US boasts about interfering in sovereign nations while sanctioning Russia for allegedly doing the same
Imagine Vladimir Putin admitted on camera to telling President Nieto of Mexico “fire your state prosecutor or you don’t get the loan we promised you.” Imagine he joked about this overt interference in another sovereign country, imagine he revelled in it as a sign of his country’s power and supremacy. What would the mainstream media headlines be? How many times would the clip be played on CNN, the BBC and Sky News? How many people in the world would not be aware he had said these words? Proof at last that Russia is meddling in the affairs of other nations. Well, how many of those news outlets played this on a loop for their viewers? [starts at 51m]
Here’s the transcript:
You see it wasn’t Vladmir Putin, it was Joe Biden, former vice-President of the United States, at the Council for Foreign Relations, bragging about how he put the squeeze on the Yatseniuk/Poroshenko government – 5,000 miles from his country’s borders.
With that glassy-eyed obliviousness to irony achieved only by the terminally stupid and entitled Biden said these words at a public discussion of an article he co-authored called “How to Stand Up to the Kremlin: Defending Democracy Against Its Enemies.” And if you think this isn’t breathtakingly hypocritical enough, his fellow author Michael Carpenter had earlier had this to say about the alleged problem with Russia:
Just to re-connect with reality at this point – the US is currently illegally occupying part of Syria. It has launched four flagrantly illegal wars since 2001. And, to top off the Double Think, a man in the same room as Carpenter – during this very discussion – openly and gleefully admitted to illegally blackmailing a foreign government – to laughter and applause from his audience.
They listen to Mr C talk about the “rules-based international order” as if the history of US rule-breaking didn’t exist. They don’t have a qualm about Russia being sanctioned and squeezed and threatened over mere suspicion of doing what Biden gleefully boasts about.
Another day in the Empire of Double Standards and Moral Relativism.
SUPPORT OFFGUARDIAN
If you enjoy OffG's content, please help us make our monthly fund-raising goal and keep the site alive.
For other ways to donate, including direct-transfer bank details click HERE.
“You know, I never gave George W Bush enough credit for what he’s done in the Middle East,” Luttwak continued. “I failed to appreciate at the time that he was a strategic genius far beyond Bismarck. He ignited a religious war between Shi’ites and Sunnis that will occupy the region for the next 1,000 years. It was a pure stroke of brilliance!”
This is Ed Luttwak talking , the author of FP’s article on bombing N Korea. He cheerled the invasion of Iraq and now sells advice. Very scary malevolent man, much admired by Jonathan Tepperman editor of FP.
That puts the cost of American support for Foreign entities in perspective. It has become much too expensive for small nations to accept US financial or military assistance. Now it costs them their national sovereignty!
Reblogged this on Susanna Panevin.
Successive US Administrations are doing God’s work, therefore Mr Biden cannot be held accountable by mortal constraints such as morals or ethics. Their evangelism is disturbing on every level.
George Clooney’s a member of the CRF, y’know. Explains his enthusiasm to make that supposedly forthcoming White Helmets movie…
The “rules based international order” is finished: the global financially engineered
fictitious economy has been dead since 2008; its underlying paradigm (socially-Darwinian neoliberalism) is redundant and can provide no miracle cure (neither can the “alternative” post-Keynesian paradigm); capitalism is being kept on artificial resusc. as a time constrained looting phase …producing a billionaire every two days while half of humanity get only famine, misery and death.
But that is not my estimation alone – that was the subtext from Davos WEF18. The answer? BAU with a new cuddly capitalism …that is “ethical”, “sustainable” and “green” …and “fair ” globalisation. Well, like “moderate” rebels, ethical capitalism does not exist.
Meanwhile, CIA Director Pompeo is preparing to counter “Russian interference ” in the upcoming Mid-Term elections …by personally providing Trump with the “exquisite truth” daily. How long can the powers that shouldn’t be perpetrate the fallacy that future prosperity is dependent on dominance over Russia and China? Or even, should it become politic …the equal fallacy that future prosperity could be restored with globalised co-dependence with Russia and China (a Davos wet dream?)
Much as Marx predicted, capitalism has brought capitalism beyond its own death… into an indeterminate period of suspended animation… socialism or barbarism awaits. Or the populist demagogues and nationalistic Fascism Davos fears (unless, of course, they can control such?) All I can hear is the sound of ideological gravediggers …clinging with torn fingernails to a broken paradigm. The not so ”exquisite truth” of Paradigm Lost, you might say?
Eloquently stated and supported by the evidence. There isn’t enough Prozac…
The oxygen breathers and the twelve year olds who do their bidding are still playing The Great Game. Deluding themselves it’s possible to dominate and control access to and use of the resources of the Eurasian landmass for narrow accumulation purposes. Totally oblivious or unconcerned to the reality that capitalism is not a viable system paradigm on a finite planet.
The only feasible option available to these parasites and sociopaths to continue hogging what they feel is their entitlement – ie everything – is to find a way to wean themselves off their dependency on the rest of us for their survival. Hence the rush for the door marked ‘AI Automation’ and ‘nano fabrication’ by a 1% desperate to make the 99% surplus to requirements and thus expendable.
Or equally possible: that it is the upper one percent that find themselves redundant …their fear is not paranoid nor delusional? Beyond the fossil fuel dependent faux-prosperity of final stage capitalist armed robbery …the longer the lacuna of the Long Depression… there is at least the possibility of a new evolutionary socialist paradigm emerging around the necessity of sustainable food sovereignty; sustainable energy sovereignty; and cooperative community building (commons). In such a paradigm: there will be no place for free-lunch rentierism …all resources will be cyclical and productive of self-maximising life capital …our new wealth paradigm invested in each other (including the ecoshere) …to which entitlement and expectation will be voluntarily re-aligned?
Or, we could all kill ourselves in the ultra-competetive race for what’s left? We either grow up, or fuck up to the detriment of all. All the money in Davos can’t save from a nuclear winter?
Ecosphere even.
‘If the countries of the world start buying and selling oil in Euros, not dollars, it is the collapse of US capitalism’ – you have to imagine the world as a Bronx housing project and the US in the No:1 crack dealing Don on the block’
The thrilling ‘History of oil’ by Rob Newman (from 30:26)
You wouldn’t see Rob, or Mark Thomas, on C4 these days …now it is part of the government -BBC propaganda nexus?
Well a lot had better do it together, because the last two countries to suggest selling oil in anything other than dollars have their leaders dead and their countries bombed to smithereens…..
The real elephant in the room here is where have all the self styled liberal left disappeared to?
The US elites Deep State/MIC did not get such a free ride over Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Afghanistan, and Iraq et al.
Seems all you hear these days is the sound of people who should know better parroting the message of their Homeland Security handlers chanting “The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming!” Little more than self-indulgent me too virtue signalling from plastic liberals who cannot see past narrow identity politics.
The epitome of the liberal left “resistance” is HRC reading “Fire and Fury” at the Grammies? BTW: ‘Creepy Joe’ Biden is a liberal left ideologue – or what passes for one nowadays …such is the morally bankrupt, poverty of intellect, paucity of alternative hat characterises the ad hom “debate”?
Would that be the billion dollar loan be from the IMF by any chance? Who, as I recall, were breaking their rules lending the money in the first place to a country at war more over a civil war in Ukraine. So they quietly changed the rules.
But hey, this is the aid gravy train folks https://renegadeinc.com/billion-dollar-bill/
Not meant to help but designed to create compliance, dependency and destabilisation.
Although I think the IMF call them structural adjustment loans…
Or financial weapons of mass destruction? Wasn’t one of the conditions of the loan to hike the price of gas and electricity – to put industry (eg the Antonov factory) out of business?
It was more blatant than that. Michael Hudson pointed out the true extent of IMF loans in the service of US Imperialism and the neo-nazi Ukrainian regime. As follows:
”The IMF broke four of its rules by lending to Ukraine: (1) Not to lend to a country that has no visible means to pay back the loan (the “No More Argentinas” rule, adopted after the IMF’s disastrous 2001 loan to that country). (2) Not to lend to a country that repudiates its debt to official creditors (the rule originally intended to enforce payment to U.S.-based institutions). (3) Not to lend to a country at war – and indeed, destroying its export capacity and hence its balance-of-payments ability to pay back the loan. Finally (4), not to lend to a country unlikely to impose the IMF’s austerity “conditionalities.” Ukraine did agree to override democratic opposition and cut back pensions, but its junta proved too unstable to impose the austerity terms on which the IMF insisted.”
It was worse than that even. The IMF cancelled Ukraine’s debt to Russia …a flagrant rewriting of the rules of international finance …
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-09/imf-just-entered-cold-war-forgives-ukraines-debt-russia
If that is the case then the top 10 officials responsible must never work in financial services again, as they are organised criminals.
Important to name the billionaires who gave them their orders…..
I’ll give you a clue: his surname is a slant rhyme with “Sorrows”. BTW: Lagarde, or anyone else, that works for the IMF has diplomatic immunity. Also, the entire organization is indemnified from prosecution …it’s in their Charter… so they are supra-judicial financial terrorists.
At least the Prosecutor General wasn’t replaced with Biden’s son Hunter. You know, Hunter, the one who sits on the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings which holds licences to explore and drill for gas in parts of western and eastern Ukraine. Yes, that Hunter.
To be fair, the prosecutor was corrupt, hence Biden gleefully explained that he had him booted out. Context is important here.
Oh, and the next time someone says the MSM is in league with the “MIC”, point ’em to this NYT editorial:
“The Pentagon Is Not a Sacred Cow”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/opinion/military-spending-pentagon.html
You are claiming the mainstream media does not endorse a pro-war narrative that benefits the MiC? And you base this claim on one article in the NYT?
Hi Matt
As I understand your reasoning, it’s therefore OK for Putin to have corrupt officials booted out in, say, Mexico, Colombia, Canada, Panama, or any other country in the Western hemisphere? Or have Caribbean tax havens closed down in the public interest.
Or not?
Congratulations on finding a NYT editorial giving the Pentagon a slap on the wrist. Much propaganda – like most forms of wishful thinking – relies not so much on what it says than on what it leaves out.
“As vital as military spending is” starts the article, explaining what the NYT accepts and wants.
But is it? When the country’s infrastructure is crumbling and poor health care outcomes place them well down the list, and they have institutionalised racism in law enforcement, and that military is why they are viewed as the planet’s greatest threat to world peace, do they have to place the “Offense” Budget as the number one priority? Having cheerled the invasion of Iraq, nothing has changed at the NYT.
Joe was making them an offer they couldn’t refuse. These guys- Biden, Clinton, Obama, Trump- model themselves on gangsters. They strive to project the image of a Capone or Lucky Luciano, who rather than Tom Paine, Jefferson or Lincoln are their role models.
It is no accident that most of these people have actual connections, through Chicago, to one of the classic political machines, where politics and protection rackets, vote collecting and patronage are indistinguishable.
Capitalism is a racket and its states are run by thugs and thieves.
And if there is one state in the USA where capitalists and politicos are cronies it is Biden’s Delaware.
Gangsters who give each other girly little plastic bracelets: very odd, very Caligula.