Why Be Afraid of Russians?
— It’s a damn good question!
[Originally written as a Facebook Note on April 5, 2017 — new graphics and slightly edited]
Point-blank, I’m more afraid of Donald Trump the Clintons, Obama and the Bushes than I am afraid of the Russians. I’m surprised if you don’t feel similarly.
America has two expansive oceans east and the west. America has friendly neighbors to north and 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 is the largest land mass nation state on the planet and is multi-ethnic. It exists in a cold, often challenging environment. Ask the ghosts of Napoleon or Hitler! For centuries its military conflicts have been directly at its borders. It has a frozen but now thawing Arctic to its north. Russia seems to benefit from and needs to protect seas more than ocean. Despite this, today, Russia has nine worldwide military bases.
Russia is no longer the communist bloc nation it once was. It is nothing today like the images that we’ve been taught since post World War II. After communism dissolved in 1991, Boris Yeltsin came into power and brought on full-throttled capitalism fueled by America’s mightiest capitalists, including the mob.
Enjoying a new-found buddy for making money, when it seemed Yeltsin was about to lose his bid for a second presidential term, America’s oligarchy came to the rescue. From Yeltsin’s presidency came the Russian oligarchs!
What The Mirror Shows
Today, America’s biggest problem is not the Russians. In many ways, America has become its own worst enemy. Our presidential elections have become nothing but an Oligarch Derby and our Congress remains comprised of the same pedigreed politicians beholden to donors.
Politicians like Ronald Reagan, both Bushes and both Clintons, with congressional and judicial support (hello Citizens United!), have ruined our nation. Our once-proud “American Dream” has been destroyed as the rich got richer, the middle class met a state of collapse and, as always, the poor got poorer.
Had Hillary Clinton won, which was the fixed intention, America would have seen Clintons or Bushes at the top of five of the past six 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. Forget not Clinton was also secretary of state in the first Obama administration.
In reality, this fact above is what helped create Trump!
The question is begging: What happened during the the Bush-Clinton (and Obama as a Clinton caretaker) successive reigns of presidential office? Our citizenry saw the media complicit with government for going to war; the Occupy Movement proved the stark and cruel reality of the 99 to One Percent; Academic research proved CEO-to-worker ratio of salary as being over 300–to-One, compared to 15-to-One ratios for most other nations. Today, eight people hold as much wealth as 60 percent of the world’s 7.4 billion population. Oligarchy in America finally became defined!
Did the Russians do this? A look in the mirror tells us: Nope!
Think about it. Have you ever seen a Bush, a Clinton or a Trump supporting a picket line of workers demanding a union or improved wages and benefits? Do the Bush, Clinton or Trump images at all match with the ideals of working people who, since FDR, experienced marked improvements in economic standing due to strong unions?
The 2014 Princeton Study on Oligarchy shows America is no longer a democracy, that it has become an oligarchy!
Republicans for more than a century always sided with the corporate oligarchs. But modern communications have caused the two political parties mold into an alliance of convenience. These days, in order for oligarchy to perpetuate, it must conflate how both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party conform. This results in a good-cop/bad-cop team that dominates 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 the darling of Wall Street, was no true Democrat. She held a sound political position on media-pushed issues like gays, guns and god. But that was about it. On foreign policy she was a stark-raving hawk. On the domestic front, she never showed for union lines and she choose the pipeline over Native Indigenous folk at Standing Rock who were demanding territorial rights and clean water.
Trump? It’s hard to imagine a greater fraudulent political personality in American history. Obnoxiously, he nabbed the GOP nomination from a crowded pack by appealing to barely a third of the GOPwinger electorate. He got help from Clinton’s inside-the-beltway media support (see Wikileaks ‘pied piper’ exposures) which helped to build Trump up in the primaries so Hillary supposedly could defeat him in the general election.
Sure enough. Trump hit the despicable buttons of selfishness disguised as conservatism, false patriotism, racism and sexism together with espousing an entirely false claim that he was for working people. Unfortunately, Trump’s lie was in a juxtaposition to Barack Obama’s failure to have kept his campaign promises and to Hillary Clinton who already had proven she was no friend to working people.
Sadly, this morphed into a relatively moderate electorate with a penchant for hero-worshiping celebrities (see Ronald Reagan) and an electorate also hungry for a political outsider in the presidency. Few people saw or thought about the political operatives who were working the scenes behind the whole Trump façade. Some were so confused they actually thought that Trump, an oligarch himself, would beat back the oligarchs. What could be more absurd!
Anyway, the way the table got set, not even the greatest apologist on the planet could have helped Hillary Clinton. Her DNC fix for her presidential nomination totally backfired (again, see Wikileaks). In effect, this helped to glorify Trump! This emotion mixed with voter suppression tactics (the GOPwinger-induced cross state Crosscheck computerized voter elimination system) enabled Trump’s victory.
Trump becoming the US president had nothing to do with Russians!
In the aftermath, Clinton didn’t do anything about the Crosscheck voter suppression. Likely, she didn’t challenge Crosscheck because she herself had used similar suppression tactics in order to steal the nomination away from Bernie Sanders.
What Russia Actually Did Do That The US Ignored
In closing, when Russia helped Syria claim a crucial military victory against ISIS (America’s supposed enemy) in the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria, the Russian soldiers didn’t jump up and down, flex muscles and do seal-like chanting. Quite the opposite. Instead, Russia brought in the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, founded in 1783 during the reign of Catherine the Great, and conducted a symphony to appreciate and tribute the victory over ISIS.
Tragically, Russia later lost a planeload of musicians (a full choir) due to an air tragedy shortly after take-off, while attempting to fly to Khmeimim Air Base in Syria.
America, when it wins a military battle, routinely goes off and bombs elsewhere, bombing somebody else thus creating more terrorists along the way. Presently, America bombs seven sovereign nations, this without any declaration of war!
Many argue — especially progressives — that Russia is kept as the principle enemy in order justify beefing up the military-industrial profiteering complex with excessive 750 billion dollar Pentagon budgets. As China has grown, it also has achieved enemy status. China only has a handful of military bases around the globe.
One has to ask two questions: 1) Who is the bully on earth? 2) Are profits more important than people?
