about connections and hot money than about
geopolitics or territory. There's evidence that the Russians have
tried to burrow their way into America's commercial and political
establishment, but by most accounts the main route of entry has been
financial.
If indeed Trump was a target of Russian efforts, we'll likely discover
that this was not something that was exclusive to Trump but rather
just one data point amid a broad, holistic strategy to curry favor and
make connections across the American political class.
Still, these efforts are probably far more limited in scope than we've
been led to imagine. DNC hack or no DNC hack, Russia is still a
comparatively weak country with limited power to influence a nation
like the U.S., especially since it's still dogged internally by those
same massive economic and infrastructural problems it's always had.
Putin's political grip on power at home is also far less sure than our
pundits and politicians are letting on.
The generalized plan to create chaos in other industrialized states by
seeding/spreading corruption and political confusion - which many in
the intelligence community believe is an aim of Russian intelligence
efforts - is revealing in itself. It's the strategy of a weak and
unstable third-world state looking for a cheap way to stay in the game
(and bolster its profile) versus more powerful industrial rivals.
Hyping Russia as an all-powerful menace actually plays into this
strategy.
But the Russians still have nukes, which is why we have to be very
careful about letting rhetoric get too hot, especially with the
president we now have.
For all the fears about Trump being a Manchurian Candidate bent on
destroying America from within, the far more likely nightmare endgame
involves our political establishment egging the moron Trump into a
shooting war as a means of proving his not-puppetness.
This already almost happened once, when Trump fired missiles into
Syria with Russian troops on the ground, seemingly as a means of
derailing a Russiagate furor that was really spiraling that particular
week. That episode proved that the absolute worst time to bang the war
drum under Trump is when he's feeling vulnerable on Russia - which he
clearly is now.
Rising anti-Russian hysteria and a nuclear button-holder in the White
House who acts before he thinks is a very bad combination. We should
try to chill while we still can, especially since the Russians, once
again, probably aren't as powerful as we think.
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