STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH
SENIOR EDITOR

Stephens: “Our system commits no such violation of nature’s law. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the Negro. Subordination is his place.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he doctrine of white supremacy was invented in 17^th century North America to justify the use and practice of slavery in the British colonies (and at the time not just limited to the south of what became the United States, but in all of them).  Just before the First US Civil War, the doctrine was well-summarized by Alexander Stephens, a Southern Unionist who later became Vice-President of the Confederate States of America under the arch-secessionist Jefferson Davis.

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Stephens memorably declared:

column published in 2009, as it started the First Civil War in support of secession, the South had six principal war aims:

• The preservation of the institution of African and African-American (the latter the courtesy of the slave owners and slave masters) slavery and its uninhibited expansion into the Territories of the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain region, and the Southwest.
• The acceptance by the whole United States of the Doctrine of White Supremacy on which the institution of slavery was established.
• The establishment and subsequent strong prosecution of American Imperialism outside of North America (a position much more strongly held in the South than in the North).

Except that the institution of chattel slavery does not exist, the South achieved all of its war aims, some of them beyond the wildest dreams of any of its leaders.  While for the most part that victory is pretty-well self-evident, I have detailed how they did that in, among other places, the column cited above and in my book The 15% Solution.  Perhaps most importantly, the Doctrine of White Supremacy dominates the thinking of much of the white US, both consciously and unconsciously.

In D.W. Griffith’s famed Birth of a Nation, Hooded Klansmen catch Gus, a black man described in the film as “a renegade, a product of the vicious doctrines spread by the carpetbaggers.” Gus was portrayed in blackface by white actor Walter Long.  The KKK was, of course, the righteous avengers.

Above a quote from none other than the normally revered Woodrow Wilson, used by Griffith in his film.  Three decades later, Hollywood again shed tears for the plantocracy way of life in Margaret Mitchell’s elegy for the South, Gone with the Wind. 

Hattie McDaniel, Olivia de Havilland and Vivien Leigh, the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara, In Gone With the Wind. The Southern way was romanticized as a genteel civilization unjustly trashed by the coarse, brutish and mercantilistic North. What made Jewish tycoons in Hollywood want to whitewash the South? That question is yet to be answered.

Then, what immediately followed the end of the First Civil War in the South was, on the economic side, the assurance of the perpetuation of a living situation for the freed slaves that in many ways mimicked slavery, that is share-cropping (“40 acres and a mule” died under the veto pen of the Southern successor to President Lincoln, Andrew Johnson).  On the political side, the first objective of the formation of the original Ku Klux Klan was to deny the freed slaves the vote, which was fully accomplished following the withdrawal of the Union Army occupiers in 1877.  This system, along with social and commercial segregation, “Jim Crow,” stayed in place until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.  With the recent Supreme Court decision voiding a key section of that Act as it applied to the South, along with the Republican national voter suppression campaign,  African-American, as well as Latino, voting is being once again repressed, both by making it physically more difficult as well as by the imposition of a version of the poll tax: the acquisition, with no taxpayer support, of the “Voter ID.”  And etc., etc., etc. (I will leave the discussion of whether voting accomplishes anything in this nation to other editors on this blog.)

And so, you might be saying at this point, what this all has to do with the killing of Michael Brown, black, by the police officer Darren Wilson, white.  It has everything to do with it.  An unusual event?  No, of course not.  For example, in the month between July 17 and August 17, 2014, 60 persons were killed by police officers, almost all of them black or Latino virtually none of them involved in committing a potentially fatal offense.  As The World Can’t Wait put it: “the murder of Black and Brown youth by the state goes on like clockwork.”

There is a reason for this state of affairs and it is not just that some white cops are racists and truly regard blacks and Latinos as second-class or non-citizens, with no rights.   It is not just because a district attorney decides on his own that he is not going to play prosecutor in this particular case, but rather defense attorney for the accused, which he can do until the cows come home in the absence of any means of cross-examination either of the accused or his witness supporters (one of whom made her own racism abundantly clear in her personal journal.  Furthermore, there was no attorney to stand in on the true prosecutorial side to challenge, before a judge, what the mis-named “prosecutor” was actually doing in defending, not prosecuting.

Oh yes, and as for why District Attorney Robert McCulloch chose to make his announcement of the Grand Jury’s decision in prime time rather than around the time when it was reached, about 2PM in the afternoon?  Well, he did just win re-election, so that’s not it.  No.  This man was addressing all white US who think the way that he does, and all the white law enforcement personnel across the US who don’t want to have to worry too much should they just happen to kill an African-American or Latino in the course of duty.  McCulloch, who would likely deny vigorously that he consciously thinks in this way at all, it being so ingrained in the thought-processes of so many US, is, along with the modern Republican Party in the Congress, the Supreme Court and many state and local governments sending out a clear message: White supremacy lives.  And so, not to worry.

For many US, white supremacy is the doctrine that governs their lives.  They, sub-consciously for the most part, need to feel secure in that thinking.  And they need to feel that US “law enforcement” is doing its part to provide them with that security.  I am not talking about feeling secure in their physical surroundings, for given how highly segregated US society is, that is not too often an issue.  I am talking about what goes on inside their heads.  And so Michael Brown is killed, and the killing will not stop.  Actually, in terms of the number of deaths, police killings of black and Latinos make lynching in the Old South (which was not always of blacks, mind you), except in the early days of the practice, look like much ado about not too much.  Marches, demonstrations, police lapel cameras (“oh dear, in the heat of the moment mine fell off”), civilian review boards, and etc. are not going to change the reality in the US, still submerged under the victory of the South in the First Civil War and what it accomplished.  Only the Second Civil War, which is coming, may be able to change that.

It should be noted that the United States is the only advanced capitalist country in which the political economy is dominated by such a doctrine as that of White Supremacy, and its use by, over time, one party or the other for political purposes.  The only other country in which the political use of a doctrine of bigotry, prejudice, and racial superiority focused on a particular social grouping within the society came to so dominate its political economy, combined with an imperialistic foreign policy, was of course Nazi Germany.  And we all know to where that led.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

http://www.puntopress.com/jonas-the-15-solution-hits-main-distribution/, and available on Amazon.

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The US embargo has forced Cubans to use their imagination to keep a lot of 1950s cars and other equipment running against all odds. They have succeeded and the result can be seen all over the island.

By Mike Faulkner, Senior Contributing Editor

“Cuba and the United States have quite a curious – in fact, unique status in international relations. There is no similar case of such a sustained assault by one power against another – in this case the greatest superpower against a poor, Third World country – for forty years of terror and economic warfare.”  —                                                                                                                Noam Chomsky. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. 2000.

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[dropcap]CHOMSKY[/dropcap] wrote that more than fourteen years ago. Nothing much has changed since then. The punitive US blockade of Cuba is still in place. In October 2014, for the 23^rd successive year the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Cuban draft resolution calling for the lifting of the blockade. Unsurprisingly for the 23^rd year the United States voted against the resolution. Perhaps more surprisingly for those uninformed about this annual event, will be the fact that the US casts its vote against Cuba in almost complete isolation.

Since 1992 no more than three member states have ever voted with the US against the Cuban resolution, but until the late 1990s significant numbers abstained. There were, for example, 71 abstentions with 59 in favour in 1992. In recent years there have been only a handful of abstentions – between 1 and 3 – and since 2012 a consistent voting pattern has emerged: 188 for the Cuban resolution: 2 against: 3 abstentions. The only ally the US now has in its vindictive hostility towards Cuba is Israel. Even lickspittle lackeys such as Albania, Romania and Uzbekistan have deserted. Israel, however, has never faltered, standing steadfast with Goliath against David every year since 1992.

Cuban “balseros” have long provided grist for the American propaganda mills, as they have been portrayed as seeking “freedom” from Communist tyranny instead of being simply escapees from an economy short of consumer goods due to the American embargo and other sordid maneuvers designed to crush their society.

If one needed an object lesson in imperial arrogance, hypocrisy and impunity one need look no further than the US treatment of Cuba since 1959. Actually, the bullying started much earlier than that – as far back as the beginning of the 20^thcentury. But after the triumph of the revolution in 1959 US hostility became remorseless, aimed at the overthrow of the new government and restoration of the status quo ante. The US has never been reconciled to the Cuban revolution. Failure to destroy it by armed intervention and terrorist assassination plots against its leaders during the 1960s and 1970s did not lead to abandonment of the mission. US power has been used relentlessly to impose the most draconian economic blockade, to deny the country its sovereign right to trade freely, and to intimidate and penalise national states, commercial companies and individuals who are deemed to be in breach of the policy of extra-territorial sanctions imposed unilaterally by the US in the 1960s and still in force. The extraterritoriality underpinning the blockade violates the United Nations Charter, the Organization of American States and the fundamentals of international law.  All US administrations invoke “The International Community”, in whose interests they claim to act. Yet in this vicious and vindictive exercise of overweening power by one state against another (which is without parallel in modern history) the United States has persistently ignored the wishes of the overwhelming majority of member states of the United Nations. And the allies of the United States who vote to lift the blockade of Cuba, do nothing to take their disagreement with the superpower beyond the politics of pain-free gesture.  Annually for the past 47 years US presidents have extended the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) against Cuba. The TWEA dates back to 1917 when it was enacted by President Wilson on the eve of US entry into the First World War, in order to prohibit or regulate trade with a wartime adversary. It is the basis of all the sanctions against Cuba, a country with which the US has never been formally at war. In September of this year President Obama extended TWEA for another year.  It is estimated by the Cuban government that over the past 55 years the economic sanctions, measured in current prices, have cost the country US$116.8 billion in lost trade. When the depreciation of the dollar against the price of gold is taken into account, the figure is US$1.11 trillion. This reality reveals the purpose of the economic blockade- to cripple Cuba economically.

Ronald D. Godard, US Senior Area Adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs, opposing the Cuban draft resolution at the UN, stated bluntly that the Cuban economy would not thrive until the government “permits a free and fair labour market, freely empowers Cuban entrepreneurs….opens state monopolies to private competition and adopts the sound macro-economic policies that have contributed to the success of Cuba’s neighbours in Latin America”. This means that the economic blockade will not be lifted until Cuba abandons its efforts to build a socialist society and submits to the untrammelled operation of the neo-liberal “free market”. In referring to Cuba’s Latin American neighbours, he evidently did not have in mind countries such as Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela that have in recent years rejected that model. He must have been referring to those like Cuba’s close neighbours in Central America who have not: Guatemala and Honduras, the two countries suffering from the most extreme social inequality in the hemisphere.

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But in spite of the crippling impact of US sanctions, Cuba, with a population of 11 million has once again provided the world with a glowing example of selfless internationalism. In early October Cuba sent 63 doctors and 102 nurses to Sierra Leone in response to the Ebola crisis. They joined a team of 23 Cuban doctors who were already working there. Another 300 health workers are being trained and will soon join their colleagues. The WHO has praised the Cuban contribution, pointing out that while other countries have offered money, no other country has matched the numbers of health professionals sent from Cuba to work in the most difficult circumstances. Soon the Cubans plan to have an aid presence in Guinea and Liberia. The 461 selected for the task were from a larger group of 15,000 health care workers who volunteered. Cuba’s response to the Ebola crisis is the latest in a long record of aid given to other nations at time of need.  2,465 health workers went to Pakistan to provide emergency care in the wake of the Kashmir earthquake; in 2010 Cuba was the first country to responds to the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti. The Independent reported (26. December 2010) that Cuba’s “doctors and nurses put the US effort to shame.” “A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-infected Haiti as part of Fidel Castro’s international medical mission which has won the socialist state many friends but little international recognition…Amid the fanfare and publicity surrounding the arrival of help from the US and UK, hundreds more Cuban doctors, nurses and therapists arrived with hardly a mention.”

As far as the British media is concerned the same may be said of Cuba’s response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Apart from an early report in the Observer , which echoed the New York Times, there has been almost no mention of Cuba’s involvement. It is difficult to believe that this is not deliberate. Either that or the equally damning conclusion that so deeply ingrained is the anti-Cuban bias in the consciousness of supposedly objective journalists that they do not consider the extraordinary contribution of this small Caribbean island in the face of a humanitarian crisis to be worthy of mention.

Because most of the communications media in Britain, together with the British government, are so subservient to the US government, particularly in matters of foreign policy, it is worth recalling a few of the pivotal episodes in the 55 year history of implacable US hostility towards Cuba. This will draw largely on an account (Cuba and the United States: A Personal Reflection on Thirty-Five years of Conflict) by this writer, published in Monthly Review in February 1996:

“In the distorted account of the breakdown of US-Cuba relations it is suggested that Eisenhower’s administration broke off relations with Cuba as a consequence of Castro’s embracing Marxism-Leninism. This turns the truth on its head. In 1960 Fidel’s ‘26th July Movement’ had no organizational links with the small Communist Party and the members of that movement, formed during the guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship, explicitly denied that they were communists. But Fidel was branded a communist on his first and only visit to Washington in 1959; a visit undertaken to win US aid. He was snubbed by Eisenhower and virtually ignored by Vice-President Nixon, who, when told about the planned agrarian reform concluded that Castro was ‘obviously a Red.’ Nixon, who a year earlier had warmly embraced the butcher Batista on a visit to Havana to boost US arms supplies to the embattled dictator, thus set the scene for his government’s future relations with Castro.

“The land reform which was the most thorough and the most popular ever undertaken in Latin America, was denounced as ‘Communist.’ In the spring of 1960 the Cubans purchased cheap Soviet crude oil in the teeth of hostility from the Western oil companies. When the Western-owned refineries refused to refine the Soviet oil, Castro, with mass popular support for his actions, took over the refineries. This was the decisive turning point which put Cuba on a collision course with the United States. The Eisenhower administration responded to this exercise of sovereignty by a small, poor country by cancelling the sugar quota, which meant that 70 percent of Cuba’s sugar production was left without a market. The intention was clear: to cripple Cuba economically in the shortest possible time and to bring down Castro.

“I was in Cuba shortly after this episode. The tension was palpable. Khrushchev…agreed to buy the sugar that the US had refused to take. The USSR became very popular overnight, but still, for the majority of Cubans, this didn’t mean that they had chosen Communism, or that they considered that it was being imposed upon them. A popular expression of sentiment in Cuba at the time was ‘Sin Cuota; Sin Amo’ (without quota; without bosses). At the time US newspapers were still available in Havana. I recall in Early August of 1960 reading the most crude distortions of what was happening in Cuba. Most of the US press was claiming that Castro was clamping a Communist dictatorship upon an unwilling, oppressed people.

“One of my most vivid recollections from that time was attending a mass rally on August 6. (1960) in the Havana Sports stadium Fidel addressed a crowd of about 70,000. There was nothing dragooned (or restrained) about the audience. It was composed of people of all ages; workers’ and peasants’ militia, students’ militia, men and women – many armed. The rally marked another decisive stage in the radicalization of the Cuban revolution and in Cuba’s relations with the United States. It was the occasion on which he announced the expropriation of all US companies and assets in Cuba. The crowd went wild with delirious excitement. The next day (or rather, later the same day, as the rally didn’t end until 5 am on August 7), the streets of Havana were thronged with thousands of people celebrating their freedom from ‘Yanqui imperialism.’ Numerous buildings were festooned with banners announcing that ‘this company is the property of the people of Cuba.’ Young militia women, rifles slung over their shoulders, stood guard in front of the buildings. Feeling somewhat apprehensive about how Uncle Sam might react to this demonstration of sovereignty by its small and ‘uppity’ Latin neighbour, we frequently asked people whether they were  worried that the marines might come ashore soon. The response was almost always immediate and uniform: ‘Let ‘em come! We’ll deal with them!’

“In late August the United States tightened the screws further. At a conference of the Organization of American States in Costa Rica, the State Department, through its manipulation of many Latin American delegations, secured Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS and demanded in the so-called ‘Declaration of San Jose’ that Castro open his country to an OAS inspection. The Cubans, aware of the debacle that had just occurred in the newly independent Congo, supposedly under the auspices of the U.N., had no intention of complying.

The beauty of Cuban women is legendary. Under Batista, the island had become a gangsters’ fiefdom, filled with illegal gaming, prostitution and other vices Americans could not so easily (and cheaply) obtain at home.  Cuba had simply become the whorehouse of the caribbean. Fidel wiped out the gangster problem, and prostitution out of necessity.  Women today work in any and all areas that used to be a male prerogative, including medicine, engineering, and the military, as well as science, education, and, naturally, the tourism and hotel industries, vital to obtain foreign currency. 

“While working [as members of the first ever international work brigade to visit Cuba] with picks and shovels in the Sierra Maestra [on the construction of the first residential school in that remote area] we read reports in the New York herald Tribune of a State Department document presented to the Cost Rica conference claiming that our work brigade was in fact a Soviet trained international communist guerrilla force, smuggled into Cuba to reinforce the supposedly demoralized Castro militia and help to spread red revolution throughout the hemisphere. It was, the statement claimed, a common Soviet ruse to disguise such contingents as ‘work brigades’. This was the kind of ‘evidence’ the State Department invented in order to swing their Latin American client states into line against Cuba.

“On September 2 the Cuban government answered the accusations emanating from the State Department via the OAS meeting. Fidel spoke at a rally in Havana attended by 1 million people who enthusiastically packed the Plaza Civica [now the Plaza de la Revolution]. From that historic meeting came the first ‘Declaration of Havana’ which was essentially a declaration of independence and an assertion of the right to formulate a foreign policy without pressure or interference from the United States or anyone else. Each clause of the declaration was submitted for the approval of the ‘assembly of the Cuban people.’ In this fashion Cuba’s foreign policy alignment changed overnight. I remember listening to that address, relayed from Havana, in a Cuban army barrack near the top of the highest mountain in the Sierra Maestra. The proceedings went on until the early hours of the morning, depriving us of much needed sleep.

“Our work schedule at the Camilo Cienfuegos site was frequently interrupted whether by invitations to this or that celebration or by visits from this or that delegation. The most memorable of these events was a visit by Che Guevara, who was at that time Minister of Industry. Representatives of a dozen or more countries packed into a fairly small building to listen to him and to ask questions. My impression was that he differed from all the other political leaders I had listened to in Cuba (and by that time I had heard many) in his less volatile delivery, and the cool, completely undemagogic way he dealt with questions. I did not know then that he was an Argentinian and not a Cuban, though whether this in any way accounted for his style, I have no idea.

“We met hundreds of young people, mainly women, from Santiago,  Havana and elsewhere, enrolled as ‘agrarian instructors’ in the first stage of the alfabetización campaign, which resulted a few years later in the virtual elimination of illiteracy in Cuba – many years short of the time the UN predicted it would take. It was almost inconceivable that anyone but the most bone-headed reactionary bigot could have failed to be impressed and deeply moved by the Cuban revolution in those early years. But few of its achievements were reported in the western world.

“Successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic, have treated Cuba’s attempts to break free from US tutelage and build a socialist society as a criminal offense to be punished with the utmost severity. The catalogue of real offenses perpetrated against Cuba is endless. Distortions of fact, lies and chicanery have been the commonplace accompaniments of the thirty-five year old vendetta against Castro and his country. In 1961 the Bay of Pigs invasion organized by the CIA was preceded by a clumsy provocation involving the mendacious claim that the Cuban air force had rebelled; CIA terrorism and sabotage against Cuba was routine in the 1960s and the numerous well-documented attempts to assassinate Castro sit uneasily with the US public opposition to terrorism; the so-called missile crisis of 1962 seems to have had its immediate origin in a secret planned invasion of the island that became known to the Cubans; the retention to the present day of the provocative base on Cuban soil at Guantanamo is in blatant violation of Cuban sovereignty and against the expressed demand of the Cuban government for its removal. But worst of all perhaps is the 34 year old blockade of the country, which, until 1990 guaranteed Cuba’s heavy dependence on the Soviet bloc.

“The US treatment of Cuba doesn’t differ in any essentials from its treatment of other cases of radical nationalism in the hemisphere. Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1963, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Chile and Grenada – all examples of what happens when attempts are made to overthrow oppressive puppet regimes. Radical reforming governments or movements in these countries have, like Cuba, been subjected to political and economic destabilization, murderous terrorism by US armed and trained death squads, sabotage, embargo, blockades, US backed military coup and outright invasion. In each case the pretense has been to ‘restore democracy”.

That was written nearly twenty years ago. Much has changed since then. But if the prospects of real, radical change in the Latin America now seem brighter than they were then, it is no thanks to any change of heart on the part of the United States. Changes in the balance of class forces in countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and Ecuador and less radical, but nonetheless encouraging signs of resistance on the part of countries such as Brazil and Argentina encourage the hope that the tide is turning and that the challenge to the neo-liberal model imposed on so many countries will permanently weaken the economic hegemony of US imperialism in the hemisphere. And, for all the difficulties it still faces, Cuba is no longer alone. Its example has been an important factor in stimulating the determination of millions to fight for the better world which is possible. Viva Cuba!

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior Contributing Editor Mike Faulkner is a British citizen. He lives in London where for many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002. He has written a two-weekly column,  Letter from the UK, for TPJ Magazine since 2008. Over the years his articles have appeared in such publications as Marxism Today, Monthly Review and China Now. He is a regular visitor to the United States where he has friends and family in New York City. Contact Mike at mikefaulkner@greanvillepost.com

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Kiev’s neonazis operate not only with impunity, but at the highest levels of government, with Washington’s and EU’s tacit consent.

Paul Craig Roberts

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he US House of Representatives has joined Hillary Clinton, Obama, the neoconservatives, Washington’s vassals, and the American and European presstitutes in demonizing Russia and President Putin. The House resolution against Russia is a packet of lies, but that did not stop the resolution from passing by a vote of 411 for and 10 against.

The entire world should take note that the American people are capable of electing only ten intelligent representatives. Ten people out of 435 is 2 percent. And yet Washington declares itself to be the “exceptional,” “indispensable” country empowered to exercise hegemony over the world!

No one should be surprised to see Washington, its presstitutes and European vassal states using the same propagandistic lies against Russia and Putin as were used against Iraq and Saddam Hussein, Libya and Gaddafi, Syria and Assad, Afghanistan and the Taliban, and Iran. Washington is fearful of the rise of Russia and China, of the leadership demonstrated by Vladimir Putin, of the formation of new organizations independent of Washington, such as the BRICS. While the George W. Bush regime was sidetracked by its “six week, $70 billion war,” which turned out to be, so far, a multi-trillion dollar 13-year losing operation, Putin kicked out some of the American agents who were contaminating Russian sovereignty and rebuilt the country.

When Putin blocked the planned US invasions of Syria and Iran, Washington decided that something had to be done about Putin and Russia. Washington had spent $5 billion dollars buying Ukrainian politicians and funding fifth column NGOs. With Putin distracted with the Olympics, Washington struck, overthrew the elected Ukrainian government and installed its puppets.

The puppets set about antagonizing Ukraine’s Russian population in provinces that formerly were part of Russia but were attached to Ukraine by Soviet leaders when Russia and Ukraine were the same country. Russians threatened with death and the banning of their language naturally did not want to be victims of Washington’s puppet government in Kiev. Crimea voted to reunite with Russia from whence it came, and so did the eastern and southern provinces.

Washington and its the vassals and presstitutes lied and described these acts of self-determination as Russian invasion and annexation. Russia is falsely accused of having troops occupying the breakaway provinces.

The purpose of Washington’s false accusations is to destabilize Russia and the country’s government. Washington has many avenues by which to destabilize Russia. Washington has the US funded NGOs, the foreign owned Russian media, and the House Resolution calls for Washington to expand propaganda broadcasting into Russia in the Russian language. Washington has cultivated oligarchs, business interests and Russian politicians who see their economic and political interests aligned with the West. There are deluded Russian youths who think freedom resides in the West and others represented by such as Pussy Riot who prefer the West’s amoralism or immoralism to the Christian culture that the Russian government supports.

If Washington fails to destabilize Russia or to have Putin assassinated, frustration could result in more reckless behavior that could lead to military conflict. The House Resolution calls on Obama to arm Ukraine with US weapons so that Ukraine can conquer the separatist provinces and take back Crimea. There are constant calls from NATO itself for more military forces on Russia’s borders, and NATO war games are conducted near Russia’s borders. Washington wants to include the former Russian provinces of Georgia and Ukraine in NATO, something that Russia cannot accept.

Washington is placing the world on the path to Armageddon, as Professor Michel Chossudovsky makes clear in “Towards A World War III Scenario” (Global Research, 2012).

The idea that Putin and Russia are out to conquer Europe and the world is relentlessly promoted by Western propaganda, with plenty of support from the top politicians.  

The Russian government downplays the dangers and continues to speak of “our Western partners,” with whom the Russian government hopes to work things out. The Russian government and the Russian people–indeed all the peoples of the earth–should understand that Russia has no partners in the West. Russia only has enemies. 

Washington has made it completely clear that Russia can be part of the West only as a vassal state and not as a sovereign country with its own interests and an independent policy. Washington’s demand for hegemony does not permit the existence of other sovereign countries sufficiently strong to resist Washington’s will. As the ideology of hegemony has a powerful hold on Washington and is institutionalized in the neoconservative control of critical government offices and media, war is the almost certain outcome.

Washington’s puppet rulers of Europe are the enablers of the neoconservative war-mongers. In all of Europe there is not a government independent of Washington. Pawns like Merkel, Cameron, and Hollande are selling out human life.

Russian government officials, such as Putin and Lavrov, address the facts, but to Washington and its European vassals facts are not important. What is important is to destabilize Russia. The conflict that Washington has brought to Russia cannot be addressed on a factual basis.

Washington knew that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and no al Qaeda connections. Washington knew Assad did not use chemical weapons. Washington knew that Gaddafi was being set up with lies. Washington knows that Iran has no nuclear weapons. What was important to Washington was not the truth but the overthrow of these governments.

While the Russian government was preoccupied with the olympics, Washington struck in Ukraine, installing a puppet government. It is likely the case that the only solution that can make the festering problem of Ukraine go away is the reincorporation of Ukraine in Russia.

Arrogance and hubris usually result in overreach, and overreach could break up Washington’s empire. But Washington doesn’t think so. Just as Washington put its NGOs into the streets of Kiev in what is called the Maiden protests, Washington has put its NGOs in the streets of Hong Kong, hoping that the protests or riots will spread to other Chinese cities.

Russia and China are far too open to the West than is good for them. Tsar Nicholas II did not expect his government to be overthrown, but Kerensky did overthrow Nicholas’ government in the February Revolution only to be overthrown by Lenin in the October Revolution. The Chinese don’t expect to be overthrown, but neither did Viktor Yanukovych.

Political life is full of ambitious persons and agendas. Putin faces these ambitions in Russia. Washington knows that Russia cannot be turned into a vassal state as long as Putin is in office. Therefore, the demonization of Putin and plots against him will continue.

The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

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Poster boy for corporate impunity: United Technologies’ retiring chief Louis Chenevert typifies the American breed of corporate magnate: exorbitant pay not tied to performance and early retirement (at 57) with a package topping over 200MM. Long live capitalism!

	December 1, 2014
THIS WEEK
We’re hearing a great deal these days about the sanctity of the legislative process. GOP leaders are raising holy hell about the new White House executive order on immigration. The President, charges Rep. Jeb Hensarling from Texas, has “thumbed his nose at the American people and our system of democracy.”Last Monday, Hensarling did his own thumbing. He urged the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that regulates Wall Street, to forget about a duly enacted CEO pay reform — in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act — that requires companies to disclose the ratio between their CEO and worker pay.Corporate CEOs hate this law. Hensarling does, too. He doesn’t want the SEC to write the regulations needed to enforce it. But aren’t executive branch agencies, in a “system of democracy,” supposed to enforce laws the legislative branch has voted into law? In a democracy, of course. In a plutocracy, that depends. In a plutocracy, what top corporate CEOs want, they usually get. The SEC, we learned last week, has now decided to shelve its long-overdue CEO-worker pay ratio regs still another year. In  Too Much this week, still more on our plutocrats.	About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good Subscribe to Too Much Inequality.Org
GREED AT A GLANCE
Miami Beach’s classic Eden Roc hotel has a new mission in life: to make room service fun again — for the super rich. The landmark hotel has just unveiled six new in-room dining options, “each with its own unique twist and story.” The menu’s “Blue Eye Mayhem” special, for instance, comes complete with an original 1950s Eden Roc beverage napkin signed by Frank Sinatra. Accompanying each choice: a bottle of the finest spirits. The cost of ordering off the new Eden Roc room service menu? Up to $4,000 for a single dinner. Finding takers should be no problem. A new report  estimates the world’s 211,273 deep pockets worth at least $30 million spend an average $38,000 a year on alcoholic beverages . . .The ultimate bummer for a CEO? That may be getting the bum’s rush right at the start of the holiday season. But Louis Chenevert, the United Technologies chief exec just rushed into “retirement,” still has reason to be jolly. Chenevert won’t be exiting empty-handed. His going-away severance package, Bloomberg News reported last week, appears likely to total $172 million. Chenevert already owns a stash of United Technologies shares worth $64 million. Before his surprise exit announcement last month, the 57-year-old led the defense contracting giant for what a Wall Street analysis from Morgan Stanley now describes as six “weak” years . . .Technology just keeps making life ever more convenient for the world’s wealthiest. Yachting Partners International, a leading luxury boat broker, is now offering a mobile phone app that makes chartering a super yacht almost as easy as ordering a pizza. With the app’s “Yachts Around Me” feature, novice mariners can search for the available luxury boats closest to them — and even sort the results by “desired facilities,” everything from helipads to fully equipped on-board gyms. Holidays don’t get any “more bespoke, discreet, or rewarding,” says Yachting Partners International marketing director Mark Duncan, than sailing the seven seas on “a personally chartered yacht, with the owner’s personal crew and chef at your service.” Duncan’s new yacht search app spotlights boat-chartering opportunities that range in cost up to $1.2 million per week.	Quote of the Week “Poverty doesn’t bind the poor together as much as wealth and the need to protect it bind the rich. If it did, we would hear the rattle of tumbrels in the streets.” William McPherson, Fall 2014, Hedgehog Review Give a gift of inspiration this holiday season, Too Mucheditor Sam Pizzigati’s gripping history of the triumph over America’s original plutocracy. Read the reviews, then take the publisher discount.
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK
Saudi Arabia’s richest person, the billionaire prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Al Saud, doesn’t like his honor questioned.  Forbes last year questioned that honor — in a series of articles that conveyed “strong grounds for suspecting” dishonesty on Alwaleed’s part. Alwaleed promptly sued for libel, but a British judge last week limited the claims he can make at trial. The prince’s flacks, now busy trying to spin this ruling as a victory for Alwaleed, don’t have an easy job. A judge in an earlier case has called the prince “completely unreliable.” On the other hand, Alwaleed’s over-the-top lifestyle does give his flacks fodder for stories that can distract the media from Alwaleed’s business dealings. Alwaleed’s mammoth estate in Riyadh, for example, sports a personal zoo with live giraffes.	Like Too Much? Email this issue to a friend
IMAGES OF INEQUALITY
A quarter-century ago, in 1989, half of America’s counties ranked as places with both low poverty and low income inequality. Today, says new research out of the Population Reference Bureau, only a third of the nation’s counties — shown here in green — rate as low in both. A greater share of America’s counties — the 37 percent in red — rank as high in both poverty and income inequality. The blue marks counties with high inequality and low poverty, the brown the reverse.	Web Gem The Political Economy of Distribution/ This Institute for New Economic Thinking online site offers a series of working papers that explore how income inequality is subverting both our economic and environmental health.
ANTIDOTES TO INEQUITY
Religious activists worried about inequality have launched a new campaign this fall to make America’s retail and fast food giants worry — about their public image. The activists are submitting shareholder resolutions urging 20 major corporations to disclose the ratio between their CEO and median worker pay. The Rev. Michael Crosby, a Capuchin friar who directs an Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility branch for Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota, says he has never seen so many Catholic orders come together over one issue as they have on this wage disparity effort. The new pay ratio resolutions, he notes, don’t figure to pass, but they can serve to help people realize “there’s something wrong with this system.” CEO pay at major fast food companies, a Demos study estimates, is running over 1,000 times the earnings of average fast food workers.	Take Action on Inequality Share your personal narrative on income inequality via the #MyHungerGames hashtag on Twitter. Learn more at Odds in Our Favor.
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS
	Stat of the Week A shopping fact for Black Friday: America’s top 5 percent, notes Washington University economist Steven Fazzari, is now consuming almost as much as the nation’s entire bottom 80 percent.
IN FOCUS
Why Our Lives Feel Squeezed: 400 Reasons America’s 400 richest are collecting far more of the nation’s income than they did two generations ago — and paying Uncle Sam far less. To fudge these facts, pals of plutocrats are having to work overtime. We don’t know who exactly filed the tax returns with America’s 400 largest incomes in 2010. The IRS won’t reveal any of these 400 individually by name. But a just-released new IRS  annual report on America’s highest incomes has revealed just about everything else about these top 400, from how much they claim in deductions to how much their incomes have swelled over time. And these top 400 incomes, the IRS data show, have done some significant swelling. Back in 1992,  the 400 highest incomes reported on America’s tax returns averaged $46.8 million. In 2010, the top 400 averaged $265.1 million. Inflation does explain some of that increase, but not most. Before taking inflation into account, top 400 incomes multiplied nearly six times over between 1992 and 2010. After inflation, top 400 incomes quadrupled — over the same years that incomes for typical American households barely increased at all. Top 400 households, after taxes, have actually done considerably better over the past two decades than these before-tax figures suggest. In 1992, after exploiting every tax loophole they could find, top 400 taxpayers paid 26.38 percent of their incomes to Uncle Sam. In 2010, they paid their taxes at an 18.04 percent rate. The impact — in dollars — of this rate drop? If 2010’s top 400 had paid taxes at the same rate as their counterparts in 1992, they would have each paid, on average, $22.1 million more to Uncle Sam than they did. Go back a few decades beyond 1992 and the good fortune of today’s super richest becomes even more striking. The IRS hasn’t published exact top 400 income numbers for years before 1992, but the agency’s historical stats do offer up figures for comparably sized cohorts in some earlier years. In 1955, for instance, taxpayers with the nation’s 427 highest reported incomes paid taxes at a 51.22 percent rate. If 2010’s top 400 had paid taxes at that rate, they would have each shelled out an average $88 million more in taxes! Those top 427 taxpayers back in 1955, by the way, didn’t just pay taxes at a much higher rate than today’s richest. They also pocketed far less in pre-tax income. The flushest taxpayers of 1955 averaged, in inflation-adjusted dollars, only $13.4 million in income for the year. The top 400 in 2010 averaged considerably more than $13.4 million every month. The bottom line: 2010’s most affluent Americans took home 20 times more before-tax income than their 1955 counterparts and 33 times more after taxes. Figures like these pose a problem for the pals of our modern-day plutocrats. With average Americans stuck on an economic treadmill that has them exhausted and getting nowhere, how can the friends of grand fortune possibly defend the explosion of wealth at America’s economic summit? Give these friends of fortune credit. They have a strategy. The best defense, the scribes at rich people-friendly think tanks and media outlets understand, can be a good offense. And take to the offense they have. They’ve fashioned a counter narrative that paints America’s fabulously wealthy as the terribly wronged victims of an economy and polity gone senselessly redistributive. This upside-down world view has just turned up again on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. America has suffered, insists the Journal, an Obama “redistribution” that has left the rich harried and everybody else no better off. The Wall Street Journal rests this latest screed in part on a new analysis from the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative D.C. think tank bankrolled by right-wing foundations and appreciative corporate sponsors. This analysis purports to show that America’s highest-income fifth is “basically financing the entire system of transfer payments to the bottom 60% AND the entire operation of the federal government.” “And yet,” continues the AEI study author Mark Perry, “don’t we hear all the time that ‘the rich’ aren’t paying their fair share of taxes and that they need to shoulder a greater share of the federal tax burden?” Perry claims that his rich-pay-everything analysis reveals “a yet-to-be discussed major implication” of a recently released report on American household income and taxes from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But Perry’s “major implication,” counters Institute for Policy Studies tax analyst Bob Lord, plays fast and loose with the actual data in the new CBO study. The CBO study divides Americans by income into five groups, from the poorest 20 percent of the nation’s households to the richest. For each of these “quintiles,” CBO highlights the average “market” income from work and investments, the average value of federal benefits received, and the average federal taxes paid. In 2011, for instance, households in the nation’s poorest quintile averaged $15,500 in market income, $9,100 in federal benefits, and $500 in taxes paid. The American Enterprise Institute’s Perry, in his new paper, manipulates these numbers to fit the right wing’s rich-as-victim narrative. Perry subtracts, for each quintile, the value of benefits received from the amount of federal taxes paid, something the CBO does not do. Average households in America’s poorest 20 percent, he then pronounces, come out $8,600 ahead. They get that much more in benefits, Perry asserts, than they pay in taxes. Like this article? Sign up to receive the Too Muchweekly in your email inbox. Households in the highest-income quintile, the AEI analyst continues, pay on average $46,500 more in taxes than they get in benefits. That, says Perry, gives them “an average net tax rate after government transfers” of 18.9 percent. By contrast, according to Perry’s American Enterprise Institute take, the three bottom income quintiles each show a negative “net tax rate.” So forget, Perry urges, that debate over whether the rich are paying their fair tax share. We ought to be debating instead, he pronounces, why the poorest 60 percent of Americans — “net recipients of transfer payments” from the top 20 percent — are “not paying anything” in federal taxes. But Perry’s math makes no logical sense, notes the Institute for Policy Study’s Bob Lord. Each of America’s bottom three income quintiles, he explains, include people whose income comes all or mostly from market sources and others — mostly the retired and unemployed — whose income comes mostly from government benefits. Perry’s paper subtracts the benefits received by the second group from the taxes paid by the first and ordains the resulting numbers the determinant of whether an entire quintile has paid its “fair” tax share. “It’s hard to fathom why Perry thought it appropriate to net the tax payments made by a McDonald’s worker in Brooklyn and the Social Security benefits paid to a retiree in Fresno,” muses Lord, “but that’s essentially what he’s done.” This distorting math, in fact, may not be too hard to fathom at all. How else, after all, can fortune’s dearest friends make the case that out-of-control “redistribution” is somehow squeezing America’s rich?	New Wisdom on Wealth Lynn Stuart Parramore, Thomas Piketty is right: Income inequality is holding us back, Salon, November 27, 2014. How the wealth gap undermines the job market. Paul Krugman, Pollution and Politics, New York Times, November 28, 2014. Soaring inequality explains why the GOP now so staunchly opposes efforts to address climate change. Luke O’Neil, Black Friday brawl videos are how rich people shame the poor, Washington Post, November 28. A privileged segment of the population sits back and dehumanizes lower-income Americans for its collective amusement. Aditya Chakrabortty, In Mumbai, the wealthy elite’s willingness to show off has reached new extremes, Guardian, November 28, 2014. Homes with helipads poisoning an entire generation. David Callahan, The Billionaires’ Park, New York Times, December 1, 2014. A new privately funded Manhattan public park shows how billionaire beneficence threatens the ability of everyday Americans to have an equal voice in civic life. Branko Milanovic and Roy van der Weide, Inequality is bad for income growth of the poor (but not for that of the rich), Vox EU, November 29, 2014. An exploration into “social separatism.” Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert, Conservatives’ silver bullet is a joke, Nation, December 1, 2014. Demolishing the notion that higher marriage rates will “fix” inequality.
NEW READS
That Oh-So-Lucrative Revolving Door Shane Shifflett, Jay Boice, Hilary Fung, and Aaron Bycoffe, Pay Pals, a Huffington Post project, with financial research provided by the Center for Economic Policy and Research, November 2014. For an economist, serving as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for the President of the United States may be as good as it gets. Pols and pundits routinely hang on your every word. But what can come next, after Council of Economic Advisers service, can certainly be far more lucrative. An enterprising former Council chair can count on oodles of invitations to serve on corporate boards of directors, the panels that determine, among other things, how much CEOs take home. Michael Jay Boskin served as a George H.W. Bush Council of Economic Advisers chair. Laura D’Andrea Tyson chaired the Council for Bill Clinton. Both have done mighty well as corporate directors — and mighty well for the CEOs they serve. Between, 2008 and 2012, Boskin picked up $4.7 million as a corporate director, not bad for attending a few board meetings every year. Tyson pocketed just over $3 million. Boskin’s CEOs averaged $68.2 million in the last of those years, Tyson’s $16.5 million. Tidbits like these abound in Pay Pals, a fascinating new interactive online resourcefrom the Huffington Post and the Center for Economic Policy and Research. Pay Palslets Web surfers discover just how much the directors of America’s top 100 corporations are paying themselves and their chiefs. Corporations, in a sense, are people. These people.	Enjoy Too Much? Email this issue to a friend who might like Too Much, too
ABOUT TOO MUCH
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies | 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 | (202) 234-9382 | Editor: Sam Pizzigati. | E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org | Unsubscribe.	Subscribe to Too Much

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NOTICE: YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS (SIGNUPS TO THE GREANVILLE POST BULLETIN) ARE COMPLETELY FREE, ALWAYS. AND WE DO NOT SELL OR RENT OUR EMAIL ADDRESS DATABASES—EVER. That’s a guarantee.