Afraid of Americans, Not Russians!
— Originally written as a Facebook Note on April 5, 2017
I’ve gotta point-blank claim I’m more afraid of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than I am of the Russians. I’m surprised if you don’t feel similarly.
America has two expanse oceans to the east and the west. America has friendly neighbors to the north and the south. America has the largest economy in the world. Relative to technical innovation America is unmatched. America also has 900 military bases worldwide and spends more money on defense than all of the larger nations combined. In short, we’ve got it all!
Russia exists in a cold, often challenging environment. Ask Napoleon, or ask Hitler! For centuries its conflict have been with southern and western borders. It has a frozen though now thawing Arctic to the north. It benefits more from seas than an ocean. Russia has nine worldwide military bases. It is no longer a communist nation as has been taught since post World War II. At the end of communism Boris Yeltsin brought on full-throttled capitalism fueled by America’s best, including the mob.
When it seemed Yeltsin was about to lose his bid for a second term, American oligarchs came to the rescue:
America’s biggest problem is not the Russians. In many ways, America has become its own enemy. Politicians like Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and Clintons, with congressional and federal court support (hello Citizens United), have ruined our nation. Together, they’ve destroyed our once proud “American Dream” as the rich got richer, the middle class collapsed and the poor got poorer.
Had Clinton won, which was the fixed intention, America would have seen Clintons or Bushes in four of the past five presidential administrations. Had she become re-elected in 2020 there would have been a Clinton or a Bush at the top of 10 of 11 presidential administrations.
This begs the question: What happened during the the Bush-Clinton (Obama as caretaker) reign of office? The Occupy Movement proved the stark and cruel reality of the 99 to one percent. Academic research has proven a CEO to worker ratio of salary of almost 400-to-one compared, with 15-to-one for most other nations. Eight people now hold as much wealth as 60 percent of the world’s 7.4 billion population.
Did the Russians do this?
Think. Have you ever seen a Bush or a Clinton supporting a picket line of workers who were demanding a union or improved wages and benefits? Does either the Bush, Clinton or Trump image at all match with the ideals of the working person who, since FDR, actually improved their economic standing from strong unions? The 2014 Princeton Study on Oligarchy shows America is no longer a democracy, but rather an oligarchy.
Republicans for more than a century have always sided with the oligarchs. But modern communications changed the convenience of this alignment. These days, in order for the oligarchy to perpetuate, it must conflate how Republicans and Democrats perform. Like an overpowering sports dynasty, Americans are controlled by a good-cop/bad-cop team that dominate our laws, regulations and policy, solely for the benefit of the wealthy.
Hillary Clinton, who enriched herself from a career in public service and who become a darling of Wall Street, was no true Democrat. She held a sound political position on gays, guns and god, but that was about it. On foreign policy she was a hawk and on domestic policy did she ever show up for working people or for the folks at Standing Rock?
Trump? It’s hard to imagine a greater fraudulent political personality in the entire history of the United States. He nabbed the GOP nomination — with Clinton’s inside-the-beltway media support (see Wikileaks) — from a crowded pack of candidates by appealing to barely 20 percent of the electorate. He hit despicable buttons of racism and sexism while espousing an entirely false claim he was for the working person, this at a time when Clinton had proven she was not.
The greatest apologist on the planet can not help Clinton because her fix for the presidency backfired and created Trump. But, fundamentally, it was voter suppression (Crosscheck voter elimination system) — not the Russians — that enabled Trump to win. But Clinton couldn’t do anything about voter suppression. She didn’t even challenge Crosscheck because she used similar tactics to steal the Democratic nomination away from Bernie Sanders.
In closing, when it claimed a recent military victory in Palmyra, Syria, Russia brought in a symphony orchestra to appreciate its victory. It later lost a planeload of musicians due to an air tragedy when attempting to fly them into its Syrian war zone for a celebration.
America, when it wins a military battle, it goes off and bombs somewhere and somebody else. America, today, is bombing seven sovereign nations!
