McCain's Broadside At Putin Also Applies To The U.S.

GOP Senator John McCain was mightily peeved by Vladimir Putin's New York Times op-ed piece, planted there with the help of the US “public relations” (private propaganda) firm Ketchum. (Then again, McCain The Cranky is easily peeved. You might say he's chronically peeved, except when he's downright enraged.)

Putin actually put forth a strong argument against U.S. military action against the Assad regime in Syria. I don't agree with it, but the U.S. establishment has chosen to respond in the main not with refutation and counterargument but with dismissive contempt. McCain took it up a notch with a personal attack on Putin. [1]

Thus, McCain didn't bother refuting Putin's points. McCain just wanted to blast Putin for being a tyrant (and I'm not a Putin fan because I'm not a fan of autocrats, period). But ad hominem attacks don't refute the arguments of one's opponent. (At least not if one applies the rules of logic and reason, which are rarely applied, so I guess they don't count.) [2]

Big McC says that Putin “has made her [Russia] a friend to tyrants and an enemy to the oppressed, and untrusted by nations that seek to build a safer, more peaceful and prosperous world." Arguably true. [I wonder what “nations that seek to build safer, more blah blah blah world” The Cainster had in mind? Give you one guess.]

But doesn't Honest John McCain's description of Russia exactly describe the U.S.? Its friends are different tyrants, to be sure. And certainly other nations mistrust the U.S., especially after its conquest of Iraq, based on lies, and now the exposé of the extent of NSA spying on everybody, from presidents to average citizens.

And the awful truth is that globally, no nation in the modern era has been a greater enemy to the oppressed than the U.S. The examples are too numerous to mention, the record of the details stretching to thousands of pages, so I will just cite a few salient examples to make the point here. (We'll leave aside the blindingly obvious examples of slavery, and genocide against the American Indians.)

It is standing U.S. policy to side with rich elites in every country it meddles and intervenes in, against the interests of the poor majority. Haiti is a perfect example of this U.S. behavior. Then we have invasions (such as Dominican Republic in 1965) and coups (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, for example) designed to overthrow leaders and destroy governments that threaten to use a nation's resources for the benefit of the population of that nation. There are the numerous military juntas the U.S. has backed- what is more oppressive than that? The U.S. thinks propaganda is more powerful than facts, and all its politicians and propagandists have to do is prattle endlessly about their love and devotion to freedom and democracy and human rights and all that good stuff. But actions speak louder than words.

The truth is, the U.S. works globally on behalf of the rich against the poor. It systematically works to sabotage progressive politicians, activists, labor organizers, and scholars, even arranging their assassinations. It works to prevent the rise to power of progressive politicians wherever and whenever it can. (When they do manage to come to power, they are immediately treated as enemies, such as with Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, and Morales in Bolivia, among others. And look what they did to Allende in Chile! Arbenz in Guatemala got off easy by comparison- his life was spared, but not those of 250,000 and counting of his countrymen since 1954.)

McCain The Pain also thundered in his indictment that Putin and his regime "punish dissent and imprison opponents. They rig your elections. They control your media. They harass, threaten, and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance. To perpetuate their power they foster rampant corruption in your courts and your economy and terrorize and even assassinate journalists who try to expose their corruption."

Again, that's pretty close to a word for word description of the state of affairs in the U.S., with some caveats. Just dealing with the Obama regime: the Punish dissent and imprison opponents part is obvious. (In the imprison category, John Kiriakou, Chelsea (Bradley) Manning, Barrett Brown, Edward Snowden if they can get their hands on him, and numerous dissidents unknown to the general public, and they would have locked up Internet activist Aaron Swartz if he hadn't committed suicide first. In the punish category, many more dissidents, such as Occupy Movement protesters, are subjected to beatings, pepper-sprayings, secret police stalking and persecution, and whistle-blowers are subjected to FBI raids and close brushes with imprisonment such as Thomas Drake and William Binney.) Or just review the history of the 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, and earlier periods. [In fact read some books on the subject- here's a link to some.]

Election rigging? McCain's own party has done plenty of that, via the fixed voting machines foisted on us by the Republican-owned companies that make them, and most notoriously the stolen 2000 Presidential election. [3]

Media control? True, the U.S. government doesn't control the media. But the Obama regime has broken new ground in attempts at intimidation and spying targeting the corporate establishment media itself. It has run massive electronic spying campaigns against the AP and Fox News (and those are just the ones we know about!) and menaced journalists with criminal investigations (and a sealed indictment against Julian Assange, and who knows who else).

Harass, threaten and banish organizations that defend your right to self-governance? When has the U.S. not done that? The secret police in the U.S. systematically attack any group that threatens established power. Again, the fate of the Occupy Movement is a recent example. Anti-war groups are targeted not just by the FBI, CIA, local and state police, and others, but even by the military, which infiltrates, spies on, and disrupts them. The U.S. is ruled by corporate oligarchs who control both the national and various state legislatures.

How about Foster corruption in the courts and economy?

Too many examples here- thousands, at least- to list, so let's just name a few: Ever hear of the dirty deals done to deregulate the financial industry? Robert Rubin, Clinton's Treasury secretary, helped orchestrate that, and subsequently went to his reward (don't call it a bribe!)- a multimillion dollar a year sinecure at Citigroup.

We have just come through a period of systematic fraud by banks and credit rating agencies that created mortgages for deliberately overvalued homes issued to borrowers who would obviously never be able to repay them, rated the resulting “securities” Triple-A (the highest, “safest” rating) and fobbed them off on chump institutional investors. After that, there was an (ongoing) period of fraudulent foreclosures, with thousands of fictitious signatures on legal filings with courts, which looked the other way. (That's a twofer- corruption of the courts AND of the economy.)

Corruption of the courts: take the Inslaw scandal, referenced below. Or the systematic theft of billions of dollars in resource royalty payments owed to Indian tribes by the U.S., which went on for decades, including under Clinton (and probably continues today).

Meanwhile, people like Maher Arar can't even sue the U.S. Arar is the Canadian that the U.S. seized off a plane as he was flying home. (He was not even entering the U.S. but merely in transit back to Canada from a vacation.) He was falsely branded a terrorist by the “Royal” Canadian Mounted Police, so the U.S. secret police shipped him off to Syria for a year of torture and imprisonment in an underground grave. The U.S. merely had to intone the magic words “National Security” and the U.S. courts said he couldn't sue. Meanwhile, the corrupt Tom DeLay has just had his criminal conviction overturned on appeal. Funny how it always works out that way. (I could fill a lengthy tome with more examples.)

Then there's a “secret” court, the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” court, which rubber-stamps warrant requests by the secret police- something like 36,000- while rejecting about a dozen, during its existence. Sounds fair, right? No one ever knows what it does, or who it spies on (everyone, we have learned from Edward Snowden's exposé of the NSA), or why.

Finally we come to “terrorize and even assassinate journalists” who threaten to expose those in power. We have a very recent example of that: the murder of Michael Hastings by elements of the deep state. Apparently lured to a meeting under false pretenses, his car was taken over by hacking into its computer system at 4:30 in the morning and driven at high speed into a tree, but apparently after a bomb planted inside exploded, leaving the engine 200 feet behind the wrecked car. (The laws of physics would dictate that if it flew out of the car after hitting the tree- which it couldn't, since the tree would be in the way- it would have continued forward, just as JFK's head snapping violently backwards in Dealey Plaza in Dallas proves a bullet struck him from in front, fired from the grassy knoll.)

Danny Casolaro was investigating the Inslaw scandal (an unbelievable example of corruption in the U.S. Federal Judiciary and Executive branch- read about it at the link) when he suddenly turned up dead in a hotel bathtub with his wrists slit, baffling his family and friends. This was a murder by the deep state made to look like a suicide. But don't take my word for it; "I believe he was murdered," no less than former Attorney General Elliot Richardson wrote in the NewYork Times. (Casolaro received numerous threatening phone calls prior to his death.)

We have the unresolved case of the “suicide” of Gary Webb. Webb wrote a series about the CIA's use of drug smuggling to fund the contra terrorists attacking Nicaragua during the Reagan regime of the 1980s. (A standard CIA practice since its very founding, since illegal drugs provides the CIA with untraceable, “off the books” funds, thus cutting Congress completely out of the loop and creating a state within a state with its own treasury department in effect.) Webb published these articles in the San Jose (California) Mercury-News, a second or third-tier newspaper in the U.S. media hierarchy.

Despite the fact that the story was absolutely true (and in fact reported earlier in the “alternative” media) the high priests of truth like the New York Times and Washington Post savaged the series and Webb's paper repudiated his work and fired Webb, in cowardly fashion. Webb was blacklisted by the establishment media and thus couldn't find employment in his profession. Ultimately he committed “suicide,” supposedly.

It is an open question whether, driven to despair by the media turning him into a pariah, he killed himself, or whether once again a vengeful CIA exercised its specialty of murder-made-to-look-like-suicide. (Easy for them to do, and they've had plenty of practice.) Either way, the power establishment bears the brunt of responsibility for Webb's death.

Much of the terrorism against journalists takes the form of legal terrorism, with threats of imprisonment for not revealing sources (as NY Times reporter James Risen is currently facing) or for “criminal conspiracy” with whistle-blowers for revealing “classified” information. Of course murdering journalists is also a good way to terrorize the rest of them. As the Chinese saying goes: “Kill one, frighten a thousand.”

But we also have to look at the systematic, ongoing murder of journalists in U.S.-backed regimes in Honduras and Colombia. That is also on the U.S. ledger. And Mexico, one of the most dangerous places on earth for journalists, is also supported by the U.S. There journalists are either murdered by drug cartels protected by the police and state, which are indifferent or complicit in these murders, or murdered directly by state actors. The numbers slaughtered in these U.S.-allied nations vastly outnumber the handful assassinated in Russia.

Russia even has multiparty elections and a legislature, just like the U.S. And there is a small independent media (just as there is a small one in the U.S.) and visible dissidents (again, like the U.S.).

There is an important difference between Russia and the U.S.: in Russia, billionaires can be crushed by the state. That can never happen in the U.S.

Obviously we would be naïve to take at face value the honeyed words of Putin in his civilized, reasonable mode, or the pumped up moral indignation of a Vietnam War criminal and reactionary militarist like McCain.

But perhaps we should take heart in the fact that nowadays, imperialists and oppressors of all stripes feel compelled to talk as if they're democrats and friends of human rights. If hypocrisy is indeed the tribute that vice pays to virtue, it seems that the power-wielding oppressors must now make regular payments.

1] Putin marred what would have been a strong brief for his case by repeating the insulting and grotesque canard that it was the rebels who gassed their own enclave. That aside, his arguments were, in brief: 1) the UN was established to make sure that matters of war and peace would be decided by consensus. This has underlain international stability after World War II; 2) when “influential” [read: powerful] countries bypass the UN, it risks turning it into another League of Nations, that is, impotent and doomed; 3) a U.S. attack is widely opposed, including by the Pope, would create innocent victims, and would lead to regional chaos and terrorism, make more difficult resolutions to the Iranian nuclear question and Israeli-Palestinian problem, and undermine international law and stability; 4) the battle in Syria isn't about democracy, but a battle for power by many factions, and foreign jihadists are present, presenting a danger to Russia and other nations as they migrate out of Syria; 5) a U.S. strike without UN sanction would violate international law, and ; 6) U.S. unilateralism has led to bad outcomes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Oh, and 7) the U.S. isn't “exceptional,” it's just another nation among others, because remember, “ God created us equal.” (The neo-Czar has discarded the official atheism of the “Marxist”-Leninist Soviet Union and re-embraced the reactionary and authoritarian Russian Orthodox Church, a natural ally, just as the Roman Catholic Church has proven a reliable ally of fascist and reactionary regimes the world over. These are examples of what I call authoritarian symbiosis.)

Putin also offered a teaser of “cooperation on other international issues” if the U.S. plays ball on Syria, no doubt to put in there to get the Obama regime salivating in anticipation of Russian help on Iran and other matters. [“Give Us The Head Of Edward Snowden!” I can envision the U.S. demanding, again.]

[“A Plea for Caution From Russia: What Putin Has to Say to Americans About Syria,” by Vladimir V. Putin, New York Times, September 11, 2013. Also there was an interesting commentary about Putin's piece in the Guardian, “Vladimir Putin: arch manipulator with a mission to check US will,” 14 September 2013. The article isn't totally correct, however: for example it uses the phrase “U.S.-democracy promotion” without quotes, as if such a thing exists as anything more than verbal and ideological camouflage for actual U.S. aims, and an idiotic David Rohde quote to the effect that Putin “probably fears” he'll be overthrown if Assad is. Maybe if he's clinically paranoid, he does.]

[2] McCain also objected to being called "an active anti-Russian politician," asserting that "I am pro-Russian, more pro-Russian than the regime that misrules you today." Hey John, maybe now you know how it feels to people who criticize U.S. policies and its socio-economic status quo when they're branded “anti-American,” including by guys like you. Or even called “traitors” for performing public services, like Edward Snowden and Chelsea (neé Bradley) Manning.

And speaking of regimes that are enemies of their own people, there's nothing like the NSA in Russia that monitors and stores ALL the communications of ALL its citizens, surreptitiously, and passes what it finds to the FBI and CIA and DEA and IRS and god knows who else for laundering and use in bringing criminal cases and harassment and persecution against domestic “enemies,” NOT “terrorists.” (Although the secret police routinely brand their enemies, like the Occupy Movement, environmentalists, and anti-war activists, “terrorists.”) In fact, no other nation on earth, not even North Korea, or China (that we know, although, inspired by the U.S. example, they might try it) does to its citizens what the NSA is doing .

[“John McCain aims broadside at Vladimir Putin with reply editorial,” the Guardian, 19 September 2013.

3] And 2004 too. Ohio was stolen for Bush that year, giving him the Electoral College votes he needed to “win.” The Democratic VP nominee, John Edwards, wanted to fight it, but John Kerry, the Presidential nominee, said no. Later Edwards was retaliated against with a fraudulent criminal case brought by the Federal government falsely claiming a campaign contribution violation- Edwards won at trial- and a never-ending media vilification of Edwards over his sexual affair while his wife had breast cancer. Why, what a beastly cad! As usual in the U.S., any politician with progressive tendencies (such as Edwards) must be neutralized, marginalized, or destroyed as a threat to the reactionary system.