The Beneficiaries of Conflict With Russia

by Brian Cloughley

March 31, 2017

                            

www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/31/the-beneficiaries-of-conflict-with-russia/

On  January 30 NBC News reported that “On a snowy Polish plain dominated by Russian forces for decades, American tanks and troops sent a message to Moscow and demonstrated the firepower of the NATO alliance. Amid concerns that President Donald Trump’s commitment to NATO is wavering, the tanks fired salvos that declared the 28-nation alliance a vital deterrent in a dangerous new world.”

One intriguing aspect of this slanted account are the phrases “dominated by Russian forces for decades” and “vital deterrent” which are used by NBC to imply that Russia yearns, for some unspecified reason, to invade Poland. As is common in the Western media there is no justification or evidence to substantiate the suggestion that Russia is hell-bent on domination, and the fact that US troops are far from home, operating along the Russian border, is regarded as normal behaviour on the part of the world’s “indispensable nation.”

Then Reuters recorded that “Beginning in February, US military units will spread out across Poland, the Baltic states, Bulgaria, Romania and Germany for training, exercises and maintenance. The Army is also sending its 10th Combat Aviation Brigade with about 50 Black Hawk and 10 CH-47 Chinook helicopters and 1,800 personnel, as well as a separate aviation battalion with 400 troops and 24 Apache helicopters.”

As the US-NATO military alliance continues its deployments along Russia’s borders, including the US-UK supported Joint Viking 2017 exercise in Norway that began on March 1 and the deployment of  more US troops in Poland “from the start of April, as the alliance sets up a new force in response to Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea,” the campaign by the US and British governments against alleged “Russian Aggression” continues to increase in volume and intensity, aided by an ever-compliant media.

During his visit to Washington on March 6-7 Ukraine’s foreign minister Pavlo Klimkin met with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Senator Marco Rubio of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and received assurances of US support in “confronting Russian aggression” while in Britain it was announced that its foreign minister, Boris Johnson, the “mop-haired buffoon” was about to visit Russia in to tell it to “keep its nose” out of western affairs. Mr Johnson declared that Russia “was up to all sorts of no good” and “engaged in cyber-warfare.”

The splendid irony of the Johnson allegation about cyber warfare is that it came just before the revelation that Britain’s intelligence agencies were deeply involved with those of the United States in cyber-chicanery on a massive scale. WikiLeaks once again showed the depths of deceit and humbug to which the West’s great democracies submerge themselves, and revealed that leaked files “describe CIA plans and descriptions of malware and other tools that could be used to hack into some of the world’s most popular technology platforms. The documents showed that the developers aimed to be able to inject these tools into targeted computers without the owners’ awareness . . . the documents show broad exchanges of tools and information between the CIA, the National Security Agency and other US federal intelligence agencies, as well as intelligence services of close allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.”

ABC News then announced, without a shred of proof, that “Julian Assange, the man behind WikiLeaks, appears to have a strong relationship with Russia” but could not disguise the report by CNN that the documents disclosed that “to hide its operations, the CIA routinely adopted techniques that enabled its hackers to appear as if they were Russian.”

There has been no comment on the WikiLeaks revelations by such as US Senator Amy Klobuchar who declared in January that “Russia used cyberattacks and propaganda to try and undermine our democracy. We are not alone. Russia has a pattern of waging cyberattacks and military invasions against democracies across the world.”  She was echoed by Senator Ben Sasse who declared that increased US sanctions would “upend Putin’s calculus and defend America from Russian cyberattacks and political meddling.”

Of course it would be impossible for the Senators to revise their rabid hatred of Russia and overcome their dismal pride to acknowledge that on March 1 the US National Reconnaissance Office launched a spy satellite carried by an Atlas V rocket that was powered by a Russian RD-180 engine. In an astonishing example of petty-minded obfuscation, the 1,500-word official report on the launching mentioned RD-180 three times — but failed to state its country of manufacture. The mainstream media followed suit.

There was to be another Atlas V launch in March, carrying supplies to the International Space Station, but it was delayed by “a hydraulic issue that was uncovered on ground support equipment required for launch.” Had it been deferred because of malfunction of the Russian engine that powers it, there would have been gloating headlines.

Reaction by the US government to the WikiLeaks disclosures has been to denounce them because they supposedly “not only jeopardise US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.”  Predictably, Senator Sasse tweeted that “Julian Assange should spend the rest of his life wearing an orange jumpsuit. He’s an enemy of the American people and an ally to Vladimir Putin.”

There should be no surprise about the activities of US and British intelligence agencies, because they already have a proven record of spying on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Chancellor Merkel of Germany, French Presidents Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, to name but a few world leaders subjected to the indignity of greasy little eavesdroppers sniggering at their private conversations.

In June 2013 it was revealed that the United States of America had been spying on European Union computer networks in the EU offices in Washington and New York. According to Germany’s Der Spiegel a document of September 2010 “explicitly named the Union’s representation at the UN as a ‘location target’.” Der Spiegel discovered  that “the NSA had also conducted an electronic eavesdropping operation in a building in Brussels where the EU Council of Ministers and the European Council were located.”  Together with their British colleagues, the techno-dweebs of Government Communications Headquarters, the US agencies have been having a ball — but have been unable to prove that Russia “used cyberattacks and propaganda to try and undermine our democracy.”

The faithful CIA mouthpiece, the New York Times, stated in December that “American spy and law enforcement agencies were united in the belief, in the weeks before the presidential election, that the Russian government had deployed computer hackers to sow chaos during the campaign.”  Not only this, but “CIA officials presented lawmakers with a stunning new judgment that upended the debate: Russia, they said, had intervened with the primary aim of helping make Donald J Trump president.”

But there is no evidence whatever that there was election-time hacking by Russia, and now there is proof that “to hide its operations, the CIA routinely adopted techniques that enabled its hackers to appear as if they were Russian.”

Although none of the assertions that Russia has been conducting a cyber war against America can be substantiated, Washington’s anti-Russia propaganda campaign will continue for the foreseeable future, while President Trump’s initial intentions to enter into dialogue with his counterpart in Moscow wither away to nothing. Even if he does resurrect the sensible policy he seemed to endorse, his acolytes in Washington will do their best to maintain confrontation by spreading more allegations of Russian “aggression” and “cyberattacks.”  The anti-Russia campaign is gathering force, and it is not difficult to put a finger on why such a counter-productive crusade appeals to so many in the West.

The US arms and intelligence industries are the main beneficiaries of confrontation with Russia, closely followed by the hierarchy of the defunct US-NATO military alliance who have been desperately seeking justification for its existence for many years.  For so long as the military-industrial complex holds sway in Washington, there will continue to be sabre-rattling and mindless military posturing.

But the International Space Station will continue to be resupplied by rockets powered by Russian engines.

Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.

The Push for Single-Payer Healthcare Is On. Democrats Should Get on Board or Get Out of the Way.

Following the stunning collapse of Trumpcare, Bernie Sanders is leading the fight by progressives to win single-payer.

BY Miles Kampf-Lassin

http://inthesetimes.com/article/20002/trumpcare-single-payer-medicare-obamacare-bernie-sanders-democrats

The failure of Trumpcare to pass the House on Friday was a devastating defeat for both the nascent administration and the GOP. For seven years, Republicans railed against Obamacare, promising to “repeal and replace” the law as soon as they could. Trump himself pledged to do so repeatedly on the campaign trail and from the Oval Office.

Yet despite controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency, Republicans could not get a bill through their own caucus in the House. Speaker Paul Ryan, one of the bill’s architects, admitted, “This was a disappointing day for us.”

Democrats understandably responded with glee. However, besides Bernie Sanders, their side of the aisle offered little in the way of a counter proposal for how to address the very real problems with Obamacare.

Trump and Ryan correctly predict that the issues with the current healthcare system—from rising premiums to insurers pulling out of exchanges—are only going to get worse over the coming months and years.

Part of the reason is that Republicans will do everything in their power to make sure these problems intensify. Health Secretary Tom Price, a longtime opponent of Obamacare, has considerable leverage to disrupt the already fragile system set up by the Affordable Care Act.

But the fundamental failures of Obamacare stem from the law's reliance on the private market. Why are insurance companies such as Humana and Aetna fleeing the exchanges? Why are premiums spiking for many middle-class Americans? Because private companies are responding to the logic of capital: Maximize profits while reducing costs.

When Republican governors reject Medicaid expansion, more sick, low-come people require insurance coverage—the healthcare consumers who are the most expensive to treat. This, in turn, creates a disincentive for insurers to offer affordable plans through the exchanges, and, as a consequence, providers pull out of markets and costs rise for everyone.

This trend is sure to continue if nothing is done to fix the system, and the only fix that will work is to expand the risk pool and include everyone. With such a system of universal coverage, costs would be spread out evenly and illness would no longer be seen as a liability in determining the costs and benefits of care.

Any real long-term solution must take this question of the market head on by moving to eliminate the private healthcare insurance industry.

The real alternative

So how can Democrats respond to the problems with Obamacare and the coming sabotage? The answer is simple, and incredibly popular: Push for a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system.

Bernie Sanders, the most popular politician in America and open democratic socialist, plans to introduce legislation creating a Medicare-for-all system in the Senate in the coming weeks. Democratic National Committee Deputy Chair Keith Ellison, a co-sponsor of a Medicare-for-all bill in the House, has reiterated his support for the measure. And as Dave Weigel reports at the Washington Post, more Democrats are coming around to the idea. Even Nancy Pelosi, who recently said of Democrats, “We're capitalists, and that's just the way it is,” is voicing support for single-payer.

A single-payer plan would mean the United States would finally join the rest of the developed world in guaranteeing healthcare to all citizens regardless of their income. And it would greatly reduce costs.  

Plus, as Medicare for All organizer and longtime prisoner justice advocate Mariame Kaba recently explained, it directly speaks to the needs of working people by building off of an already incredibly popular program:

What you need in an organizing sense is you need an issue to be able to appeal to people. Medicare is what we have that is the most close to a kind of socialist policy in place around healthcare. It’s the one that people understand, that they already have…You organize around the things that have material, direct, and urgent impact on people’s lives, and then you push those people through that fight into fighting for other things together.

The barriers to passing single-payer in the current political terrain are significant. Republicans want to move in precisely the opposite direction, separating government from healthcare. And moderate and conservative Democrats have historically been resistant to such a plan.

But following the spectacular failure of the Republican bill, momentum is on the side of the opposition. This creates an opportunity that progressive groups are hoping to seize.

Organizations such as National Nurses United, the Working Families Party, the Democratic Socialists of America and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee all hope to organize the grassroots in order to take advantage of this newfound push for single-payer.

From demand to reality

Much reporting on the GOP failure to pass Trumpcare has focused on Republican infighting, but the massive outpouring of resistance from the public played a critical role. Phone calls from constituents went 50-1 against the bill, and recent congressional town halls have been mirror images of those crashed by Tea Party protesters during the fight over Obamacare.  

A continuation of this citizen engagement will be needed to move the country closer to a single-payer system. In states such as Rhode Island and California, local activists are pushing proposals for single-payer. And while the bills supported by Sanders and Ellison are unlikely to pass now, they provide Democrats with a rallying point to demand a truly universal healthcare system—a proposition supported by 58 percent of Americans.

This would also open the door to proposals that lay the foundation for single-payer, whether it’s allowing the import of cheap pharmaceuticals from Canada and other countries, introducing a public option on the exchanges or lowering the Medicare age to 55—a popular idea that nearly became law with the passage of Obamacare before it was torpedoed by then-Sen. Joe Lieberman. Lowering the Medicare age would clear the path for eventually taking it all the way to zero.

The crashing and burning of Trumpcare will benefit millions of Americans. Yet millions continue to live without affordable healthcare. Making single-payer a demand provides a clear message to politicians: Where do you stand? It also provides an opportunity to call out the hypocrisy of Trump, who as a candidate promised “insurance for everybody.”

Single-payer would do that, and it would cost considerably less than the current system. That is a clear and simple message, and it's a winning one for 2018 and beyond.

Spiral Beach - Voodoo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f9j7rHVp0U

Blaming Russia for Everything

March 31, 2017

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/03/31/blaming-russia-for-everything/

Exclusive: The Senate Intelligence Committee launched its Russia-gate investigation by inviting some “experts” in to rant about how everything that goes wrong in the United States is the fault of the Russians, observes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

It’s almost getting comical how everything that happens in the United States gets blamed on Russia! Russia! Russia! And, if any American points out the absurdity of this argument, he or she must be a “Moscow stooge” or a “Putin puppet.”

When Sen. Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign fails seemingly because he was a wet-behind-the-ears candidate who performed like a robot during debates repeating the same talking points over and over, you might have cited those shortcomings to explain why “Little Marco” flamed out. However, if you did, that would make you a Russian “useful idiot”! The “real” reason for his failure, as we learned from Thursday’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, was Russia!

When Americans turned against President Obama’s Pacific trade deals, you might have thought that it was because people across the country had grown sick and tired of these neoliberal agreements that have left large swaths of the country deindustrialized and former blue-collar workers turning to opioids and alcohol. But if you did think that, that would mean you are a dupe of the clever Russkies, as ex-British spy Christopher Steele made clear in one of his “oppo” research reports against Donald Trump. As Steele’s dossier explained, the rejection of Obama’s TPP and TTIP trade deals resulted from Russian propaganda!

When Hillary Clinton boots a presidential election that was literally hers to lose, you might have thought that she lost because she insisted on channeling her State Department emails through a private server that endangered national security; that she gave paid speeches to Wall Street and tried to hide the contents from the voters; that she called half of Donald Trump’s supporters “deplorables”; that she was a widely disliked establishment candidate in an anti-establishment year; that she was shoved down the throats of progressive Democrats by a Democratic Party hierarchy that made her nomination “inevitable” via the undemocratic use of unelected “super-delegates”; that some of her State Department emails were found on the laptop of suspected sex offender Anthony Weiner (the husband of Clinton’s close aide Huma Abedin); and that the laptop discovery caused FBI Director James Comey to briefly reopen the investigation of Clinton’s private email server in the last days of the campaign.

You might even recall that Clinton herself blamed her late collapse in the polls on Comey’s announcement, as did other liberal luminaries such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. But if you thought those thoughts or remembered those memories, that is just more proof that you are a “Russian mole”!

As we all should know in our properly restructured memory banks and our rearranged sense of reality, it was all Russia’s fault! Russia did it by undermining our democratic process through the clever means of releasing truthful information via WikiLeaks that provided evidence of how the Democratic National Committee rigged the nomination process against Sen. Bernie Sanders, revealed the contents of Clinton’s hidden Wall Street speeches, and exposed pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation in its dealings with foreign entities.

You see the evil Russians undermined American democracy by arming the American people with truthful information! How dastardly is that! Could Boris and Natasha do any better or worse? And although the Soviet spies in FX’s “The Americans” were in their prime in the 1980s and would be pretty old by now, do we know where they are in the present day? Though WikiLeaks denies getting the two batches of emails – the DNC’s and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s – from the Russians, have we ruled out that the emails might have been slipped to WikiLeaks by the FX characters Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, presumably in disguise?

Oddly, too, when similar factual revelations come from Western-favored leaks, such as the purloined financial records of a Panamanian law firm known as the “Panama Papers,” we hail the disclosures regardless of the dubious methods that were used to steal them, especially if the contents can be spun to undermine disfavored governments like Russia (while also inconveniently embarrassing a few unimportant “’allies”).

But if you make that comparison or you note how the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy have supported various “independent” journalists and news outlets to advance U.S. propaganda, that makes you guilty of “moral equivalence,” another serious offense.

Crazy Talk

So now that you know how the game is played, you had the Senate Intelligence Committee eliciting testimony from people like media watcher Clint Watts, who seems to believe that any criticism of a U.S. government official (at least anyone he likes) must be directed by Russia!

“This past week we observed social media accounts discrediting U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan,” said Watts, who is billed in The Washington Post as “an expert in terrorism forecasting and Russian influence operations.”

Gee, I know you might say that you went on Facebook last week to criticize Ryan for bungling the “repeal and replace” of Obamacare by proposing a scheme that managed to alienate both right-wing and moderate Republicans as well as all Democrats. But that only proves you are indeed a Russian disinformation agent! (Watts also claimed that Sen. Rubio’s presidential bid “anecdotally suffered” from an online Russian campaign against him.)

As Watts describes these nefarious Russian schemes, they are so nefarious that they don’t have any discernible earmarks or detectable predictability. In his view, the Russians don’t want to help any particular person or group, just undermine America’s faith in its democracy.

As Watts puts it, Russians attack “people on both sides of the aisle … solely based on what they [the Russians] want to achieve in their own landscape, whatever the Russian foreign policy objectives are. They win because they play both sides.” In other words, any political comment that an American might make might just prove that you’re a traitor.

But Watts singled out President Trump for special criticism because he supposedly has tweeted about Russian-planted conspiracy theories. “Part of the reason active measures have worked in this U.S. election is because the commander-in-chief has used Russian active measure at times against his opponent,” Watts said, citing Trump’s bogus claims about 2016 voter fraud and his earlier silliness about President Obama’s Kenyan birthplace. Yes, as we all know, every goofy idea is manufactured in Russia. Americans are incapable of developing their own nonsense.

Watts then suggested that some kind of Ministry of Truth is needed to stamp out unapproved information. “Until we get a firm basis on fact and fiction in our own country, … we’re going to have a big problem,” Watts said. He warned of a dangerous future from Russian information: “Somewhere in their cache right now there’s tremendous amounts of information laying around they can weaponize against other Americans.”

Perhaps what is even more frightening than the Russians letting Americans in on how Washington’s political process really works – by somehow slipping WikiLeaks some evidence of Democratic Party bigwigs tilting the Democratic primaries to ensure Clinton’s nomination and revealing what Clinton told those Wall Street bankers – is the idea that the U.S. government should be enlisted to enforce what Americans get to see and hear.

The PropOrNot Smear

Watts and his alarums showed up in another context in the weeks after the 2016 election when The Washington Post ran a front-page story highlighting the claims by an anonymous group, PropOrNot, which was pushing a blacklist of 200 Internet news sites, including such independent sources of information as Counterpunch, Truthdig, Naked Capitalism, Zero Hedge, Truth-out and Consortiumnews.

Though the Post granted PropOrNot anonymity so it could safely slander independent-minded journalists, the Post turned to Watts to bolster PropOrNot’s case. “They [the Russians] want to essentially erode faith in the U.S. government or U.S. government interests,” Watts said. “This was their standard mode during the Cold War. The problem is that this was hard to do before social media.”

The Post then linked to an article that Watts had co-authored entitled, “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” which, in turn, cited as proof RT articles that mentioned Hillary Clinton’s health problem last September (which was later acknowledged to be a bout with pneumonia) and that discussed the vulnerabilities of the Federal Reserve (in an age of escalating public and private debt). Both might seem to you like reasonable topics for journalists, but you must understand that RT – because it is Russian-sponsored – has become the favorite whipping boy of anyone trying to make the case that America is besieged by Russian propaganda. And don’t you dare mention that almost no one in America actually watches RT or you might end up on PropOrNot’s list, too.

Watts and his cohorts continue: “Social issues currently provide a useful window for Russian messaging. Police brutality, racial tensions, protests, anti-government standoffs, online privacy concerns, and alleged government misconduct are all emphasized to magnify their scale and leveraged to undermine the fabric of society.”

And, we know for sure that you’re a Russian agent if you express any concern that the heightened tensions between the U.S. and Russia might lead to nuclear war. As Watts and friends write, “More recently, Moscow turned to stoking fears of nuclear war between the United States and Russia” – and their “proof” was a link not to RT but to the financial Web site, Zero Hedge, which already had made it onto PropOrNot’s black list.

So, let’s see if we got this right: We are not to worry our pretty little heads about nuclear war or a future financial meltdown or police brutality toward racial minorities or race relations in general or armed right-wing clashes with authorities or spying on our Internet use or any government wrongdoing at all or even citizen protests against that wrongdoing. Because if we debate such issues – if we even read about such issues – we are playing into Vladimir Putin’s evil plans.

What Democracy?

Which makes me wonder what kind of “democracy” these brave “defenders of democracy” have in mind. The New York Times, The Washington Post and some establishment-approved Internet sites already have begun work on establishing standards for what information the American people will be allowed to see and hear – with disapproved sources of news marginalized by Internet search engines or prevented from earning any money by exclusion from Google and other ad programs.

Presumably, the 200 or so Web sites on PropOrNot’s black list would be the first cut for the new Ministry of Truth since many of them have published articles that raised questions about the accuracy of claims made by the U.S. State Department or they have expressed the belief that there may be two sides to complex issues – when Americans are supposed to hear only the side that Official Washington wants them to hear.

Some of these “Russian propaganda” Web sites – prior to the Iraq War – even raised doubts about the U.S. government’s certainty that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of WMDs. Thank goodness the Internet wasn’t as widely used back then or perhaps many Americans would have doubted the truth-telling by The New York Times and The Washington Post, which dutifully passed on the U.S. government’s pronouncements about Hussein’s secret WMDs.

Surely, in 2002-03, the Russians must have been behind the resistance by those few Web sites to the WMD group think that all the respectable people just knew to be true. How else can you explain the skepticism? And maybe Russia was responsible for the U.S. government’s failure to find any of those WMD stockpiles. Curse you, Russia!

With the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing on Thursday, this determination to squelch any dissenting American views as “Russian disinformation” moved up a notch, beyond some think-tank chatter, some newspaper articles or some initial planning for private-sector censorship.

The craziness has now become the focus of an official Senate investigation into Russian “meddling” in American political life. We have taken another step down the path of a New Cold War that blends a New McCarthyism with a New Orwellianism.

[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Orwellian War on Skepticism” and “How US Flooded the World with Psyops.”]

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Who will control this digital space merged with our brain?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZJSmUExU6M