A Myth Stronger Than Arithmetic: The “Stolen” 1960 Election

There’s a myth about the U.S. presidential election of 1960: that Kennedy won the 1960 presidential election by “stealing” Illinois. (Specifically that the Richard Daley Democratic political machine, which controlled Chicago, the most populous city in Illinois, cheated.)

People as varied as the reactionary numbskull playwright David Mamet, to disillusioned former CIA officer John Stockwell, believe this myth: Mamet out of ideological fanaticism, and Stockwell I assume out of carelessness. [1]

But this myth is ludicrously easy to refute, namely with simple arithmetic.

People hear this myth so often, it probably never occurs to them to check the most obvious fact on which it must rest- that if Illinois' electoral votes were given to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, Nixon would have won. But simple arithmetic shows this isn’t so. All one has to do is perform a mathematical exercise that a first grader could perform: subtract Illinois’ electoral votes from Kennedy’s original total and add it to Nixon’s, and see which number is larger. The larger number is the winner.

So let’s do what the U.S. media has apparently lacked the resources to do in 54 years.

You can confirm these numbers yourselves very easily online. Kennedy’s electoral college total was 303. Nixon’s was 219. Illinois had 27 electoral votes that year, all of them going to Kennedy. Now concentrate, here comes the tricky part: 303 MINUS 27 EQUALS 276. So if Kennedy had “really” lost Illinois, he would have had 276 electoral college votes. Now ADD 27 to Nixon’s 219, and you get 246.

Now here’s the really hard part. 276 is a BIGGER NUMBER than 246. Since the person with the BIGGER NUMBER has MORE VOTES, that person WINS. So Kennedy with 276 STILL BEATS Nixon with 246.

David Mamet, Richard Nixon’s skeleton, all you right-wing conspiracy theorists, and corporate media parrots who uncritically repeat rightwing political agitprop: go back to first grade and retake elementary arithmetic.

The people who started this myth must have either been extremely cynical, or kindergarten drop-outs.

It probably never occurs to people that mythmakers would be so brazen as to fabricate such an obviously fictive claim. Who would have the nerve? But reactionaries follow the Hitler-Stalin method: nothing is too brazen; in fact, the more whopping the lie, the better, because small lies meet with more skepticism than big ones. People assume that a whopping lie must be true, because no one would dare try to pull such a thing. [2] Also, most people could never see how completely unscrupulous Nixon was- thanks to the U.S. corporate propaganda system consistently covering for him, even after the Watergate burglary, or rather the one Watergate burglary (it wasn't the first one the “Plumbers” committed against the practically unguarded Democratic National Committee offices- not even an alarm? or did the CIA-trained burglars, including JFK assassin E. Howard Hunt, disarm an alarm?)

And Nixon, true to his utterly cynical nature, actually put it about for years afterwards that he didn’t challenge the election results for the good of the country! Chutzpah, forevermore thy name is Richard Milhous Nixon. And notice how his slimy move served a dual political function. He deflects right-wingers who might be angry at him for “caving in,” and he presents himself to everyone else as noble, high-minded, self-sacrificing for the good of the nation, a man so loyal he let himself be cheated out of the presidency to serve the higher purpose of protecting the stability and perceived legitimacy of the political power structure! Nixon, one of the most selfish men who ever lived! A man who spent his life playing every angle for self-advancement and self-aggrandizement. The cynicism is supremely ironic.

Meanwhile, the Zombie Myth of the Stolen 1960 Presidency will never die, it seems. The U.$. media is assiduous about heaping ridicule on true conspiracy accounts, such as the assassinations of the Kennedys and King, and the 9/11 attacks, but this one gets a pass, as do most right-wing conspiracy theories. None Dare Call It Bias and Hypocrisy.

1] Not too many years ago, the idiot reactionary Mamet was given space in the Village Voice (an allegedly “alternative” weekly paper) to spout this impossible conspiracy theory. I sent the Voice a letter pointing out the math, but the “leftist” paper didn’t run it, nor did they run a correction so their readers wouldn’t be disinformed by the falsehood.

2] Hitler explicitly stated that a big lie was better than a small one because the average person wouldn’t imagine that anyone would be so brazen as to tell such an obvious untruth, whereas they are more suspicious of small lies because these are the kind they’re familiar with (and that they themselves tell). But he didn’t mean HE lied. He said JEWS used this technique to evade responsibility for losing World War I for Germany. You see, the Jews were guilty of blaming the German General Staff. Ironically, Hitler’s example of the Big Lie technique was itself a big lie.

From James Murphy's translation of Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”):

“But it remained for the Jews, with their unqualified capacity for falsehood, and their fighting comrades, the Marxists, to impute responsibility for the downfall precisely to the man who alone had shown a superhuman will and energy in his effort to prevent the catastrophe which he had foreseen and to save the nation from that hour of complete overthrow and shame. By placing responsibility for the loss of the world war on the shoulders of Ludendorff they took away the weapon of moral right from the only adversary dangerous enough to be likely to succeed in bringing the betrayers of the Fatherland to Justice.

“All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X.

Western-Installed Cabal in Ukraine Tries to Glue Shattered Country Under Its Rule by Force

The Kiev cabal, installed by the U.S. and a violent mob spearheaded by fascists, is now launching murderous assaults on easterners resisting its rule. It has a newly-formed “National Guard” which in an apparent slip the New York Times said was composed of members of the mob that overthrew the elected president of Ukraine. This force is launching sporatic attacks, including with heavy weapons, on checkpoints and strongpoints of separatists and gradually besieging eastern cities. On Sunday, yesterday, the day of the referendum being staged by easterners to vote on independence (NOT on unify with Russia), these fascist goons murdered some civilians in retaliation for the referendum being held. (The U.S. and its Eurolackeys haven't uttered a peep in denunciation or opposition to these murderous attacks, while demanding daily that Putin order the separatists to disarm themselves and submit to the rule of the cabal- which is now officially fronting for the World Bank and its “austerity” economic program assaulting the Ukrainian populace.) [1]

In Ukraine now, we see the Maoist dictum, “political power flows out of the barrel of a gun” in practice. There is no legitimate authority, just people exercising power by direct physical force. The U.S., with its Eurolackeys, is directly responsible for creating this situation by its ill-advised, illegitimate subversion and overthrow of the elected president (Viktor Yanukovych) and his replacement by a World Bank apparatchik (Arseniy Yatsenyuk) whose mission is to deliver Ukraine into the hands of U.S.-bossed Western imperialism.

The U.S. and its Eurolackeys fractured Ukraine with its ill-advised, imperialist, and very aggressive coup and seizure. The U.S. apparently thought it could rip Ukraine completely out of Russian influence, as if Russia has no political gravitational force at all, and bleed its people via the World Bank implanting a needle directly into its economic artery and draining the country. For some strange reason, Russia refuses to play ball by playing dead. Instead, Putin, who is “out of touch with reality” (we are told by the New York Times, which told us a secret White House source told it Angela Merkel told Obama about Putin- still no word directly from Merkel if she said it, but if she did, she's an ass and an obsequious, sycophantic servant to U.S. power- which, actually, she truly is.[2])

U.S.-Ukrainian cabal-appointed “Interior Minister,” the fascist Arsen Avakov who now controls the Ukrainian police, and apparently the army too, boasted on Facebook of killing 20 “terrorists” in another attack in the east on those defying the seizure of the country by the Western-installed clique. The attack occurred in Mariupol, on a police station taken over by armed and unarmed dissidents who reject Western domination and favor, variously, autonomy within Ukraine, independence, or unification with Russia. As in Odessa, where around 40 resisters were burned alive in a building set on fire, the police station was set ablaze. Apparently this sadistic tactic is becoming standard operating procedure for the fascist forces that have been set loose to crush the opposition to the Western-satrap regime.

This three-way division among the opposition to the Western-imposed cabal that seized power in Kiev through violence thus renders simplistic and misleading the label “pro-Russian” for the opposition, and certainly puts the lie to the cabal's propaganda, echoed in much Western media by hack propagandists, professional imperialist polemicists, and pseudo-”experts,” that says it's all Russian agents and/or Russian agitation that's the problem. The old “outside agitators are responsible” line, beloved of Southern white racists in the U.S. who claimed their terrorized “niggers” were happy and content, and of LBJ, who demanded that the CIA discover how the Soviet Union controlled the anti-Vietnam war movement, which it created. Nuts, I know. But pathological mass murderers are nuts, aren't they.

Of course, the propagandists and “respectable” pontificators are following the lines of the “leadership,” namely Obama, Kerry, their European stooge politicians, et al, who say that all would be peace and harmony in Ukraine after their forcible seizure of it if not for Russian “agitation,” “aggression,” “destabilization,” and the alleged threat of “another Russian invasion.”

And the sickest irony? While Western propagandists subject their publics to a daily barrage of mendacious, twisted propaganda, one of their propaganda themes is “Russian propaganda distorts the situation” in Ukraine. Funny, that Russian propaganda hews a lot more closely to reality then the demented imperialist ravings force-fed into people's brains in the West.

1] The loathsome U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR phrased the news of this murder of unarmed civilians by the fascist National Guard like this: “Violence broke out when Ukrainian National Guardsmen opened fire on a crowd,” killing people. Violence broke out. What a sleazy evasion. This phraseology avoids putting moral responsibility on the murderers. Then NPR ran a report from one of its propagandists in Ukraine, Cory Flintoff, who dismissed the delusion by the easterners that the new so-called government “is run by fascists and neo-Nazis.” As if known fascists don't in fact now occupy key posts in the new “government,” controlling the military forces.

2] Merkel bleats a little about U.S. spying on Germany, but this is strictly so she doesn't lose credibility with the German public. Obama has stonewalled her on the German demand-proposal-plea for a “no-spying-on-allies” pact, which the U.S. won't even agree to, even though if they ever DID make such a deal, they'd just double-cross the Germans and everyone else by continuing their compulsive electronic surveillance anyway, but the U.S. won't even PRETEND to stop spying. So this is adding insult, indeed humiliation, to injury. But like the old saw goes: “The Germans; they're either at your feet or at your throat.” They are authoritarians par excellance, which means psychologically they embody the two-sided coin of dominance-submission.

One big reason the U.S. can fuck European nations up their asses is that the so-called “security services” of those nations are controlled by neo-fascists, who naturally ally themselves with their counterparts in the U.S. secret police agencies which they regard as their Big Brothers. (I don't use the mendacious Establishment euphemisms “law enforcement” and “intelligence.” These very terms are lies.) So the European (and Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand, and numerous other nations' too) secret police are in effect traitors to their own nations and are the tools of a foreign power, the U.S. This has been factually proven in many cases, and in the German (and UK and French) case by the Snowden documents, as reported in Der Spiegel, for example. In fact, the U.S. couldn't do what it does without the aiding and abetting of the traitorous, criminal secret police organizations of the victim nations. (In the Third World, of course, it's even worse, as secret police and militaries make war against their domestic populations at U.S. direction, under U.S. tutelage, with U.S.-supplied lists of victims, and with U.S. funding, training, and arms. Europe only suffered some terrorist bombings under the Gladio program, which killed “only” around a hundred people in total, and Australia a bloodless coup that overthrew the Whitlam government. Whitlam was overthrown with the help of Australian secret police/military agencies. See for example “ChasingNugan Hand: Whitlam, the CIA, and Nugan Hand.”)

U.S. Political Elites Refuse to Accept Russia's Legitimacy

If you refuse to accept another nation's legitimate interests, you in effect refuse to accept that nation's legitimacy.

If one accepts that Russia is a legitimate nation, then it inexorably follows that it must have legitimate interests. Surely its interest in Ukraine is legitimate, if it is to have any interests at all that the U.S. and the lackey states of the American imperium recognizes.

But apparently just as it used to be in America that no black man had any rights that a white man was bound to respect, Russia has no interests that America will deign to recognize.

Yet again, the Sunday morning political propaganda shows on U.S. television, populated with the inbred elite of the capital city of the U.S. empire, treated the public to more hysterical bashing of Russia and Putin over Ukraine. George F. Will, a reactionary fixture of the U.S. propaganda system, opined authoritatively (the only way he ever opines) that war has already been started by Russia in Ukraine. Putin's evil “aggression” was much denounced by all on every channel.

What are Russia's interests in Ukraine?

1) Ukraine is on Russia's border.

2) The Crimea peninsula of Ukraine provides Russia's only sea access in its west that is below the Arctic Circle. Russia was now a landlocked nation along its entire thousands-miles long southern border before the Crimeans voted to reunify with Russia (of which Crimea had been a part for centuries until the half-Ukrainian Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev impulsively gifted the Ukrainian Soviet Social Republic- part of the Soviet Union- with it in 1954).

3) Ukrainian factories produce key parts for strategic Soviet weapons.

4) Russia has an interest in preventing a hostile military alliance, NATO, from continuing to gobble up the nations on Russia's western border and farther west. NATO has absorbed all but a handful of Russia's western neighbors. Ukraine is one of the last holdouts.

I don't believe in nation states. But the people who rule the world, who fancy themselves “global leaders,” do. So then the question is: is Russia a legitimate nation-state? Well, let's compare it to its two current leading foes, the U.S. and Germany. Russia has been a nation for centuries longer than either of those two, so it has seniority. By that measure, Russia is more legitimate than either of those two.

Well, how about its historical behavior? Rotten, sure. So is Germany's. (Ever hear of a guy named Adolf Hitler? How about World War I and World War II? There's more, but that should suffice.)

As for America, it's founded on the twin pillars of genocide and slavery. It is one of the most rapidly expanding empires in history. And contrary to its propaganda, it isn't very democratic. Never has been. It has only been in the last 90 years of its history that most adults were even legally permitted to vote in its elections. Today it is a corporate oligarchy fronted by a two-party dictatorship. Nothing to write home about.

We can talk about domestic policy, specifically repression. Presumably a nation that represses its own people is illegitimate. (Which would mean that MOST nations on earth are illegitimate, but never mind.) Russia is far from the most repressive regime on earth, and a LOT less repressive than various U.S. “friends” like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Colombia, to name but three. Much is made of political murders in Russia (despicable, to be sure), but they are on the same order of magnitude as U.S. political murders. Far more political murders are committed in Mexico and Colombia, both of which the U.S. is tight with. (But notice which of these nations gets obsessive U.S. media coverage about its repressiveness- only Russia.) [1]

In fact, the U.S. is more repressive than Russia, if one uses objective measures. The U.S. has the world's largest prison population- far larger than Russia's, and about the same as China's, a country with over four times the population of the U.S. The U.S. conducts the most extensive secret police surveillance of its population of any nation on earth, with the possible exception of North Korea.

The U.S. now has institutionalized torture.

Putin pardoned and freed 1,000 prisoners at the end of last year. Obama? 8. And unlike Putin, who freed the two imprisoned Pussy Riot members still in prison before their sentences were up, Obama freed not a single political prisoner. In fact, he made some of those he “freed” serve months more time in prison before being released, just to be even more grudging about it, it seems.

“Thug” Putin is ultimately responsible for a handful of political killings. Murders. Obama is proud to have killed thousands of “terrorists,” including children, grandmothers, rescue workers, medical personnel, and a 16 year old American son of a “terrorist propaganda.”

But all this doesn't really matter. The U.S. recognizes Russia as a legal nation. Russia is a UN member, and holds a permanent seat on the UN “Security” Council. If the U.S. admits that Russia is a legitimate nation, it has to admit it has legitimate interests. It would be impossible for a nation to NOT have interests, as it would be impossible for a person to not have interests.

If having a friendly Ukraine on its border, and preserving a vital naval base and the military output of Ukrainian factories aren't vital, legitimate interests, what are?

ANY half-competent and RESPONSIBLE Russian ruler would HAVE to defend these vital national interests! Apparently the U.S. was spoiled by Boris Yeltsin, a grossly incompetent, criminally irresponsible drunkard who sold his nation down the road to the U.S. Yeltsin's reign was incredibly destructive for Russia. No wonder the U.S. loved him. Apparently only rulers who will betray their own countries to benefit the U.S. are acceptable to the U.S.

For trying to protect his nation's immediate border, Putin is daily accused in the West of trying to “recreate the Soviet Union” and “restarting the Cold War.” What hogwash. These polemicists, propagandists, politicians and apparatchiks of the U.S. bloc should just come right out and say that they don't accept Russia's right to even have interests- which means it really has no right to exist.

I'm not surprised that a lot of Russians- and a good number of Ukrainians too- disagree with that. I wonder why idiot Western elites are surprised.

1] A couple of thousand people were just sentenced to death in Egypt after two one-hour “trials,” arising from the death of a single cop. In Colombia, labor organizers are routinely assassinated by fascist death squads, which Obama and the U.S. media look the other way and shovel military and secret police aid to the regime and directly help the regime murder leaders of FARC. Mexico is a carnival of the most lurid violence and state corruption, and the police are simply criminal organizations themselves. But oh man, Russia is so corrupt and criminal! Double standard, anyone?

With a side order of hypocrisy and cynicism; coming right up!

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.

Obama: “I'm a Big Believer in Conning People”

No, he didn't say that. He said “I'm a big believer in net neutrality. I campaigned on this, I continue to be a strong supporter of it,...” And he is referring in this 2010 interview to the then FCC Commissioner. The current Obama-appointed Chair of the FCC is industry lobbyist Tom “Wheeler-Dealer” Wheeler.

So from at least 2007 to at least 2010, Obama presented himself publicly as a staunch supporter of net neutrality. Now, without any public notice, he is sneakily moving to “destroy one of the best things about the Internet,” to quote the man himself.

                                                                                                                                                    

But then, Obama tries to conduct most of his evil in secret. From massive, omnipresent NSA surveillance, to assassinations, to draconian laws, to organized repression of protest in the U.S., to supporting some of the worst dictatorships in the world (like Egypt), Obama tries to keep what he does hidden, while trumpeting verbiage designed to dupe. Immigration is a prime example of the glaring contradiction between his words and deeds. While deporting record numbers of people from the U.S. (2 million and counting), smashing to bits tens of thousands of struggling families in the process, and unleashing a violent, murderous Border Patrol, when the political heat from average people starts to rise, he spouts “immigration reform” rhetoric, while doing nothing to push Congress to act. He announces ameliative programs with great fanfare, which in practice remain virtually dormant. (That happened with “mortgage foreclosure relief” too.) The actual programs he pursued with vigor are for greater repression, such as the Orwellian-named “Secure Communities” program, which turn local police into arms of the Immigration Police. This turns immigrant communities into fearful, Insecure places where people cannot report crimes because they will in effect be turning themselves in for summary imprisonment and deportation.

The larger reality to grasp is that the Democratic Party is just as repressive as the Republican Party, and there is plenty of evidence for this, from every Democratic regime form Woodrow Wilson to the current one, as I have described in previous essays in detail.

Obama Says He Himself “Destroys one of the Best Things About the Internet”

Barack Obama, back when he was first hustling his way into the Oval Office, made many false promises and representations about his intentions and policies. Starting as soon as he achieved state power, he showed his true colors by doing the opposite of what he promised.

Technically these are broken promises, but that implies an initial intention to do what he said he was going to do. With the possible exception of closing Guantanamo Bay for PR purposes to tidy up America's image (and moving the prisoners to other prisons- that part wasn't mentioned, including by the corporate media) there is no evidence he ever intended to do what he said. For example, as soon as he got in office, he appointed the architects of the financial calamity and Clinton regime retreads to key positions of power. He has worked to steadily increase the power of the secret police state and ratchet up domestic repression. Abroad, he personally presides over a never-ending campaign of mass assassination (over 4,000 killed by drones so far, and others killed by various means such as airstrikes, military death squad raids, etc.). As far as winding down the Iraq war, it was already being wound down, so he merely was continuing Bush regime policy, as in other matters.

The correct term isn't broken promises. It's betrayals. With malice aforethought, he conned his way into the White House.

I was on to this con man in 2004, when he was first trotted out on the national stage at the Democrats' party convention that year. Others have been much, much slower to “figure Obama out.” There's really nothing complex here. He's an obvious hustler and extremely calculating and ambitious self-promoter (the pattern goes back to his college days), just like the previous Democratic regime heads, the Clintons, with absolutely no moral limits or ethical values. The only limits are imposed by political considerations, which includes imagery.

I don't know how often or egregiously Obama needs to lie to and double-cross people for them to get over being “disappointed” or “disillusioned” with him to finally see reality clearly and take the true measure of the man.

Anyway, here's the latest betrayal. He ran in 2007 and 2008 voicing full-throated support for “net neutrality,” the concept that different websites shouldn't pay for privileged access to homes and other endpoints of data transfer, and ISPs (Internet Service Providers, the corporations that connect end users to the Internet, namely cable TV companies, Telecoms, and satellite providers, and other intermediaries that have to pay to use the wires, fibers, or bandwidth of those companies) shouldn't charge website for privileged, faster transmission speeds while in effect discriminating against smaller websites that lack the capital to pay up.

Now he's done another of his complete reversals. He just appointed a new Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, a wheeler-dealer by the name of Tom Wheeler, who just happens to be the number one lobbyist for both the cable and telecom industries (both of which honored him with awards for his outstanding service on their behalf), and Wheeler is pushing through permission for cable companies to differentiate speed of transmission for websites based on their paying to in effect jump to the head of the transmission line. (And you thought that only Republican regimes appointed foxes to guard the hen houses!) No less than a former FCC commissioner, Michael Copps, who was the longest serving chairman, has denounced this policy.

Let's take a stroll down memory lane and refresh our memories about this Barack Obama Forgotten Pledge. Here he is saying his policy of today “destroys one of the best things about the Internet.” The occasion was an arranged setup with MTV, a channel set up targeting youth, which was helping him in his Pied Piper strategy of getting credulous young people to follow along behind him:

                                                                  

“So as President I'm gonna make sure, that that is the principle, that, my FCC commissioners, uh, are applying, uh, as we move forward.” Did you hear that? Right at the end. Ah, but all that was then. This is now. He should adopt Nixon mouthpiece Ron Ziegler's formulation, and say those previous false statements are "inoperative."

This was in answer to a question from an alleged small businessman with a website. (Longer version with the questioner below.)

He also went out of his way to mislead the digital drones at Google. Here he is at Google HQ:

                                                                      

Apparently “the next chapter in American innovation” is even greater corporate consolidation, power, and control. Comcast, the cable giant that is at the forefront of throttling “freeloader” websites and demanding payment for privileged access to its subscribers, is right now absorbing Time-Warner cable, creating a gargantuan cable system. There is less and less competition for providing Internet access. Most Americans have a choice of either two or one cable providers as it is.

Well, at least ONE Google executive was swayed by the con:

                                                                       

Then we have a young Obama foot soldier (note his teeshirt) who was probably a ringer tasked with “asking a [pre-determined] question.” Anyway, it gave Obama another opportunity to trot out one of his lies:

                                                                         

                                                                               

There he goes again, decrying the idea of access providers wanting to “charge a premium” to some websites, and defending “net neutrality.” “That's going to be a major battle,” he said. And now we can see without any doubt which side he's on. What a treacherous guy! He's an enemy infiltrator of all progressive movements, in effect. Maybe NOW fools will finally STOP INVESTING HOPES in establishment politicians. At least vote for genuine reformers, like Nader (savagely attacked by the Democratic Party enforcers at The Nation magazine, among others).

Here's the longer version of the Q and A from MTV:

                                                                                  

But all this is small beer next to thousands of assassinations, signing into law (and fanatically defending in court) a law allowing Americans to be indefinitely imprisoned in the military gulag at the whim of the President, erecting the most massive system of population surveillance in human history, the deportation of two million non-citizen workers (smashing countless families to bits in the process), and empowering the U.S. Border Patrol to shoot dead Mexican citizens in Mexico for “throwing rocks” (which isn't even true sometimes), to name a few monstrous horrors of the Era of Obama.  

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.

Ukraine Imches Closer to Civil War: Kerry Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

The U.S. coup and seizure of the central government in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, has fissured that nation
into two parts; the eastern section with its economic, social, linguistic, and cultural ties to "Mother Russia," and the western part, now dominated by fascists and U.S. functional puppets who seized power violently, overthrowing an elected government. The western populace hallucinates a pot of gold awaiting them to the west, whereas in fact what awaits (and is already being agreed to by the new puppet regime) is World Bank-imposed "austerity" and debt collection.

Yesterday at least three people were killed in attacks on Russian-leaning ad hoc militias who have seized government buidings in the eastern cities. In response to this, U.S. Secretary of State John "These Days I'm a Hawk!" Kerry has ordered Russia to make the easterners surrender to the authority of the puppet regime in Kiev or else face further sanctions, on the assumption that Russia exercises iron control over the eastern population.

Contrast that with U.S. behavior when it pumped $100 million into subverting the Ukrainian elected government and backed a terrorist mob that besieged the seat of government in Kiev, murdering cops and burning buildings and vehicles, complete with false flag snipers killing both police and rioters (which was blamed on the targeted regime of Yanukovych, since overthrown). At that time, it denounced the government it was working to overthrow and demanded the removal of the police who were holding back the fascist-thug led rioters! Now that the shoe is on the other foot, the U.S. does a 180 and demands law and order.

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov claims that the U.S. side is in violation of the interim deal reached in Geneva by not disarming fascist militias.

No doubt the Russians aren't trying very hard, if at all, to convince Ukrainians who want no part of the forced separation from Russia to stand down and surrender. But Russia has far more legitimate interests in Ukraine than does the U.S.

Russia can't even raise the price on natural gas it sells to Ukraine from the cut-rate sweetheart rates it charged to market prices without the western propagandists calling it extortion.

After this fracturing and destabilizing of Ukraine by aggressive Western imperialism, they have the call to pin the blame for destabilizing on Russia.

So now we know what makes a "bad guy." Anyone who gets in the way of the plans of Godfather U.S.

Sinister U.S. Secret Police Chief Appears in Kiev

CIA head John Brennan himself personally went to Kiev, capital of Ukraine, to arrange God knows what evil. As the CIA's stock-in-trade is assassination and torture and the creation of police states under U.S. control, we can expect no good to come of this.

Brennan is Obama's chief enforcer, a man who worked cheek by jowl with Obama for four years in the White House overseeing the U.S. global assassination program. During the previous Bush regime, he was involved in the torture program. This involvement stopped Obama's plan to make Brennan chief of the CIA several years ago, but eventually Obama was able to arrange it.

Brennan will of necessity be working with Ukrainian fascists, as these are the people who were handed control of the Ukrainian "security forces" (Internal Security). The U.S. of course has a long history of warm relations with fascists going back to the 1920s, and the CIA in particular has been chummy with them since its founding in 1947, enlisting many Nazi war criminals, protecting them, learning their torture methods, paying them to help run a torture center in Germany in the 1950s, and forming alliances and nurturing relationships with them in numerous countries all over the world. You could say the U.S. has been the arsenal of fascism since World War II.  [1]

Brennan is a leading suspect in the murder of investigative journalist Michael Hastings last year, who was working on a highly sensitive story about the CIA at the time.

In other Ukraine-subversion news, Russia agreed to join a U.S.-EU demand that anti-coup Ukrainians vacate government buildings they're occupying in eastern Ukraine. The U.S.-and EU made no such demand when their coup mob occupied government buildings in Kiev, and firebombed vehicles and buildings and shot cops Back then, from Obama on down, the demand was for the now-overthrown Yanukovych government to pull out the police and let the mob take over the city.

1]  For the CIA-Army torture center in Germany in the 1950s, see "Code Name: Artichoke -  Conspiracy Documentary," dealing with the CIA murder of CIA scientist Frank Olson. The section on the torture center starts at 24:00 in the video.

U.S. Bloc Ups the Ante on Ukraine Confrontation, With More Violence and Military Reinforcements

The U.S. isn't backing off one inch from its brazen attempt to rip the Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence and have it all to itself- the entire Ukraine.

Recall that repeated Russian offers to share the Ukraine with the Western empire- incredibly generous and not something the U.S. would ever consider regarding Mexico, say, or Canada- have been rebuffed. Starting with the “take it or leave it” deal the EU demanded ousted president Yanukovych sign earlier this year, when the Russians offered a three-way economic arrangement which the EU peremptorily rejected, through the power-sharing arrangements Yanukovych offered the “opposition,” which they rejected, the U.S.-bloc has been playing a winner-take-all power game over Ukraine.

Now NATO blowhard-militarist Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a reliable U.S. tool in all matters who has been making veiled threats against Russia for weeks, has announced that NATO will send more military forces into NATO-states on the Russian border. The U.S. Navy is sailing warships in the Black Sea. (And the U.S. had the chutzpah to grouse about a Russian plane “buzzing” one of the intruder warships.)

On the same day the now fascist-led Ukrainian puppet government's forces were killing and wounding scores in their “anti-terrorist operations” to seize key facilities occupied by pro-Russian Ukrainians in eastern cities, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was saying this: "We appreciate the [Western-installed Ukrainian client] government’s statements that any actions it undertakes will be gradual and responsible, and we agree that the use of force is not a preferred option. That said, the Ukrainian government has a responsibility to provide law and order, and these provocations in eastern Ukraine are creating a situation in which the government has to respond. The best way to de-escalate this situation is for the armed militants to leave the buildings they have seized." (April 16^th.) Or, surrender or die.

Notice what carney said; the U.S. PREFERS that the Ukrainians resisting the U.S. takeover of
Ukraine just give up and stop resisting. But if they don't, the puppet government HAS to crush them ("has a responsibility...")

Funny, when Western-sponsored “armed militants” (many of them fascists and flaming anti-Semites whose hero is World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera) had occupied government buildings in Kiev, gutting some by fire, shooting and throwing Molotovs at police, with false flag snipers working for Maidan (the “moderate” group which overthrew the government; see Ukraine Snipers Worked For U.S. Puppet Government, Estonian Foreign Minister Told Ashton), Obama demanded that then-President Yanukovych withdraw the security forces! (Which of course would have allowed the violent mob to completely take over Kiev and seize state power, as they subsequently did.) Now that the shoe is on the other foot, in eastern Ukraine, of course the U.S. takes exactly the opposite position.

The U.S. Assistant Secretary of State herself was physically present on the streets of Kiev during the violent siege of the seat of government, handing out cookies to the killers who were killing cop and who ultimately overthrew the elected government, leading to the installation of new rulers handpicked by Nuland herself. (As we know beyond a shadow of a doubt from the intercepted phone call between her and her underling, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, in which she gives Pyatt his marching orders. See U.S. Enlisted UN Stooges in Ukraine Subversion.)

Now Secretary of State John “These Days I'm a Hawk!” Kerry is meeting in Geneva with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, along with the U.S.' EU lackeys and Ukrainian puppets, to try once again to jawbone the Russians into surrendering their interests.

GOP Senator John “Permanent POW” McCain assumed his usual perch on the Sunday morning TV propaganda shows to demand that Obama ship more arms to the Ukrainian puppet regime to fight the Russians. Of course, Russia could crush the Ukrainian military with one finger, so the real purpose of more weapons would be to fight and win a civil war.

So after destabilizing Ukraine with a coup and takeover (the U.S. and various private donors spent up to $100 million or so on the destabilization effort and takeover) which included false flag snipers killing both policemen and rioters (and blaming it on the hapless former president Yanukovych), we hear from Western politicians, apparatchiks, and propagandists incessant condemnations of Russia for “destabilizing” Ukraine and for breaking “international law”

Something tells me Russia is not going to allow itself to be landlocked along its entire southern border just so “the West” will stop saying mean things about it, or so Putin's pals can sun themselves on the Riviera.

This is the gratitude the U.S. shows Russia for providing crucial logistical support for the U.S. crusade in Afghanistan. The U.S. depends on transit through Russia for its expeditionary force there.

Interestingly, Pakistan gets a much better deal from the U.S., even though the Taliban is the cat's paw of the Paki military secret police, the malevolent ISI! (Inter-Services Intelligence.) Go figure.

Fascist Ukrainian youth honor their idol, World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

Ukraine Snipers Worked For U.S. Puppet Government, Estonian Foreign Minister Told Ashton

Another ignored phone call.

Just as the infamous phone call between U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, has been consigned to oblivion by western media and governments as if it never happened, so too the telephone conversation between the Estonian Minister of Foreign Affairs Urmas Paet and Catherine Ashton, the grandly-named “High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy,” aka “EU foreign minister.” In the former conversation, we heard U.S. apparatchiks discussing U.S. subversion of the Ukrainian government and plotting to install a puppet regime. In the latter call, the Estonian Foreign Minister revealed that those infamous snipers were NOT working for the Viktor Yanukovych regime (subsequently forced out of power) but were elements of the opposition, shooting both street protesters/rebels and policemen. (A couple of dozen policemen were murdered during the two-month-long violent attack on the elected government, most by the snipers.) This phone call became public in the first days of March. As of today, U.S. polemicists and propagandists and pseudo-scholars are still pretending that the snipers were acting under orders from the ousted Yanukovych. (They present no evidence for the assertion, but merely state it as established, undisputed fact.)

Let us look at that phone call (you can listen to it below). EU poohbah Ashton is debriefing Paet on his recent visit to Ukraine, to get an update on how their political manipulations are going. Estonia, Paet's country, is a very junior member of the EU, and a recent addition to that anti-Soviet and now anti-Russian military alliance, NATO. (Having lost its claimed reason for being with the extinction of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has been using NATO as a recruitment vehicle for roping European forces into joining it in its various military adventures outside Europe.)

Paet met various politicians and other people in Ukraine. He told Ashton that the “head of doctors” in Ukraine, “Olga,” and others from “civil society” told him:

“There is no trust in new government....They know everybody who will be in new government, all these guys have dirty past.” Fascist thugs beat a member of Parliament in front of Parliament, journalists who witnessed it told Paet. “There is extraordinary pressure on members of Parliament,” such as middle-of-the-night “uninvited visitors” to parliament members. [That is, fascist goons.] The EU wants “Olga,” to be Health Minister. She's balking, according to Paet. Ashton is quite cynical. Ashton proposes lines to feed to “Olga” and others to convince them that the foreign-installed puppet government is not all bad and to induce them to join it, to lend it legitimacy.

After Ashton instructs Paet that Yanukovych must be blamed for the death, Paet gives her unwanted news, namely that the snipers were working for the Western-backed opposition.

Paet: “In fact and what was quite disturbing, the same Olga, told that well, all the evidence shows, eh that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among, policemen and then people from the streets, that they were the same snipers, killing, people from both sides.”

Ashton, sounding flustered: “Well that's, yes, that's-”

Paet: “So that um then she also showed me some photos, uh she said that as medical doctor she can you know say that it is the same, same handwriting [sic], the same type of bullets, and it's really disturbing that now the, new, uh [he sighs] new coalition, that they don't want to investigate, what exactly happened, So that there is, now stronger and stronger understanding, that behind snipers they were, it was not Yanukovych, but, it was somebody from the new coalition.”

Ashton basically ignores the facts, and contradicts Paet on the last point. "I think they do want to investigate I mean I didn't oh pick that up that's interesting. Gosh.” (GOSH!) We can see that Ashton would prefer the truth about the snipers not be mentioned. The truth flies in the face of the western propaganda line that Yanokovich is responsible for all “the violence.”

Listen carefully to the recording. Ashton pushes to manipulate “Olga” to be an EU stooge and join the government to legitimize it. Ashton's whole thing is trying to make the new puppet regime look legitimate, paper over the crimes, misdirect people's anger, and cynically manipulate their grief. And blame all the chaos and violence on the just-overthrown Yanukovych. The first approximately two minutes of the call are underlings setting up the call, so you might want to skip ahead if you're impatient:

                                       

Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and Catherine Ashton discuss Ukraine over the phone

   [sound might be clearer at version at link above.]

The western media, a highly-disciplined collection of propaganda organs, simply ignores this stunning evidence, and various anti-Russian polemicists and agit-propagandists continue to blame Yanukovych for the snipers. This is just one of many lies, which gain currency through repetition, within the Big Lie, that Russia somehow fomented the “crisis” in Ukraine, not the U.S. and its lackeys by instigating and egging on a violent mob coup, with fascist anti-Semites at its core (somehow the U.S. ALWAYS ends up in league with fascists, you notice that?). The fact that the U.S. and EU couldn't wait until the next scheduled elections this spring puts the lie to the idea that “the Ukrainian people” rose as one to overthrow the elected government. What was the big rush to overthrow Yanukovych that it couldn't wait until May?

Recall that as the violent mob besieged the seat of government for two months, and repeatedly tried to storm the Parliament, Obama demanded that Yanukovych “end the violence” by withdrawing the police!! Yanokovich proposed compromises and tried to bring opposition figures into the government. Under U.S. direction, all compromise by the “opposition” (U.S. puppets) was rejected.

All this because Yanukovych didn't sign an economic treaty with the EU!!

Yes, he was corrupt. So are all Ukrainian governments, and so will the new U.S.-puppet one be. In fact, the U.S. prefers corrupt governments. They are much easier to control through bribery and blackmail than honest governments. Also the politicians and bureaucrats in corrupt governments don't give a damn about the well-being of their countries and peoples, and thus are willing to sell them out to foreign meddlers like the U.S. and EU nations for a few gold coins or a promotion by the imperialist string-pullers.

The idea that being corrupt is justification for a violent foreign-backed mob coup is ludicrous, when the Ukrainian voters have it fully within their power to oust that government in an election in a few months! But that's the excuse that's put forth, along with the sniper-murders falsely pinned on Yanukovych, and “violence” generally, violence committed by the fascist mob. (There are numerous videos on youtube.com of the mob's siege of the seat of government in Kiev, their arson, their violent attacks on police lines holding the mob back from overrunning the government buildings, and so on. All the evidence is ignored in this giant propaganda campaign by western medias, following the leads of their governments. Those media might as well be state-controlled, as they are acting no differently than state-controlled media would be.)

On this strategy of false-flag snipers as part of a foreign subversion effort, the same thing happened in Venezuela. Domestic elements trying to destabilize and overthrow a government, with a hidden U.S. hand pushing them along, use snipers to assassinate opposition protesters in the street and blame the government. The U.S. and other western media (and governments) then loudly blare the lie that the government is using snipers to murder peaceful protesters in the street.

Here's a video, with testimony from a CNN reporter, on how coup plotters in Venezuela used snipers in this fashion:

From “Counter Intelligence III: The Strategy of Tension.”

And here's Chalmers Johnson on the topic, who also mentions an example of the shameless mendacity of U.S. media propagandists, in this case JFK-assassination accessory Dan Rather, blaming sniper-murders on the hated Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Johnson points out that using snipers to gun people down and blaming the murders on the government targeted for overthrow is a standard U.S. destabilization tactic:

                                                             

From “Decline of Empires: The Signs of Decay.”

Thus do gangster empires behave. They are a blight on humanity.