Trump To Ukraine- Your Rare Earth Minerals Or Your Life

On February 28, 2025, Career Extortionist Donald John Trump got unexpected resistance from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump had summoned Zelensky to the White House to sign an agreement to hand over to the U.S. (presumably U.S. corporations in favor with Trump) half the revenues from Ukraine's natural resources- the minerals, oil, natural gas. In return for- basically nothing. No guarantee of military aid, intelligence aid, nothing. Just a typical Trump move, vague rhetoric, nothing enforceable. Nothing Trump has any intention of enforcing. [1]

Trump's shakedown attempt failed, so far. Zelensky was describing his view of the history of the war with Russia. Trump didn't want to hear it. He laid into Zelensky, saying he doesn't have "the cards," meaning he's playing with a weak hand, while Trump held the, well, trump card of U.S. war support. (Recall that Trump in his previous go at being president, briefly delayed delivering military supplies to Ukraine in a clumsy effort to get information on the corrupt Biden family doings in Ukraine, which pro-Democratic Party media dismissed as "dirt" without mentioning the outrageous, openly corrupt deal that Biden son Hunter got from Ukrainian gas company Burisma- a seat on the corporate board for $50,000 a MONTH, for several years. That's a multi-million dollar not very well disguised bribe to the Biden family. Incredibly dishonest hiding of the facts by Democratic Party politicians and their media allies. Oh, and Trump was actually impeached by the Democrats for that delay. Needless to say, the Republicans, who have memories as long as their party symbol, the elephant, never forgot or forgave.)

In yesterday's meeting, Trump rebuked Zelensky for being "very disrespectful," and "you're not being thankful, and that's not a nice thing." (Trump always accuses people who stand up to him of being "not nice," and worse.) Trump's vice president, the slippery opportunist J.D. Vance, jumped on Zelensky, with an accusatory rhetorical question, "have you said thank you once," and then revealed a festering grudge, denouncing Zelensky for "campaigning for the opposition" (that is, Biden) last October. (Of course "campaigning for" is a matter of interpretation. Don't trust Vance's.)

Trump bellowed at Zelensky that he was losing the war, and using the fact that the Ukrainian military is dependent on U.S. weapons and ordnance, armaments that Europe cannot manufacture as leverage, his ranting made clear that Ukraine had no choice but to give in to Trump's extortion.

Or so Trump thought, and evidently had previously calculated.

Zelensky didn't back down, however, so he was effectively thrown out of the White House in front of the assembled media. The schedule joint lunch didn't happen.

Conveniently on hand outside the White House to verbally excoriate Zelensky was Trump's number one Senate stooge, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. He rabidly attacked Zelensky, and insisted Zelensky would have to go unless he changed his attitude. (Graham often thinks he has the right to choose the heads of other nations' governments, a consistent imperialist impulse.) Among the things Trump's barking dog Graham said about Zelensky was "The way he confronted the President was over the top." All Zelensky did was try to talk back to Trump, a major offense when dealing with an Emperor-King.

 

Meanwhile USAID had cut off an infrastructure program in Ukraine, all USAID programs having been cancelled by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the reactionary Florida Cuban Trump plucked from the Senate for a cabinet post, and Elon Musk and the fake "Department" Trump created, DOGE, for "Department Of Government Efficiency." A deceptive name for what should be called Artificial Department Of Government Dismantling Or Destruction, ADOGOD.

After leaving the meeting where he was dressed down by Trump and Vance, Zelensky posted Thank-Yous to Trump, America, and the American people, on Trump hitman Elon Musk's propaganda site, X (formerly Twitter). Zelensky has thanked the U.S. and Europe innumerable times during the war.

On Ukraine, Trump is right that it cannot win the war. However the way he wants to end it mirrors what he did in Afghanistan, when he negotiated with the Taliban, cutting the Afghan government completely out of the process, and leaving it to his successor, Biden, to pull the rug out from under the client regime that depended on the U.S. for its survival. That regime collapsed as soon as the U.S. hastily retreated, or "cut and ran," an oft-used expression in U.S. discourse by war mongers but was strangely absent in the Afghan case, when it perfectly applied in a very literal sense. The result of handing over that country to the medieval and deranged Taliban has been awful for the Afghan people, and especially horrendous for Afghan women, who are now banned from employment and education and virtually imprisoned as housework and breeding slaves in their homes. 

But Trump cannot totally cut the Ukrainian government out of the picture as it is much stronger than the Afghan regime and unlike that regime, has the support of its population which supports the war effort except in the eastern portions of the country, which seceded after the U.S. coup and was bombed and shelled by the Kyiv regime, which waged war on it, Russia supporting the secessionists. Europe also support Kyiv, although it will not be able to manufacture weapons and ordnance of the type and in the quantities the U.S. has been supplying. Hence Trump's arm-twisting of the Ukrainians.

Unfortunately the U.S. put Ukraine in this difficult position. Just a few days after the Russian invasion in February 2022, Putin initiated negotiations with Zelensky about an agreement to end the war, which at that point Russia's thrust to Kyiv was grinding to a halt. The U.S. immediately stopped that. British prime minister at the time Boris "Bojo The Clown" Johnson" immediately rushed to Kyiv to pull Zelensky away from the negotiation path. The talks with Russia were promising. 

Then Ukraine went on  to achieve victories in the war. In the fall of 2022 Ukraine was at its high point of military success. This isn't mere hindsight. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest U.S. military officer,  general Mark Milley, said at that time that it wouldn't get better for Ukraine and this was the time to seek an end to the war. [2]

However, then-president Joe Biden was always an aggressive war monger in Ukraine for years. He rejected that option. So he doomed Ukraine to ultimate defeat. (As Obama's vice president, he pushed for weapons to be sent to Ukraine, but Obama demurred, opting for just training missions.)

There are larger ways in which the U.S. painted Ukraine into this corner. There was the U.S.-instigated fascist led coup of 2014, ordered by Obama, with high U.S. officials on the ground in Kyiv agitating, most notoriously Victoria Nuland of the State Department, and people like (now dead) U.S. Senator and rabid militarist John McCain.

And then there's the original sin. President George "Bush The Younger" Bush in 2008 strong-armed NATO, over objections from Germany and France, into declaring that Georgia and Ukraine would be brought into NATO. Russia immediately howled that this was intolerable. (The German chancellor at the time, Angela Merkel, says she knew this would never fly with Russia, but being a U.S. lapdog, as are all bourgeois European "leaders," she went along with the U.S. diktat.)

Most of the U.S. imperialist elite, being drunk on its power as usual, thought they could just shove it down Russia's throat, just as they had shoved down two earlier NATO expansions after the collapse of the Soviet Union down Russia's throat, betraying a promise made to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last, ill-fated head of the U.S.S.R., that NATO would not expand "one inch to the east" in return for the Soviets not to stand in the way of the absorption of East Germany by West Germany. (So-called "reunification," although by that time East Germany was a very different country from West Germany, just as Austria is different from Germany, regardless of the fact that all speak German. Hell, the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a bunch of other places all speak English. They're far from identical places.) William "Bill" Clinton expanded NATO in 1999, followed by another expansion by Bush and the notorious declaration at that 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, NATO having already planted its flag that far east. NATO was created as an anti-Soviet military alliance by the U.S., with the obligation on the U.S. to go to war with the U.S.S.R. if that nation attacked any NATO member.

Why is bringing Ukraine into NATO a red line for Russia? Because the U.S. could put nuclear ballistic missiles in that country, as it has nuclear weapons all over Europe, which could annihilate the Russian government and key targets in a few minutes. No one enjoys having a loaded gun pointed at one's head, even if the person holding the gun purrs that it's strictly for self-defense! That is a form of coercive leverage. Moreover, imagine if China overthrew the government of Canada and Mexico, and brought one of those countries into an anti-U.S. military bloc. The U.S. wouldn't wait 8 years to invade, as Russia did after the 2014 U.S. coup. It would invade in 8 days!

UK prime minister tried to make up for the Trump gang's brutal treatment of Zelensky the next day, March 1st, warmly welcoming him with a crowd to provide cheers. The U.S. move to abandon Ukraine also go the backs up of people in Ukraine.

The fact is, in various ways, Trump is effectively forcing Europe to move towards independence from the U.S., finally, 80 year after the end of World War II in 1945. Not that that's Trump's intent, just a positive byproduct of his hostile and economically destructive actions. (Did someone say, "Tariffs"?) So while the Democratic Party and the U.S. imperialist elite are aghast at Trump's baseball bat whacks at the U.S. alliance system, which the U.S. has totally dominated, I think it's about time that system broke down. I'm an anti-imperialist, you see. Because all empires are in fact criminal enterprises that use violence, the threat of violence, and various forms of coercion to subjugate other peoples and economically exploit them and their resources, often to extreme degrees. Empires are not "glorious," contrary to their propagandists, including many so-called historians.
=========================================================================
CODA AND FOOTNOTE 

In a sense, Trump's bullying of Ukraine is far from unique in U.S. imperialist history. It's just a throwback to 19th century type imperialism, which was cruder than what we've come to expect, at least in appearance. We did have the unprovoked invasion of Iraq by George Bush, and thousands of assassinations (including of Americans, some in the U.S.) by Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama.

But with Trump, you have a person who is a bully, with the power of the most powerful position on earth. That is not a happy combination. Oh, and he's currently using that power to deconstruct pieces of the U.S. government, including the IRS. That alone with make the Federal deficit worse. The pretend deficit hawks of the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) are onboard with that. The Trump-Musk regime has already fired several thousand IRS employees, including some in enforcement.

Every dollar spent on the IRS brings in more than a dollar in revenue. Every dollar spent auditing the rich brings in $6 in revenue. Those audits are now being virtually eliminated.

This is just greedy rich people cutting their taxes. While doing this, they and the lying corporate media pretend that the deficit is caused by Social Security and Medicare. That is one gigantic BIG LIE. Social Security and Medicare run annual SURPLUSES. Yes, by 2035 Social Security is expected to take in less in payroll tax contributions than it pays out. So it will make up the difference by tapping into its gigantic multi-trillion dollar trust fund. Big deal. That is not "bankruptcy," as demagogic politicians and dishonest media propagandists call it. And here's an easy fix: remove the cap on income subject to FICA tax so people who make millions a year in income (even a billion in some cases!) pay the tax on their full income. Right now poor people pay FICA starting on the first dollar of wages. (Unlike the income tax, there is no standard deduction under FICA.)

Those annual Social Security trust fund surpluses are spent by the government on other activities to reduce the annual deficit. Treasury bonds are placed in the trust fund in return. Of course those bonds then have to be paid off eventually, with interest, with other Federal revenue- income taxes, fees, tariffs, asset seizures ("forfeitures"), whatever.

This years-long attack on Social Security as the cause of deficits indicates that the rich oligarchs won't be satisfied until their taxes are set at zero, and they get even more hundreds of billions in government welfare than they already do every year. (Notice "welfare" is a dirty word in the U.S., and is only applied to the pittances grudgingly allotted to the very poor, mostly women with children, who are painted as undeserving parasites.)

Alright, this went off on some tangents, but they are connected and important to be aware of. I share my knowledge for free.

1] Speaking of Trump extortion, he recently extorted $15 million from the cowards running Disney Corporation, which owns ABC, a major pillar of the corporate propaganda system. ABC paid Trump to settle a completely meritless suit Trump brought for "libel," because on-air host George Stephanopoulos (a former Clinton regime figure) said Trump had committed rape. In the civil suit that one of Trump's rape victim's brought and won against Trump, the jury found that a sexual assault occurred, which the judge said was tantamount to rape. So this was an eminently defensible case for ABC. 

This is on the cowardly corporate execs. Or maybe cowardly misses the point. Disney, like all giant corporations, needs the goodwill of the Federal government to avoid friction in its obsessive drive for maximum profits lest that government throw sand in the corporate gears. Many regulations affect corporations. And these large corporations are rapacious in buying other corporations- which the U.S. Department of Justice can oppose by filing anti-trust suits to block the intended mergers. As in fact the Trump DOJ is doing right now to stop Hewlett-Packard Enterprises from buying Juniper Networks.

I guess the execs at those companies forgot to bribe Trump with campaign donations and/or gifts to his "Inauguration Fund." Or maybe Trump just didn't notice what the DOJ is doing. The Biden regime DOJ started objecting to the proposed merger in November 2024, a full 10 months after the merger was announced in January 2024, with an anticipated completion date in a year. Seems like a long time to wait to raise an objection. But the DOJ didn't file suit in court until January 30 of 2025, the eleventh day of Trump's latest term as president. Idiosyncratic for Trump, who makes a point of doing the opposite of whatever his Democratic predecessors did.

2] "U.S. scrambles to reassure Ukraine after Milley comments on negotiations," Politico, Nov. 14, 2022, for example.
 

 

 

 

Joseph Biden Is ACTUALLY Guilty Of What Adam "Shifty" Schiff Accuses Trump Of

The Democratic Party has lost its collective mind.

Again.

First it was the Russiagate hoax they put us all through. Now it's a phone call Trump made asking the Ukrainian president's help in investigating what should be a scandal around the Democratic Party establishment's and corporate media's favorite candidate for president in 2020, the segregationist Joseph R. Biden.

Democratic Party Congressman and chair of the House "Intelligence" Committee Adam Schiff says that Trump is the same as a Mafia boss and he extorted the Ukrainian president, even though the transcript of Trump's phone call to that president shows no such thing. Schiff says it doesn't have to be explicit to be extortion. In fact, there isn't even a veiled threat in the call, as described in notes prepared by the various apparatchiks who monitored it. Trump wanted Ukraine's help in getting to the bottom of how then-vice president Joseph Biden's smarmy son, Hunter, got a plum position on the board of Ukrainian gas company Burisma and a cool $3 million payday.


Trump delayed delivering military equipment to Ukraine for a few days. This is something the Dems call "impeachable."

You know how many times U.S. presidents have held up Congressional appropriations?

LOTS.

Or misdirected the monies, as Trump is doing to build his border wall.

Or "abused" presidential power for personal ends, as the current agit-propaganda is screeching is grounds for impeachment. No other president has ever done THAT, RIGHT?

What a crock.

Bill Clinton bombed other countries to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal! He actually KILLED people!


I'll bet EVERY U.S. president has used his powers for personal ends!

And at least some vice presidents.

In 2014, when Joseph Biden was vice president under president Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama, Biden ACTUALLY threatened the Ukrainian government with cutting off U.S. aid unless that country's chief prosecutor was fired. That prosecutor was looking into the strange case of Hunter Biden's extraordinary good fortune.

The prosecutor was duly given the axe. Biden says it was because he was corrupt. But EVERYONE in the Ukrainian government was and is corrupt. Including the former prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who was hand-picked by State Department apparatchik Victoria Nuland and installed following the coup the Obama regime instigated.

Schiff is a completely unethical and dishonest mountebank who distinguished himself during the years-long Russiagate hoax as one of the worst liars and fake conspiracy mongers in the Democratic Party. A stream of false assertions and slanderous innuendoes poured forth from his mouth. Actually facts bounce off his bulletproof exterior. This political cyborg does a poor imitation of a human being.

 

The eminently trustworthy The Honorable Adam Schiff. 

This is the same scam the Democrats pulled when their damning emails were revealed by WikiLeaks in 2016. With the crucial help of their corporate media and Deep State secret police allies, the Democrats suppressed the content of the emails and made the "issue" one of "RUSSIA ATTACKED OUR DEMOCRACY!" (Russia actually wasn't the source of the emails, but never mind.) True information was ignored and replaced by an ongoing hoax claiming Trump was a Russian puppet.

This time, the important facts- that the son of vice president Biden got an incredible favor he could not have possibly gotten on his own merits, which demands an explanation- are once again being ignored in favor of a ginned up fake scandal.

I see nothing wrong with asking a foreign government to investigate such a matter. Foreign governments are enlisted in U.S. investigations all the time. And why is getting information on a candidate from outside U.S. borders an impermissible "interference" in a U.S. election? It makes no difference where facts come from as long as they are true!

Another thing that is being treated as a grave violation of "normal procedures" and impeachable is that the notes of the phone call were stored in a highly classified system. 

So fucking what?

Every year, millions of documents are "classified" just to keep the public from knowing what the government is up to!

Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats leader in the House of Representatives, had the nerve to say that Trump did that to hide something.

Unlike Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State setting up a private email server to HIDE ALL HER MESSAGES!

The hypocrisy and double-standards of this latest absurd campaign to oust Trump is mind-bending. And it's being done instead of attacking Trump for the actual horrible things he does.

But the Democrats actually agree with almost all of those things. If not all of them. Backing Saudi Arabia and Israel to the hilt, trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government (both Pelosi and Charles "Upchuck" Schumer, the Senate Democrats leader, have publicly cheerleaded for that subversion), giant tax cuts for the rich and big corporations, and more.

The Democrats haven't even defended abortion rights or Planned Parenthood. Trump cut off their Federal funds without a peep from the Democrats.

Despite the fact that most of the propaganda system and the secret police Deep State is arrayed against him, Trump is going to win this one. So if he gets reelected, as seems more probable than ever, the blame should go to the Democrats and their enablers.

Is Trump An Unwitting International Relations "Realist"?

"International relations" is an academic field, a subset of "political science," that deals with the relations of nation-states to each other and the system in which they operate. There are various schools of thought within international relations in U.S. academe. One is the "realist" school. Perhaps its leading public exponent today is University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer, a military veteran and self-described "conservative" who was a protege and admirer of Samuel "Mad Dog" Huntington, late of Harvard University. [1]

Two things Trump has been up to create an interesting parallel to a strategic policy advocated by Mearsheimer. They involve Russia, and China.

 Mearsheimer sees China as the only potential competitor and threat to the U.S., a rising power with a population over four times the size of the U.S.' and a rapidly growing economy. China has been flexing its muscles in the South China sea and aggressively claiming ownership over the area. Russia on the other hand is a declining power, in this view. Mearsheimer sees the natural outcome of the U.S.-China power rivalry as a containment strategy, especially if war is to be avoided. He sees the U.S. as the linchpin of a coalition including Russia, Japan, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and others that will surround and contain China. We're already seeing friction between the U.S. and China in the region, and military feints and muscle-flexing by both nations.

President-to-be Donald Trump has been accused for months by the U.S. media, by Democratic operatives, and prior to the November 8th U.S. election by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, of being cozy with Russia and admiring of Russian president Vladimir Putin. This hectoring has continued post-election, by much of the U.S. media, and by Democratic Party poohbahs, accusing Trump of allegedly being "pro-Russia," "friendly" with Putin, even being a Putin stooge.

There is indeed evidence that Trump isn't interested in pursuing the anti-Russian policy of the Obama regime, a policy supported by the elitists of the so-called foreign policy establishment, a claque of unelected people who rotate between cushy seats in government, academia, and various foundations and institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations, the latter functioning like a mother-in-law engaging in backseat driving to presidents and to the State Department.  These people keep accusing Trump of "praising" Putin, apparently because Trump called Putin a "strong leader." (These same carpers consistently brand Putin an "autocrat." So he's a weak autocrat? That's an oxymoron. Of COURSE Putin is "strong," if we accept the U.S. establishment's own insistence that he's an autocrat! That's just a fact. As a matter of logic- and admittedly logic isn't the U.S. blatherariat's strong suit- it's not necessarily a compliment. If I say "Hitler was a strong leader," I can assure you I don't intend it as praise. But let's posit that Trump admires Putin- I think he at least respects him.)

There's also much chatter about Trump's "business ties" to Russia. Evidence of Trump's "business ties" with Russia seem to amount to a lot of Big Talk about deals that never materialized. Trump does a lot of fishing until he finds a sucker to hook.

Stronger evidence of an impending "pro-Russia" tilt comes from Trump's announcement of his pick for Secretary of State: the boss of oil company giant ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson. (Rex by the way comes from Latin, and is defined in English as reigning king.) According to The New Yorker magazine website, Tillerson "has forged close ties with Vladimir Putin and the head of Russia’s state oil company." [2] Putin even awarded Tillerson a medal in 2013, the "Order of Friendship." ExxonMobil has a multibillion dollar deal with the Russian oil firm Rosneft to develop Russian oil fields. This relationship had the necessary blessing of Russian president (excuse me, "autocrat") Putin. (See my previous post for a partially-facetious photo essay on the Tillerson-Putin connection.) U.S. sanctions against Russia (punishment for Russian resistance to the U.S. takeover of Ukraine) have put the Rosneft deal in the deep freeze. ExxonMobil shareholders can look forward to the deal to be thawed out under the Trump regime.

We should expect that Tillerson will safeguard the interests of the company that is his sole adult employer and to which he owes his wealth, contrary to fatuous assertions in the U.S. media that OF COURSE Tillerson will put the U.S. "national interest" (whatever THAT is) first- and it's not just Trump partisans making that ridiculous claim. (I guess these people didn't notice how Hillary Clinton sold favors from her position as Secretary of State to donors to the Clinton Foundation, including a huge uranium mining deal. These propagandist shills will say anything, no matter how patently absurd, to shore up the perceived "legitimacy" of the corrupt U.S. power system.) Money talks, and billions of dollars is a very forceful voice.

Finally there's the ongoing campaign to blame Russia for Trump's victory with the evidence-free claim, now treated as fact, that Putin ordered computer hacking into Democratic computers and delivery of the resulting email caches to WikiLeaks to help Trump. Obama is now threatening retaliation. That needs to be the subject of another essay. Briefly, this ignores the fact that the archaic Electoral College allowed Trump to "win" with fewer votes than Clinton, and that the worst damage to Clinton occurred shortly before election day, when Republican FBI secret police chief James Comey revivified the Clinton private server "scandal" by announcing new evidence in the closed investigation in the form of more emails found on devices seized from disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner, the man the media never tires of publicly humiliating for texting pictures of his penis to various women. Comey caused Clinton's lead to plunge from 14% ahead nationally to even with Trump. So the Democrats are scapegoating Putin! Similarly, after the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) stole the 2000 election, with five GOP agents sitting on the Supreme Court delivering the coup de grace, the Democrats ever since have blamed Ralph Nader. In that election too, the Democrat, Albert Gore, won millions more votes than George W. Bush. (Clinton actually won the nation by 2.5 million votes. Some "democracy." Just imagine if it happened in Russia, what the U.S. media would be saying!)

If it can be anticipated that Trump will pursue a friendlier policy towards Russia, on the China side of the ledger, Trump added minuses, committing what the U.S. establishment considered a gross diplomatic faux pas, namely accepting a congratulatory phone call after his election "win" from the president of Taiwan. This irked the Chinese rulers, who issued a public growl. U.S. establishment elite types added their own disapproving tongue-clucks over Trump's annoying the Chinese tyrants by seeming to call into question the "one China" policy of the U.S. by accepting the phone call. The "one China" policy means the U.S. recognizes China's claim to Taiwan as a mere province of China, not an independent nation as most Taiwanese prefer.

Trump, a habitual counter-puncher, upped the ante, saying in effect So What? The U.S. "doesn't have to be bound" by the old policy. To this China responded with a veiled threat of war, saying if Trump failed to hew to the one China line, it could "threaten peace." [The current U.S. policy is a schizophrenic one of recognizing China's claim to Taiwan as a mere Chinese province, refusing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which it helped kick out of the UN to appease China, yet on the other hand maintaining a posture of preparing to use military force to protect Taiwan from China! If Taiwan is nothing but a Chinese province, like Florida is a U.S. state, by what right does the U.S. threaten to wage war to "defend" it from the country it is ostensibly a part of? For me, I favor self-determination, and loath repressive dictatorships, so I think Taiwan should be recognized as an independent nation. That is the human perspective on the matter.]

U.S. foreign policy and media elites wasted no time pounding on Trump to try and force him into line on the "established" -that is, preexisting- U.S. policy. An example popped up today even as I write, on the U.S. Government radio propaganda network NPR, on the program "Here and Now," (Dec 12). [NOTE: I ended up not finishing this essay until later.] The program's "security expert," an Imperialist named Jim Walsh, who heads the "Security Studies" program at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, broke it down for us. Walsh tsk-tsked that Trump wasn't getting the proper "security" briefings- i.e. being indoctrinated by people like Walsh. Opining disapprovingly on Trump announcing he's not bound by the "one China" policy," Walsh said, "it's been settled policy since Nixon;" a U.S. policy "for 30 years;" Taiwan is "a vital interest to China;" "normally it's a bad idea to threaten a nuclear weapons state;"  dropping the policy "could be a dangerous thing;" and "we should be trying to cooperate " with China on things like North Korea. Other NPR programs today similarly piled on Trump. [3] 

Jim The Security Expert would no doubt disagree, but almost all of that applies to how the U.S. has been treating RUSSIA over Ukraine. I say he would probably disagree because there is virtual unanimity in the U.S. establishment that Russia "caused" the Ukraine "crisis." But take each point: Ukraine is a vital strategic interest to Russia- it's on its border, and it has an absolutely vital naval base in the Crimean peninsula of Ukraine. Russia is a nuclear power. And the U.S. needs Russia's cooperation in Syria, among other places, and needed it to conclude a nuclear enrichment deal with Iran stopping Iran's program. But on one point there's a difference. The U.S. has  been consistent in its policy towards Russia. It has extended its policy of unremitting hostility to the U.S.S.R. to Russia. Too consistent, in fact. Sometimes Change Is Good. But the American bourgeoisie only think so when it's something BAD they're cramming down our throats, like job insecurity, "globalization," loss of company pensions, and soon the gutting of Social Security and Medicare, if they can. Or if there's some government they're peeved at and decide to overthrow. Suddenly "stability" doesn't matter and change is the thing.

Add it all up, and you get a friendly rather than hostile attitude towards Russia and a hardened stance against China, in line with the "realist" prescription of Mearsheimer.

Trump of course is too unschooled and ignorant to be consciously subscribing to the Mearsheimer strategy. He's probably never even heard of John J. Mearsheimer, or the Realist school of international relations theory. But his actions and attitudes have been accidentally dove-tailing with the strategy Mearsheimer advocates, at least so far. Ironically, Mearsheimer considered Trump unqualified to be president, but has deemed Obama "basically a realist" in the technical academic sense that Mearsheimer categorizes himself. This despite the fact that Obama has created hostile relations with Russia (by aggressively ripping Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence, violently overthrowing the democratically-elected government there using fascist mobs who set policemen on fire- you can view youtube.com videos of this- and sending in false flag snipers to shoot both police and protesters- and for good measure we had Victoria Nuland not just handing out cookies to "protesters" but publicly bragging about the billions spent by the U.S. to achieve its aim, namely subversion of an elected government, which the U.S. euphemizes as "democracy promotion," an Orwellian inversion of dictionary definitions of words- in a country that had a scheduled election coming up in months, where the president to be overthrown offered major concessions to the mob, which at U.S. direction it rejected) with Obama thus driving Russia into the arms of China. The entire Western establishment has dutifully followed along in this moronic and capricious strategy.

China and Russia already have had joint naval maneuvers and signed major economic deals as a result of the irrational policy towards Russia of the U.S., a policy driven by the hyper-aggressive imperialism of the U.S. The U.S. is a nation that won't be satisfied until it controls the entire planet, at which point it will move on to controlling other planets in the solar system. (Actually that's not even facetious. The U.S. military is already plotting to control the immediate space above the earth.)

Of course the U.S. will never achieve true world domination. It cannot dominate China, for one. For another, the world is too fractious to effectively rule, as the quasi-anarchic situation in the Middle East as well as in Somalia, Mali, and other places, demonstrates.)

The truth is, as boorish, ignorant, and improvisational as he is, Trump may accidentally end up following a far wiser foreign policy towards China and Russia than the "experts" have been prescribing! Who'd a thunk it! [4]

1]  "Mad Dog" isn't my sobriquet for Huntington. It was bestowed by his fellow imperialists during the Vietnam War, during which he offered his expertise in helping destroy Vietnam.

2] "Rex Tillerson, from a Corporate Oil Sovereign to the State Department," The New Yorker, December 11, 2016.

3] Another example from NPR,; John Hockenberry brought on to his radio show "The Takeaway"  a creep from the infamous secret police corporation Stratfor, an outfit run by veteran secret policemen that works to attack and delegitimize American dissidents, often using illegal means. The Stratfor ghoul pushed the line of the day, that Russian "hacking" of the U.S. election helped Trump win, which supposedly demonstrates a Trump-Putin Axis. (In the extreme version, Trump is a Putin puppet.) Trump of course actually lost- by which I mean he got fewer votes than Clinton. But the U.S. isn't a normal nation. Here, the loser "wins" if he gets more "Electoral College" votes, a bizarre creation of the slavery-favoring U.S. Constitution. Trump will actually be "elected" in December, when the 500-plus "Electors" meet in their respective state capitals and the District of Columbia to rubber-stamp the preordained outcome with their own "votes."

4]  That's not to endorse Trump. His other appointments have been truly monstrous. A racist for Attorney General, rabid generals for key posts wielding repressive powers, a pro-pollution climate science denying fanatic to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a man at Interior to allow a free-for-all looting of Federal lands in the west and mountain states, and the dunderheaded and corrupt former Texas Governor Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy, a Department Perry vowed to abolish when he ran for president in 2012. And Trump's bankruptcy lawyer, a fanatical Zionist who wants Israel to annex the entire West Bank, as Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. Friedman compares progressive American Jews to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis. Oy vey!

Trump wanted to out-Zionist Hillary Clinton during the campaign, promising to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The Palestinians can expect more suffering, and more death and destruction to be periodically rained down on them. Which is the say, the same they would have gotten with another President Clinton.

Obama Threatens Britons Over Leaving the European Union

U.S. emperor Obama has weighed in yet again on the upcoming British referendum two months hence, on leaving or remaining in the European Union (EU). Butting into other people's business is an old habit with the imperialist U.S., so no surprise there.

In typical fashion, Obama spoke out of both sides of his mouth, saying it was up to Britons to decide, while telling them how they should vote if they knew what was good for them. He told them brusquely that they'd be at the back of the line if they wanted to make a trade treaty with the U.S. if they voted to exit the EU, the so-called "Brexit" (short for British exit). Pretty rude.

Obama said, in coded language, that Britain will have the most pull if it continues to be the U.S.' stooge within the EU. Speaking as a "friend," Obama hinted that Britain's usefulness to the U.S. would be significantly diminished if it were to drop out of the EU, where it can act as a agent of U.S. interests inside that would-be superstate.

British prime minister David "Big Toff" Cameron chimed in, saying people should listen to their "friends," a reference to the U.S. nation-state. Cameron was forced against his will, after years of stalling and broken promises, to finally allow some democracy in Britain and let the people vote on continuing to be absorbed into the EU.

British elites are themselves divided on the issue- hence the referendum. Cameron's own party, the Conservatives, is split. And the self-promoting, showboating mayor of London, Boris Johnson, like Cameron a Tory, has come out for Brexit. Miffed at Obama's interference British internal affairs, he penned an irate piece in response, carping that Obama removed a bust of the glorious British imperialist Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, or somewhere in the White House. Obama replied that he passed by another Churchill head every day. So there.

It seems to me that there will neither be catastrophe nor great advantage to Britain if it exits the EU. There will be additional hoops to jump through for Brits wishing to work in Europe. Britain will have increased sovereignty in terms of domestic law. It will be free to deny social benefits to foreign workers, as well as limit their numbers. Trade might become a bit more cumbersome. As Britain never jettisoned its own currency, the pound, for the euro, nothing changes monetarily. The need to exchange currencies for trade and travel that already existed will be the same. The idea that Britain somehow swings greater weight on the global stage within the EU is based on the fallacy that the EU is something more than a U.S. appendage in international affairs, or else a passive body that cannot agree among its constituent nations on any decisive action. In the Ukraine matter, the U.S. has put Europe in the position of making sacrifices to punish Russia. The U.S. made the policy ("and fuck the EU," in the immortal words of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland in her infamous, unguarded phone call to U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt) and the EU suffered the economic consequences by imposing trade sanctions on Russia as per U.S. diktat. (The ever-dutiful and obedient German chancellor Angela "The Iron Mouse" Merkel, the actual boss of the EU, carried out her Master Obama's instructions.)

The End.

U.S. Hoists Its Flag Over Nest of Espionage and Subversion In Havana

Technically this den of iniquity is called the "U.S. Embassy." Like all U.S. embassies, it is a base for CIA spies and military "attaches," who also have an espionage function.

And like any U.S. embassy located in a nation whose government the U.S. wants to change to one more to its liking, it is also a hive of subversive activities. The Cubans should study carefully what the U.S. did not too long ago in Ukraine. (It was willing to spend $2 billion there, according to a boast by Victoria "Wicked Witch" Nuland, the neocon whom Obama  has as an assistant secretary of state for "European Affairs," to overthrow the previous elected government.)

This particular infection-point of malign U.S. power was previously the "U.S. Interests Section," prior to the decision of the Obama regime to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, which were broken off by Kennedy in 1961 in favor of a campaign of aggression, terrorism, and economic warfare that continued for decades.

An example of the prior activities of this "Interests Section" was the hoisting of large, provocative, insulting banners aimed at the streets below, with the apparent purpose of inducing the Cubans to hate Fidel Castro and overthrow his government. (It didn't work.)

Secretary of State John "Skull And Bones" Kerry flew into Cuba for the rag-hoisting ceremony, and to lecture the Cubans about what he called "democracy" and human rights. (Since the U.S. is very good at destroying both of those, I assume he was being ironic or facetious when he exhorted the Cuban government to provide more of both. But that assumption is wrong, of course. He was actually being dementedly cynical.)

One "issue" the U.S. wants "resolved" is to extort millions of dollars from Cuba to "compensate" Americans who lost property in Cuba after the revolution 56 years ago. Parts of the U.S. media are participating in this extortion campaign, with both the New York Times ("The Newspaper of Record," that's us!- they proclaim) and the U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR running sob stories about children of property owners wanting their holdings paid for or returned to them. So far, the U.S. media hasn't run any stories about all the Cubans murdered by U.S.-sponsored terrorists, or the losses suffered when the U.S. infected Cuba's sugar and tobacco crops, and pig herds, with diseases, or poisoned sugar for export, or snuck in lubricating oil that made engines wear out ten times faster than normal (a Texas engineer working for the CIA boasted in print of coming up with that one) or the billions lost due to the U.S. interfering with Cuban trade, forcing foreign nations and governments to boycott Cuba. (Because, in case you didn't know, the U.S. rules the world.)

Here's another "issue" Cuba could raise. Over the years, U.S. courts have awarded hundreds of millions of dollars to the families of "victims of terrorism." I mean per person killed. They've entered such judgments against the PLO, Iran, and others. I suggest Cuban courts award the families of the hundreds killed by U.S.-sponsored terrorism hundreds of millions of dollars (in pesos) apiece. After all, since the U.S. regards itself as a model for all nations to follow, and expects Cuba to emulate it, I think Cuba should definitely show itself to be a good pupil and do this.

And get the fuck out of Guantanamo Bay, U.S.!

China Makes Significant Inroad Into U.S. Global Domination

One of the major pillars of U.S. hegemony is its monopoly control over the world financial system. This control is so total that the U.S. can threaten and seize the financial assets of people around the world almost at will. It also maintains a system of total surveillance over all the world’s financial transactions. It controls the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, two malign institutions of money power that have caused untold hardship to literally billions of people over the years. 

So it was potentially a major blow to U.S. power when China in 2013 announced the formation of a rival financial institution, the so-called Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) based in Beijing. (It could have just as well been called the Anti-IMF, or AIMF.) The U.S. has worked assiduously to try and make the Chinese initiative a flop by ordering its client states around the world (and “allies,” that is, subalterns to U.S. imperialism like Japan, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to stay out of the Chinese bank.

But now, some ducks that since 1945 have always lined up dutifully behind their U.S. master, have announced they’ll join China’s new Fund. First, Britain- Britain! the Loyalest Lapdog!- announced it would sign on with China. That gave Germany, Italy, and France the nerve to follow suit. (There’s Safety In Numbers, I guess they figured.) The U.S. had a snit, just as it  upbraided China when China originally announced plans to form the new Bank. (Maybe if the U.S. didn’t treat its “allies” like adversaries and secretly surveil all their communications, especially those of its rulers, they would continue to stick by it. It probably also doesn’t help that Europe, and not the U.S., is paying the economic price of the U.S. economic warfare against Russia being waged over the Ukraine “crisis” that the U.S. caused by its subversion and destabilization actions there. But as Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said in a memorable phone call- intercepted and posted to youtube for all the world to hear- to the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine who was managing the subversion, “Fuck the EU.”) [1] To make matters worse, now Australia and South Korea are reconsidering their earlier decisions to decline China’s invitation to join. Control is rapidly slipping out of the U.S.’ fingers when even satrapies like those two are jumping ship.

The top Chinese propaganda organ, Xinhua, did a little victory dance in the end zone after this touchdown. (Apologies to my foreign readers for the American football analogy.) [2]

China has already been making economic inroads in the U.S.’ self-proclaimed “backyard,” Latin America, with development projects, among other things. Meanwhile the U.S. continues to destroy the nations in the region it declared as its property way back in 1823. (This act of arrogance is grandly named the “Monroe Doctrine,” after president James Monroe, only the fifth U.S. president, and is celebrated to this day. The U.S. from the beginning didn’t waste any time pursuing its imperialist ambitions. It invaded present-day Canada in 1812 in an attempt to steal territory.)

The U.S. continually wreaks havoc and social and economic destruction in “its” hemisphere. It did that with the Honduran coup of a few years back, that turned that country into a chaotic charnal house. It long ago wrecked Guatemala and El Salvador. (I knew, before it was reported, that the wave of “Central American” refugees fleeing into the U.S. last year came from those three countries, and not Nicaragua. And I was right.) Now the U.S. is trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government. Still it persists in its criminal ways, which it thinks have no consequences as long as it continues to paper them over with transparent lies and cynical rhetoric about “American values” and its alleged love of freedom and democracy and human rights (all things which it has in fact been one of the major destroyers and enemy of). Is it a mystery that eventually others would turn against it?

As far as strategy goes, the U.S. doesn’t do strategy these days. It does tactics. It thinks clever, devious tactics constitute strategy. They don’t. Despite knowing better- remember the “pivot to Asia” announced by Obama-Clinton a few years ago, since forgotten?- the U.S. ignored the big picture, the geostrategic one,  preferring  to pick unnecessary fights. Like ripping Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit. Ukraine is a vital strategic area for Russia, on its border, with military equipment industries it relies on and the absolutely critical Black Sea Fleet naval base in Crimea. U.S. interest in Ukraine is actually zero- aside from the irresistible compulsion to try and control the whole world. (The whole world except Israel, that is. The U.S. has a weird submission thing going with Israel, with Israel as its Dominatrix. The U.S. surrenders complete control to Israel. Maybe someone will invent the field of political psychiatry to figure this one out.)

The imperialist elite in the empire’s capital of Washington, D.C., was definitely miffed at its lackeys for joining the new Chinese financial club. Some poohbah at the Brookings Institute, a D.C. “idea” factory for grinding out ruling class ideology and “position papers” (advice to government officials), groused that Britain needed to be punished. “Britain should not be let off the hook,” growled nomenklatura member Thomas Wright ominously from his perch at Brookings. And Obama regime officials have been open about expressing their, shall we say, displeasure. [3]

This from a country that almost sided with the fascist military regime of Argentina in the Falklands War! It was only thanks to then-War Secretary Caspar Weinberger that the Thatcher regime wasn’t betrayed by the U.S. Alexander Haig and Jeane Kirkpatrick were steering the fascist president Reagan into siding with Argentina until Weinberger spoiled their plans.

With the U.S., loyalty is a one-way street.

A U.S. establishment apparatchik in Beijing moaned “We’re going to come out looking insecure and weak.” (Fear of “weakness” is a chronic neurosis among U.S. elites. It is a paranoia that the establishment media and Republican politicians infect reactionary nationalists among the U.S. populace with also.) [4]

Funny thing is, the U.S. could have avoided all this if it had merely given China greater voting rights in the two big global financial institutions it controls, the IMF and World Bank. But it refused to make even modest changes. That’s what happens when you get greedy and want it all. (A cautionary note to the world’s billionaires too, by the way.) Just as the U.S. would have been better off not trying to gobble up Ukraine. (Not to mention all the suffering and dead Ukrainians who would have been better off.)

If in the future the imperialist baton is snatched from the U.S.’ fingers by China, doubtless nations will come to chafe under Chinese domination. The more fundamental question is, after several millennia of various empires, will imperialism, which is anti-human because it oppresses and denies autonomy to people, and economically exploits them, ever be consigned to the dustbin of history? Probably not until a majority of homo sapiens evolves into conscious human beings, at which point they will no longer tolerate imperialist systems of power.

For now, resistance to the so-called “international system,” the rule of venal nation-state elites, is limited to ineffectual protests, spasms of anarchist vandalism, and nihilistic psychopaths of the ISIS variety (the latter having no interest in human rights and liberation from oppressive power but to the contrary aspiring, with maniacal zeal, only to supplant the existing dominators with their own even viler forms of oppression). Those in power have many tried-and-true methods for suppressing movements for change. Only fanatics willing to sacrifice themselves are left to oppose them meaningfully.

1] See, “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion,” April 5, 2014.

2] See, “Commentary:Washington, what are you waiting for?” Xinhua, March 18, 2015.

3] See “China gloats as Europeans rush to join Asian bank,” Washington Post, March 18, 2015. Even the Post, the elite newspaper of the empire’s capital, had to admit that U.S. refusal to reform the IMF helped drive other nations into China’s open arms.

4] “Insecure and weak;” thus fretted Paul Haenle, director of the ­Carnegie-Tsinghua Center in Beijing, ibid.

U.S. Practicing for War with Russia in Ukraine

On September 4th, the Pentagon, the global headquarters of the U.S. military leviathan, announced military “exercises” (practicing for war, in this case against Russia) with Kiev regime forces. This rehearsal, called Rapid Trident, will also involve military units from various U.S. lackey nations. Another rehearsal with Ukrainian regime troops will take place on a U.S. warship sailing in the Black Sea. (Maybe Russia should start sailing naval vessels in the Gulf of Mexico and off the Florida keys, with Cuban forces. See how the U.S. likes that! You'll hear the screeching and outraged fulminations then!)

No doubt there are other U.S. military operations in Ukraine that are being kept secret.

We already know that the U.S. secret police are running “operations” in Ukraine. No less than the head of the CIA himself, John “Cutthroat” Brennan, turned up in Kiev after the coup earlier this year. The U.S. media has maintained a total blackout on what the CIA (and other U.S. “intelligence” agencies) are doing in Ukraine.


The Western-installed president of Ukraine, Petro “Billionaire Candyman” Poroshenko, has publicly stated his intent to press Obama to sign a military alliance agreement when he sees Obama in Washington, D.C., the Imperial City, later this month. This “security” pact is to drag the U.S. into wholesale military intervention in Ukraine, Poroshenko hopes.


And the U.S.-chosen prime minister of Ukraine, Arseniy “Yats” Yatsenyuk, shrilling screeched to a crowd of Western politicians and big business bosses that Russia wanted to gobble up all of Ukraine and Putin was recreating the Soviet Union. (Apparently the Soviet Union is such a great bogeyman that capitalist demagogues can't let it die. Like a zombie, or the Freddy Krueger character in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Soviet Union is indestructible.) According to Yatsenyuk, “I clearly understand the final goal of Putin. He doesn't want to take just Donetsk and Luhansk. He is trying to take all of Ukraine. He wants to re-form the Soviet Union.” Seeking to alarm his audience with the ghost of the Soviet Union, Yatsenyuk continued to lobby for NATO membership for Ukraine, which he believes would force NATO to attack Russia on his regime's behalf.

“We are still in a state of war and the key aggressor is the Russian Federation,” squawked Yatsenyuk, completely ignoring the reality of an internal rebellion and civil war, with Russia aiding one side and the U.S. bloc the other. Then he made his oft-repeated pitch for NATO military intervention: “NATO in this particular circumstance is the only vehicle to protect Ukraine.” From a section of its own populace, not just Russia. And for “Ukraine,” read “the Kiev regime.” [1]


Other than kill some people and blow things up (“give the Russians a bloody nose” in U.S. imperialist parlance), violent U.S.-NATO interventions can't defeat Russia militarily in Ukraine. (Unless the U.S. starts a nuclear war- which would mean everyone loses and no one wins. Although there have always been American madmen inside and high up within the “national security state” who believe nuclear war is “winnable.”) The success of the violent mob coup in February made the U.S. overconfident. It thought, with the installation of a comprador regime of collaborators, that it had successfully ripped Ukraine out of the Russian orbit and added it to the U.S. domain. The almost immediate signing of an onerous “loan agreement” with the International Monetary Fund, including the usual economic “restructuring,” cemented the new relationship of subservience to Western high finance. [2]


The “agreement” mandates the impoverishment of the Ukrainian people, in effect, in order to pay off Ukraine's “debt” to the West. And here's an example of outrageous hypocrisy: Ukraine owes Russia for Russian natural gas Ukraine has consumed but not paid for. Russia's demand for payment, and warnings- called “threats” in Western media- to cut off the gas flow, is deemed to be economic blackmail and a form of pressure. Not so Western extortion of Ukraine with the forced impoverishment of its people. That's just sound economics, in the Western propaganda version of reality!


1] Yatsenyuk was personally anointed for his position by the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, the neocon imperialist Victoria Nuland, whose pet name for him is “Yats.” See “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion.”


Yatsenyuk's yammerings rate entire articles in the New York Times, as that U.S. ruling class bulletin board sees things. “Yats's” latest war-mongering ravings rated a whole article in that paper on Sunday (probably Saturday online). “Putin Intent on Taking 'All of Ukraine,' Leader Says.” September 14, 2014, page 4. Nice inflammatory headline there, Times!


2] In addition to the IMF imposing the usual class warfare policies on Ukraine, raising taxes on the people, raising the prices they have to pay for the necessities of life, and cutting social services, as part of Ukraine's “association agreement” with the Western vultures the Ukrainian comprador rulers agreed to let Monsanto flood Ukraine with its Genetically Modified Organisms (special food crop seeds made to withstand heavy doses of Monsanto's agricultural poisons, mainly the herbicide Round Up), as a camel's nose under the tent to break into the European market. See “Monsanto in Ukraine: EU Association Agreement and IMF loan for Ukraine opens the backdoor for GMO into EU.”

Kiev Regime Blocking Relief Supplies to City It’s Besieging

In a challenge to the Kiev regime’s assault on its “own” people in the east, Russia is sending food and other relief supplies to besieged civilians in the city of Luhansk. The Kiev cabal has vowed to block it at the border. This is occurring in the context of a months-long campaign of bombing and shelling of eastern Ukraine, in particular the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, including shelling a hospital twice. Currently a humanitarian crisis is looming.

The Western-installed satrapy regime in Kiev, Ukraine, has now killed a total of around 2,000 civilians in the eastern half of “its” country, The death toll doubled in the past week, reports The New York Times, a paper that has editorially gone all-in supporting the U.S. coup, painting Russia in editorial after editorial as the Bad Guy that “annexed” Crimea, is “destabilizing” Ukraine, and demanding that it stand down, quash the rebellion/self-determination forces, and abandon the east to its western-ordained fate.

Referring to the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, the Times reports that:

“Shelling there and elsewhere in the region by the Ukrainian forces has taken a heavy toll on civilians, with the death toll in the war doubling in the last week to more than 2,000, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported on Wednesday.

“Conditions in Luhansk, under siege by Ukrainian government forces, are particularly dire. City officials said Tuesday that its 250,000 residents had been living without power, water and a sewage system since Aug. 3, and that only essential food was available.

“Nevertheless, both Kiev and its Western allies have warned that the Russian aid convoy was just a cynical ploy to get much-needed military assistance to rebel fighters in Luhansk, who are running low on ammunition, or — in the worst case — the first step in an invasion of southeastern Ukraine.” [1]

Arseniy P. “Yats” Yatsenyuk, the “prime minister” of Ukraine hand-picked for his post by high-ranking U.S. State department apparatchik Victoria Nuland, ruled out any aid except from the Red Cross. (Of course, the Kiev regime has made it impossible for the Red Cross to enter the region under attack.) [2]

And in a self-described official statement, Arsen Avakov, the interior minister who oversees the Kiev regime’s secret police and regular police, snarled: ““A provocation by the cynical aggressor on our territory is unacceptable,” it apparently being “provocative” to try and relieve a besieged city by providing necessities to the civilian population. (Granted, it wouldn’t be surprising if the armed rebels helped themselves to some of the supplies.)

Of course, there’s an easy solution to the situation: the Kiev regime could stop waging war on the population of the eastern part of Ukraine.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry claims the 260 truck convoy, which left from Moscow and as of yesterday was idling 200 miles (about 334 kilometers) from the Ukrainian border, is hauling 2,000 metric tons of supplies, including 400 tons of cereals, 100 tons of sugar, 62 tons of baby food, 54 tons of medical supplies, 12,300 sleeping bags and 69 generators. The Kiev regime is all but accusing Moscow of secreting military supplies in the cargo.

The Kiev regime insists that all 260 trucks will have to be unloaded at the border and reloaded onto other trucks- a massive undertaking. (No word on who would supply replacement trucks more to the Kiev cabal’s liking. Presumably not Russia. The regime surely doesn’t have 260 spare cargo trucks sitting around, even if they were inclined to break their own blockade of Luhansk.)

In an obviously political countermove, the Kiev cabal has suddenly added false promises to its rhetoric, claiming it will break its own siege by sending its own aid convoy. (I wouldn’t bet any money on that actually happening if I were you. It’s hard to imagine they would deliver supplies to areas under “rebel” control. (It might be more accurate to call them self-determinationists, although that term doesn’t deal with the complication of Russian nationals’ involvement in the autonomy/separatist movement, especially in leadership roles. I certainly don’t question the fact of Russian state involvement. But whose border is Ukraine on? Russia’s? Or the U.S.’s? And who has an absolutely geostrategically vital naval base there? So who arguably has greater interests there? Oh, by the way, there are plenty of ethnic Russians who speak Russian in Ukraine. How many Americans are citizens there? Remind me again.)

The U.S. subalterns of the “European Union” are meeting on Friday, August 15th,  to plot their next move in all this.

Here’s something awkward for the U.S. imperialist bloc, which could explain why the NY Times relegated it to the very last paragraph of the aforementioned article:

“Since the conflict erupted in March, Russia has argued that Kiev does not respect the needs or interests of the mainly Russian speaking population of southeastern Ukraine, and the confrontation over the aid convoy risked confirming Moscow’s point.”

Yeah, that’s a “risk,” alright. But given the power of the Western media, the risk is minimal. Besides, apparently the U.S. empire has a burning need to absorb Ukraine into its bloc, or at least its sphere of dominance. There’s no rational reason for this, no geopolitical need, just a mindless imperialist compulsion to achieve hegemony over the entire planet, a madness that even self-described “conservative” U.S. “political scientist” John Mearsheimer, a prominent academic at the University of Chicago and ten year military veteran, has repeatedly described and criticized as overreach. (His criticism is pragmatic, not moral. There are youtube.com videos of his public talks.) [3]

1] “Confusion and Alarm as Russian Aid Convoy Heads to Ukraine,” New York Times, August 13, 2014. This was the online title as of August 13. On the 14th it was changed to the more soothing "Convoy Said to Pause at Russian Base as Questions Persist."

2] See “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion“ for the infamous phone call between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, a career U.S. imperialist with prior coup experience, in which she designates “Yats,” as she calls Yatsenyuk, as prime-minister-to-be. This smoking gun evidence no longer exists as far as U.S. media and government are concerned, despite the fact that when it was revealed, the U.S. State Department didn’t deny its authenticity, choosing instead to sneer at Russian perfidy and sleaziness in intercepting and revealing it. (I’m referring to top State Department flack Jen Psaki’s official comments when confronted on the matter. To the best of my knowledge, no other U.S. official has deigned to publicly recognize the existence of the damning phone call.) After confirming in a backhanded manner the recording’s authenticity (“I didn’t say it was inauthentic”) she says the release “is a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

Here’s an excerpt from Psaki’s press conference in which she’s questioned about the Nuland-Pyatt conspiracy call. At 4:50 in the video she calls it “a new low in Russian tradecraft." Psaki had the gall to brazenly deny to reporters that the phone call contradicted U.S. public claims that it was leaving it up to the Ukrainians to determine their own government.

                                                     
Notice how Psaki employs the principle of the best defense is a good offense. She doesn’t even bother denying the authenticity of the call, instead brushing the matter aside with supercilious contempt. Brilliant move, Jen! If you ever lose your job at State, you’d make a great dominatrix. Her subordinate State Department flack, Marie Harf, takes after Psaki in her insufferable and unrelenting high-handedness. (Just watch these creeps on youtube.com if you need proof.) For some reason, the State Department flacks are a lot more arrogant and condescending to the media than are their White House counterpart flacks. I haven’t had time to analyze why that is. One possible explanation is that the White House flacks get a lot more media attention, so the image they project is more important. State Department mouthpieces apparently feel free to be as obnoxious and haughty as they like. Another is that the president is an elected official, plus the head of a political party, which worries about elections, whereas the State Department is totally insulated from any democratic accountability at all, and its head, the Secretary of State, is appointed, not elected.

Victoria Nuland, whose official title is Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, has been called a “neoconservative.” In U.S. political parlance that translates as a reactionary within the power structure. Originally the term denoted a small clique of upper caste Jewish reactionaries largely based in New York City and centered around institutions like the rabidly reactionary rag Commentary, a publication of the American Jewish Committee, one of the key centers of organized elite Jewish power in America and a component of Israel’s quasi Fifth Column in the U.S., aka “the pro-Israel lobby.” The word has since bled out to take in various gentiles. The idea was that these people used to be “liberals,” who reacted in revulsion to the anti-Vietnam war movement, the counterculture (“hippies”), and the black “power” movement, which they viewed with fear and hatred. How “liberal” people like Norman “The Frother” Podhoretz, longtime past editor of Commentary, ever actually were, as they allege, is open to dispute, to say the least.

Nuland is married to Robert Kagan, a prominent right-wing imperialist ideologue and co-founder of an aggressively militaristic propaganda mill called “Project for the New American Century,” which promotes U.S. global hegemony. This fountain of imperialist vomit put out a paper called Rebuilding America's Defenses (2000), co-signed by Kagan, his brother Frederick (another right-wing militarist) and their daddy, Donald, yet another reactionary, who squats in a professorship at Yale University, a notorious CIA recruiting ground. Notice two of the three words in the title are extremely dishonest. The U.S. military budget has risen every year since at least 1977, the beginning of the Carter regime. Yet fanatical U.S. militarists are constantly pretending that the U.S. has dismantled its military. As for “Defenses,” of course the U.S. military is offensive and aggressive, with 750 bases outside its national territory, and a two-century-long history of aggression and conquest.

3] To watch a one minute excerpt of a U.S. TV appearance Mearsheimer was allowed, in which he succinctly gives his view of the Ukraine situation, see “Arrogance and Stupidity in Obama Regime Power Grab in Ukraine.” (Dissenters from the U.S. propaganda consensus have been virtually excluded from establishment media.)

German Government Reaffirms Status as BootlickingToady to U.S.

The regime of Chancellor Angela Merkel has barred Edward Snowden from coming to Germany to testify before a Parliamentary committee. This despite the fact that Snowden revealed not just massive spying on German citizens by the NSA, with the help of the German secret police, but deliberate targeting of Merkel's own cellphone, starting before she became Chancellor.

Her regime apparatchiks informed the committee in writing that allowing Snowden in to testify would "run counter to the political interests of the Federal Republic" and "put a grave and permanent strain" on US-German relations. Unlike tapping their Chancellor's phone, apparently. Which speaks volumes about Germany's relationship to the U.S., and the hollowness of German “democracy,” since a parliamentary committee can be stymied in its work in this high-handed fashion.

Merkel has been summoned to the capital of the Empire, Washington, D.C., to “confer” about forcing Russia to abandon Ukraine, and to get Europe to agree to a trade deal to the U.S.' liking. (The U.S. has the upper hand in such negotiations not only because of its superior power, but because it knows exactly what the other side in the negotiations are thinking, strategizing, and the minimums they'll accept, thanks to the NSA tapping and bugging all European governments' and pan-European institutions' computers, phones, and offices, which we also know now thanks to Edward Snowden.) Apparently they don't trust phones so they need to speak in person. And notice who goes to see who. The subservient one is summoned into the presence of the superior one.

The U.S. has even refused to agree to stop spying on allies like Germany, as Germany has asked.

To add insult to injury, it only took a mere U.S. Assistant Secretary of State to bar Germany's pick for Ukrainian leader from even entering the puppet government (the boxer Vitali Klitschko), as we know from the infamous “Fuck the EU” phone call between the imperious Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador in Ukraine, the smarmy Geoffrey Pyatt. [See “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion.”]

The Green Party leader, Simone Peter, had this to say of Merkel: "Merkel is displaying cowardice towards our ally America. We owe the Americans nothing in this respect. The government must at least make a serious effort to safely bring Snowden to Germany and let him give evidence here. But Merkel doesn't want that."

Merkel will do as she's told about Ukraine. A Good German, she is an authoritarian who obeys superiors. And the U.S. president is clearly her superior. The only opposing force is the economic interests of German business that is invested in Russia, trades with Russia, buys fuel supplies from Russia. That puts her in a squeeze between opposing forces.

The mystery is why the German people chose to be ruled by this dull matron. There is a Green Party, and a Left Party, whose members in parliament were miffed by the blocking of Snowden from appearing to help parliament do its job. They were overruled by the government, a coalition of the right-wing “Christian Democratic” party (Merkel's party) and the fake-liberal “Social Democrats.”

Of course, Snowden can still testify from Russia by remote video connection, for example. That will enable the NSA to record the testimony in real time. Another victory for America! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Ukraine Satraps Launch Murderous Military Assault on Eastern Ukrainians to Provoke Russian Invasion

The puppet Ukrainian regime chosen by the U.S. and installed by a violent, fascist-dominated mob financed by the U.S. (and by American billionaire Pierre Omidyar) is taking off the gloves and launching a full-scale military assault on eastern Ukrainians who refuse to bow to its ersatz authority. The city of Donetsk is the first target. The satrapy regime is targeting government buildings in the east that were taken over by armed citizens there, in an ironic reversal. Remember, this Western stooge regime seized power by seizing government buildings. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, the new rulers are moving decisively to crush rebellion, as the elected government they overthrew fatally failed to do. And the U.S. and its Eurolackey stooges has also done a neat reversal. When they were overthrowing the elected former president Viktor Yanukovych, they demanded that security forces retreat in the face of murderous cop-killing mobs. Now they demand the opposite, that people seizing buildings surrender.

You couldn't design a better provocation to get Russia to send in troops to protect sympathetic Russophile Ukrainians and ethnic-Russian Ukrainian citizens then an armed military attack on them. At the same time, western media and politicians and apparatchiks issue threats daily against Russia, telling it not to “invade” Ukraine and screeching loudly about Russian “aggression” and “subversion.” Moldova is said to be a victim of Russian “aggression” (because of a breakaway region), and the Georgian-Russian war is invoked as part of a pattern. (Never mentioned is the fact that Georgia started the war, stupidly calculating that NATO would start a war with Russia to rescue Georgia. Seems the Ukrainian satraps may be making the same dumb miscalculation.) In Odessa in western Ukraine, 30 Russophile Ukrainians have just been burned to death when the building they were occupying was set on fire.

Preparing for civil war to control ALL of Ukraine, “President” Oleksandr V. Turchynov has just announced the imposition by his personal fiat of a military draft for those 18 to 25 years old, for unspecified terms of “service.” (Western media refer to him, and to Victoria Nuland's pet “Prime Minister” Arseniy “Yatz” Yatsenyuk, as “interim” or “acting” president and pm, not “unelected” or “U.S.-installed.” You can bet if the shoe were on the other foot, it would be “Russian-installed, unelected,” “illegitimate,” “installed by force,” and so on.) [For Nuland designating “Yatz” as PM-to-be, see “U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion”]

Conscription by personal ukase- just like a Tsar! So who is trying to “return to the past”? Putin? He's not the only authoritarian around, apparently. (But not even Putin personally reviews a weekly murder list, which has so far eliminated thousands of “enemies,” or has the power to indefinitely imprison people in a military gulag without trial or charges. Guess who has that power? The “Leader of the Free World.”^TM) Turchynov The Interim also whined about police and military personnel “defecting” to the anti-Kiev cabal cause. So this is shaping up to be quite a messy civil war. Expect U.S. military “special operations” assassins to be added to the mix. And the CIA is already there- in fact the head of the CIA, John “Torture & Kill 'Em” Brennan himself was just in Kiev, plotting god knows what sinister mayhem.

Turchynov makes a point of consistently referring to the eastern resisters to him and his cabal as “terrorists.” That term makes clear the intent to use violence, not negotiations or reconciliation, to cement the rule of his cabal.

And while conducting this military assault on the east, the Kiev cabal will stage a “presidential election” later this very month, under the tutelage of their Western puppet-masters. Which will give Western politicians, apparatchiks, and propagandists another chance to wax hypocritical, as they will no doubt be hailing this snap election as a paragon of democracy, unlike the “illegitimate,” “illegal,” “Unconstitutional” Crimea referendum “held under Russian guns” in which Crimeans voted 93% to reunite with Russia (called “Russian annexation” in Western media). [1]

Meanwhile, U.S. and Eurolackey regimes and media pile higher the stinking pile of hypocritical rhetoric. There's no end to talk of Russia “subverting” and “destabilizing” Ukraine, when it was the U.S. grab for Ukraine and overthrowing of the elected government that did precisely those things. We hear that Russia is “on the march,” and Putin is “starting the Cold War again,” “grabbing territory,” and “trying to recreate the Soviet Union.” For example- and there are hundreds by now- U.S. government propaganda radio network NPR is talking about “growing Russian aggression against Ukraine.” (But interestingly, this time phrasing it as “what they [Germany and Britain] see as Russian aggression.”) [NPR, Noon EST, May 2.]

Actually, all Russia is doing to desperately trying to preserve the status quo, as the waters of a hostile military alliance (NATO) rise higher and higher around it. Now it's just trying to preserve the vital naval base in Crimea, and access to the output of factories in eastern Ukraine, which produce key military parts for Russian ICBMs and other weapons. Seizing Ukraine is like aiming a dagger at Russia's strategic heart. No surprise Russia is stirred to react. Instead we are told this is all part of some expansionist scheme by “thug” Putin, not breathtaking western aggression and subversion.

Russia has been mostly passive, contrary to hysterical western agitprop, as the U.S. reneged on the agreement made with Gorbachev that in return for a total retreat from eastern Europe, the U.S. wouldn't expand NATO eastwards. Now NATO is lapping on Russia's very borders, and Russia is expected to roll over and play dead as it loses its only warm water port in the west and access to strategic industries.

The double standard that the U.S. empire and its lackeys insist on imposing is mind-bending. A group of pro-Russian Ukrainians released some western spies- oh, excuse me, “observers”- military officers sent by the OCSE (yet another western imperialist organization) without obtaining freedom for prisoners they originally demanded. (The western media called the officers “hostages.”) This while the satrapy regime is waging war on resisters to their rule. Yet daily the U.S. and its toady stooge governments demand that Russia force the resisters to surrender, as they “agreed to do” at Geneva. But those governments aren't stopping the Ukraine coup regime from starting a civil war.

The Obama regime seems determined to press on with this deranged crusade, ratcheting up unjust sanctions against Russian government officials for doing their jobs, Russian businessmen who are guilty-by-association with Putin, and Ukrainians who haven't hopped on the coupists' bandwagon. [2]

The U.S. and Europe are trying to cut all Ukrainian ties to Russia, which are extensive and critical for Ukrainian well-being. (The standard, draconian International Monetary Fund “program” for the Ukrainian people has just been unveiled. It is revealing and will be the subject of a future essay.)

Of course, even if Obama started a nuclear war, it probably wouldn't be “strong” enough for the likes of John “Permanent POW” McCain, and the Republican Party, whose policy is Nothing a Democrat Can Do Is Any Good. Which has never stopped Obama from trying to appease them, whether it's the destruction of ACORN, the summary defenestration of Shirley Sherrod, passing a health care scheme taken straight from the Reaganite Heritage Foundation (now called “Obamacare”), crushing of domestic dissent, and a never-ending global campaign of mass assassination to “fight terrorism.”

There was a slogan during the Vietnam war; “Two, Three, Many Vietnams.” The idea was that the more “conflicts” the U.S. got embroiled in, the better (except for those murdered by the U.S., and the maimed, and the other survivors who have to live in devastated, destroyed lands poisoned by dioxin, depleted uranium, and other deadly substances U.S. imperialism has brought to the world). The theory is the U.S. would be spread thin, perhaps to the breaking point. So maybe we should hope that the arrogant, hyper-aggressive create more “crises” in more “troublespots” of their own making.

Well, I don't think two, three, many Ukraines will break the U.S. Just as the Iraq war didn't, merely weakened it in some ways- at terrible cost to Iraqis. The question is, how stupidly can the U.S. Goliath behave before it seriously catches up to it? Its hostility to Russia runs smack against the strategic imperative to construct a balancing coalition against China. Any such coalition will have a gaping hole without Russia. Obama just returned from an errand in Asia where he was trying to knit together just such a coalition among small Asian powers like the Philippines and Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, plus Japan, and India down the road. I wonder if the thought of this contradiction ever even occurred to him.

Not that I want to help him. I don't work for U.S. imperialism, in case you hadn't noticed. And I've personally experienced worse repression under his regime than under his predecessor Bush the Younger. So much for the “lesser evil” argument for voting for the Democratic Party!

1] Oddly, even though periodic, passing references are made to this “presidential election” in western media (but nothing at all by the western politicians!) there's been no “coverage” of any campaigning, no mention even of who the “candidates” in this “election” are! I'm guessing it's be Turchynov The Temporary President vs. A Bunch of No-Names Nobody Has Heard Of. That'll be real fair. The people have spoken!

2] Guilt by association is a long-standing actual principle of U.S. power practice, contrary to their wonderful-sounding, high-minded proclaimed principles. Currently it is employed massively in the “war on terror.” The NSA is creating “terrorist links” by seeing who calls who calls who calls who. So if a “suspected terrorist” called someone who called someone who called YOU, for example, your life gets inexplicably harder. That's called “three hops” tracing by the secret police. They have their own secret lingo for things, which makes them feel special.

Arrogance and Stupidity in Obama Regime Power Grab in Ukraine

You'd think having to contain the growing power of China would be enough of a priority that a U.S. regime wouldn't stir up trouble in a small country thousands of miles away and pick a wholly gratuitous fight with Russia. But the same blundering empire that engaged in a prolonged, pointless, sadistic war against Vietnam, that invaded Iraq just to prove it could overthrow governments it disliked (and to settle a grudge that a stupid man, George Bush, had towards the Iraqi dictator because he fell for a fabrication cooked up by the Kuwaitis to make it look like that dictator had tried to assassinate his father, George Herbert Walker Bush), that learns nothing from history and sticks itself in quicksand in Afghanistan, just couldn't resist trying to seize control of the small country of Ukraine on the border of Russia, where Russia has a critical naval base, and wrest it out of the Russian sphere of influence. The U.S.' junior EU partners even rejected a Russian offer of shared economic links with Ukraine.

Well, when you get greedy, sometimes things go badly. The trouble with the U.S. is it's too powerful. It needs to get its nose bloodied more. Apparently Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were not sufficiently chastening for it to stop making trouble.

So now, at a time when realpolitik would dictate focusing on how to contain China, the U.S. goes and creates a “trouble spot” right on Russia's border. And true to form, when the U.S. doesn't get its way, it immediately issues ultimatums and demands and inflicts punishments on the offending party, in this case Russia, for daring to defy the U.S. And if Russia doesn't knuckle under, why, that just proves that its President, Vladimir Putin, is a “thug” (the favorite epithet for him, liberally employed by U.S. politicians and the chattering elite who fill the media here, inflicting their propaganda and deranged worldview on the rest of us) who is “out of touch with reality” (a common characterization, including one attributed to Angela Merkel in a phone call to Obama, as whispered in the ears of the New York Times by some anonymous White House apparatchik). Then the amateur, laughable psychoanalysis of what “drives” Putin begins.

Hey bourgeoisie, here's a clue for you: any Russian leader who would LET you drive Russia out of such a strategically vital area on its border, with an irreplaceable naval base and access to the world's seas, would be guilty of political malfeasance. ANY Russia ruler at all qualified to be ruler would have to stop you!

Now that pathetic joker Joe Biden, VP of the U.S., the man who as Senator did more than anyone to place the sex offender Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, is flitting in and out of Ukraine and other states in the region, tongue-lashing Russia and “showing support” for the pathetically weak puppet government the U.S. just installed with mob violence and false flag snipers. (It's all in the previous essays below.) And U.S. Secretary of State John “Look Ma! Now I'm a Hawk!” Kerry called Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to once again demand that Russia make the eastern Ukrainians who refuse to be ruled by the new puppet government in Kiev abandon the buildings they've seized, or else, we are informed by State Department mouthpiece Jen Psaki. Psaki tells us that Kerry "urged Russia to take concrete steps to help implement the Geneva agreement, including publicly calling on separatists to vacate illegal buildings and checkpoints, accept amnesty and address their grievances politically." Yeah, politically. Like through peaceful processes? And elections? Like the violent fascist-led mob backed by the U.S. and EU that seized power in Kiev DIDN'T do, you mean? Sounds so reasonable! Maybe if the U.S. and EU hadn't caused this fissure in Ukraine to split open we wouldn't be enduring this “crisis” in the first place, ya think? [Today in Kiev, apparently reading from the same script, Biden parroted the exact same words as Psaki, demanding that Russia make the eastern militants clear out of their strong points, “accept amnesty, and address their grievances politically.” And the U.S. announced it's sending troops to Poland and other new NATO states, apparently to reassure the insecure rulers of those states and lay down a tripwire in case of a hypothetical, far-fetched Russian invasion.]

The U.S. has managed to weaken itself, pointlessly, because now if it fails to roll Russia back and force it to abandon eastern Ukraine, Asian countries fearful of Chinese island land grabs and the expansion of Chinese power generally will have renewed doubts about the strength of the U.S. “commitment” to their security. Why create a needless test over Ukraine? It is idiotic! The U.S., scrambling to shore up this collapsing sand castle of a government it created in Ukraine and salvage the situation, is warning Asian nations not to take advantage of economic sanctions on Russia, apparently signaling that the U.S. will be displeased if Asia starts buying Russian petroleum and natural gas and otherwise undermine the punitive sanctions.

The Russian reaction to the U.S. coup, contrary to the blather of the bourgeois commentariat in need of a cover story to hide the responsibility of their own side in provoking this situation, is not part of some pre-planned Putin “plot” in which Russia is going to “invade” country after country, another domino “theory” concocted to justify U.S. aggression and invert reality. Nor is it just anti-Imperialists like me who say the Russian reaction is predictable and provoked by Western action. Self-described “conservative” University of Chicago “International Relations” professor John J. Mearsheimer, a promoter of what is called “realism” theory in I.R., thinks so too, as he has stated publicly (on PBS NewsHour). [1] But hey, that's not my problem. They're going to keep forcing me to give them my money and shovel it into the maw of their gargantuan military and secret police establishment, no matter what.

But as usual, the U.S. is trying to dress its naked power play in the finery of high moral principle. “International order is at stake,” pompously trumpeted Ben Rhodes, deputy “national security adviser” to Obama. “Our policy on Ukraine is not targeted at Russia specifically, it is targeted at upholding the international order that we believe has been violated.”

If we parse “international order” correctly, that makes perfect sense. The “international order” in question is the system in which the U.S. holds global dominance, and all other nations must give way before U.S. demands and desires. Failure to do so is a violation of “the international order,” by definition. Once you understand the U.S. view of the world, there's nothing opaque about such statements.

Rhodes also thought it was brag-worthy that the U.S. got a meaningless vote through the toothless UN General Assembly taking Russia to task over the Ukraine situation (aka “crisis”). The U.S. managed to line up barely half the members of the General Assembly- 100- behind its scolding of Russia for reunifying Crimea by popular referendum of Crimea's inhabitants.

“One of the reasons you saw that vote in the UN was that Asian nations don't like precedent being set that a sovereign nation's territorial integrity can be violated with impunity,” crowed Rhodes. [My emphasis.]

Like the U.S. DIDN'T do when it invaded and conquered Iraq, Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, (during the regimes of Bush the Younger, Reagan, Bush the Elder, and Lyndon Johnson), overthrowing unwanted regimes? Or when Reagan invaded Lebanon? And mined Nicaragua's harbors, and committed much murder and mayhem in that country, both with a proxy terrorist army and U.S. military “Special Operations Forces”? Or when the U.S. “secretly” bombed Laos and Cambodia, and invaded Cambodia? Or on scores of other occasions in U.S. history, including when it took a huge chunk of Mexico by force and incorporated it into the U.S. in 1848? (The Mexicans didn't get to vote on that either.) Or its invasions and conquests of the Philippines, and of Cuba? One could go on, and on, and on. But why bother? Clearly people like Rhodes, and all those who labor in the vineyards of the Western propaganda system, are completely immune to obvious facts. Their ideological fanaticism is such that they can make such brazenly hypocritical statements from within their glass castles, secure that no one will throw a stone back at them. Or if someone does, the stone-thrower can be dismissed with contempt as a brainwashed ideologue out of touch with reality!

Oh, and Rhodes had something to say about deaths resulting from the Ukrainian puppet government's allied fascist forces attacking pro-Russian Ukrainians in the east at one of their checkpoints:

“We are looking into it. We have been very clear that we do not support any types of violence and we want to see de-escalation.” Right. Just the opposite of when fascist-led mobs besieged the seat of government in Kiev, and were burning the place down, and hurling Molotov cocktails at police and shooting them. The U.S. was all for violence then, and in fact Obama himself demanded that the then-President PERMIT the mob to take over by withdrawing the security forces.

Rhodes repeated the U.S. demand that Russia should quell the rebellion against the new puppet government: “The road map laid out in Geneva requires pro-Russian forces to lay down their arms and vacate those buildings. As long as they are there, the risk of this type of confrontation is acute,” added Rhodes. Of course, the eastern Ukrainians weren't at Geneva and didn't agree to anything. It's kind of like France and Britain negotiating with Hitler to give Germany part of Czechoslovakia- and then telling Czechoslovakia what happened! Little wonder the easterners immediately announced after the Geneva confab that they weren't budging, notwithstanding Russian public calls for them to stand down. (Not that I think Russia is trying too hard to get them to, and why should it?)

Some apparatchik on Biden's plane even fed reporters on board the line that it wasn't forces from Kiev that were involved, as if he could know for sure. The fascists who now control the Kiev "security forces" have previously attacked eastern militants to try and dislodge them from buildings they've seized.

The anonymous apparatchik went on to make more threats against Russia, saying the U.S. would impose “costs” on it if the rebellious Ukrainians in the east didn't slink off into the night with their tails between their legs. Yeah, count on that happening.

As the U.S. well knows, projection of power at distances requires naval power. It was a U.S. Navy officer who wrote the book on this, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, by Alfred Thayer Mahan, in 1890- a book that is currently in vogue in China, note. I'm sure the Russians know exactly what the U.S. is up to by threatening its continued tenancy in Sevastopol, Crimea, by its Black Sea Fleet, and the U.S. knows too. It is trying to cut Russia off at the knees, reduce its power some more. Other than that base, Russia has one naval base outside its territory, a small one in Syria. The U.S. has, oh, only about 750 military bases of all kinds all over the planet. It has a couple of dozen bases just on the island of Okinawa. This is some empire we're talking here! And it can't stand rivals.

But given the already weak state of Russia, and the continuing rise of China as the only significant potential competitor to the U.S., as I said, it strikes an objective observer as quite an indulgence to pick a fight with Russia over Ukraine. But the U.S. has been picking fights since 1812, when it invaded what is now Canada to try and rip off some territory, burned York, Ontario, and the British had to teach the U.S. a lesson by marching down to Washington, D.C., and razing it in retaliation in 1814. (The U.S.' provocation of burning York and other towns is usually omitted in the U.S. version of what happened, just as the fact that the Iranian “hostage crisis” was precipitated by the U.S. letting the hated Shah into the U.S. is omitted in the retelling of this alleged, and unforgivable atrocity by Iran against the U.S. By the way, zero “hostages” were killed, zero “hostages” were harmed- but 250,000 Iranians lost their lives under the tyrannical reign of the Shah, who was installed in a CIA coup in 1953. But man, those Iranians have a lot to answer for over what they did to the U.S.!)

The greedy U.S. thinks it can swallow the whole of Ukraine, but it's looking more and more like the country will split between eastern and western halves, as the economic, cultural, and linguistic links the easterners have with Russia are too strong to be suppressed by a weak, newly installed puppet regime, and if bloody civil war breaks out, Russia will aid the easterners. At best, a prolonged period of instability, insecurity, illegitimate government, and violence is in store. Unless NATO is hankering for a land war in Ukraine, Russia ultimately will not be expelled, and either Ukraine will be split, or the entirety of Ukraine will have to accommodate to Russian interests. [2] The West, which caused the trouble in the first place to a large degree, will screech to high heaven about the awfulness and crudity and thuggishness of Russia and see it all as the culmination of some deep dark Russian plot. The truth is, the plot here is the EU-U.S. plot, which is unraveling, predictably. Blinded by imperial hubris, they couldn't see the obvious; that Russia couldn't, and wouldn't, allow itself to be forced out of a critical strategic area on its own border.

1] Mearsheimer on PBS NewsHour March 4, 2014. Video clip here:

2] Geoffrey Pyatt, of all people, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and one of the chief coup plotters, as glaringly revealed by the infamous intercepted phone call between him and his boss, Assistant Secretary of State, said this on CNN: "The geography and balance of power is such, there is no military solution to this crisis. The fact is that militarily, as Crimea showed, Ukraine is outgunned." Gee, maybe you guys should have thought this through better in advance. Look before you leap.

And the new Ukrainian “prime minister,” the one hand-picked by Victoria Nuland, as we know from that same phone call, popped up on NBC TV's “Meet the Press” (U.S.) to rattle his beggar cup for alms from the Superpower: "We need a strong and solid state. We need financial and economic support. We need to overhaul the Ukrainian military. We need to modernise our security and military forces. We need real support." Hey buddy, you missed Christmas. Mail your wish list to Santa Claus, address: the North Pole. Maybe he'll leave a surprise under your Christmas tree this December.