by CARL BOGGS 

  When it comes to exposing and dissecting dirty capitalist/imperialist shenanigans, few can match, let alone surpass, Carl Boggs. Here he is in top form with a conclusive broadside on Russiagate that admits no possible refutation. A delight for those who love the truth and the smashing (and shaming) of arrogant intellectual chicanery. 

The steady deterioration of American political discourse seems to have reached its lowest ebb in historical memory, visible in the rightward shift of both Democrats and Republicans.  One sign is the frenzied Democratic assault on Republicans from the right, especially in foreign policy.  Another is the resounding silence on the most crucial problems facing humanity: threat of catastrophic war, nuclear arms race, ecological crisis, health-care debacle, the worsening miseries of global capitalism.   Tabloid-style spectacles have increasingly filled media space.  Still another sign is the intensifying anti-Russia hysteria promoted by unhinged liberals in Congress and the corporate media, reminiscent of the worst McCarthyism.

Liberal lion Rachel Maddow. Stirring up wars and xenophobia, and singing paeans to the CIA is now normal for this kind of "progressive".

Another example of this descent into absurdity is the book Russian Roulette, by liberals Michael Isikoff and David Corn – Beltway writers whose shrill anti-Russian crusade has received highest accolades by the New York Times and such promoters of the permanent warfare state as Rachel Maddow (whose gushing endorsement is on the back cover).  The subtitle – “The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” – reveals the political obsession of Democrats (and plenty of Republicans) for the past eighteen months, to the exclusion of most everything else.   More than anything, the volume illustrates the staggering level of ignorance in the U.S. about Russian history and politics, crude propaganda easily displacing coherent analysis.  (A more general – and devastating – review of Russian Routlette by Paul Street appeared earlier in CP.)

Russian Roulette is filled with 300 pages of meticulous detail – Trump’s (actual, planned, or failed) business dealings in Russia, endless goings and comings of shady characters and “operatives”, electronic transactions across the great divide, a litany of speeches, conferences, dinners and other activities, computer hacking and trolling schemes, breathless tales of lurid behavior, Russians clandestinely entering the U.S., reports on secret files, and of course the menacing specter of Russian “oligarchs”.  All this is believed to demonstrate Putin’s ruthless war against America, his supreme goal being to “destroy our democracy”, instill chaos, and neutralize U.S. as well as European geopolitical power.  As we have been ritually informed by CNN and kindred venues, cyber warfare (for now) is the Russians’ preeminent mode of combat – and it has been so devastatingly effective as to paralyze normal American politics.  It was cyber warfare, moreover, that delivered the 2016 presidential election to the Russia-loving Trump.

A thick tissue of lies and innuendo from cover to cover, but no hard evidence anywhere.

Trump, it turns out, was guilty of the most grievous sin: he went so far as to mention the possibility of cooperative relations with Russia, the idea being to help fight terrorism and better manage the nuclear threat. His other crime was to question the neocon/Democratic/Clintonite agenda of regime change in Syria – an agenda (still alive) that could bring military confrontation with a nuclear state. Trump’s fanciful hope meant that he had to be a willing “stooge” of Putin and his nefarious plots.

It turns out that the myriad claims, charges, and allegations set forth by Isikoff and Corn amount to little of substance – surely nothing to prove that Putin has been conducting warfare against the U.S., or that Russians had decisively influenced the 2016 presidential election.  Evidence that Trump conspired in any way with Putin or his imagined assemblage of henchmen, former KGB agents, cyberwarriors, and oligarchs is similarly lacking.   Yet, for the authors the only way Hillary Clinton could have lost the presidency that was rightfully hers was because the Russians intervened, with help from the treacherous Wikileaks, the authors writing: “Never before had a president’s election been so closely linked to the intervention of a foreign power.”

According to Isikoff and Corn, the scheming Russians managed to infiltrate party machinery, elections, and the Internet, deploying squads of cyberwarriors from the notorious Internet Research Agency and other sites.  They also placed ads in Facebook and other social-media sites.  How many American voters were even exposed to such fare, much less swayed by it, cannot be established, but vague popular awareness of this Russian skullduggery did not appear until the Mueller investigation called attention to it more than a year after the election.  No one denies the actuality of Russian trolling and hacking enterprises. The problem for the authors here is that such operations are so universally practiced as to be rather commonplace, while it has yet to be shown they can alter election outcomes in the U.S.. Moreover, in this area of intelligence work (as in so many others) the U.S. has long been unchallenged world champion.

The authors describe Putin as an “autocratic, repressive, and dangerous Russian leader” who routinely kills his political enemies and crushes dissent.  Such oversimplified descriptions of Putin and the Russian scene in general are set forth as established truths, no discussion or evidence needed.  Why a duly-elected leader (with 76 percent of the vote earlier this year) can be so ritually dismissed as a ruthless tyrant Isikoff and Corn never get around to explaining.  Were election irregularities or illegalities reported?   Were voters threatened or coerced?   Is Putin any more authoritarian than the vast majority of leaders around the world?  Would Netanyahu in Israel, Macron in France, or Merkel in Germany (all elected by much slimmer margins) be described as simple despots?

M. Isikoff and D. Corn, two recently discovered highly virulent strains of genus sordidum politicus imperatoria vermes. Liberals seem extremely vulnerable to this contagion.

The authors’ unfounded generalizations are based mainly on three sources, most crucially the all-important (but phony) Christopher Steele “dossier” that was said to implicate Trump in a variety of offenses and scandals that even Isikoff and Corn admit is comprised of “sensational and uncorroborated claims” – that is, fake news.  They argue, further, that Putin hacked DNC communications and passed along damning emails to Wikileaks, but investigation (by William Binney and others) suggests they were more likelyleaked than hacked; Julian Assange firmly denies that the files (never viewed by the FBI) came from any state actor.  The establishment media paid little attention to the damning content of these emails, so their impact on the election in any case could not have amounted to much.  Even the Mueller Committee report earlier this year, which indicted 13 Russian trolls and hackers, conceded they had no appreciable impact on the 2016 election results.

In Russian Roulette the authors seem infatuated with the American “intelligence community” – purported last word on the question of Russian interference — writing confidently but misleadingly: “The intelligence community has identified Moscow as the culprit in the hacks of Democrats in October [2016].”  One cannot help wondering what sort of “community” Isikoff and Corn have in mind.

By “intelligence community” do they include the NSA, an agency that has been spying on Americans and the world with impunity for years while a spokesperson (James Clapper) lied about it before Congress?  Could they be referring to the CIA, active for decades in clandestine and illegal operations such as unwarranted surveillance, sabotage, torture, drone strikes on civilians, and regime change (by military force, not just computer meddling) in Vietnam, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and too many other countries to list here, all aided and abetted by flagrant lies and cover-ups?  Perhaps they have in mind the FBI, an agency long dedicated to destroying popular movements (Civil Rights, anti-war, etc.) through COINTELPRO and other illegal operations.  Or the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), which for decades has squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on a futile but disastrous and racist War on Drugs, filling jails with people targeted, harassed, jailed, and ruined for the crime of using banned substances?

Can Isikoff and Corn actually take seriously the murky claims of the most Orwellian surveillance apparatus in history?  Do they believe that this “community” is subject to any meaningful oversight and accountability?  Their remarkably clueless account – basic to virtually every narrative in Russian Roulette – reveals an astonishing disconnect from postwar American (and world) history.

The central Isikoff/Corn thesis is not only devoid of factual support but is totally inverted: the present state of affairs is exactly the opposite of what they argue.  There has been no “Putin’s war on America”, but rather sustained U.S. (and NATO) warfare against Russia – political, economic, ideological, military – since 2000, if not earlier.  The Russians occupy the other, targeted end of the power spectrum, obvious to any serious observer.  Who has invoked harsh and repeated economic sanctions on whom?  Who has militarily encircled and targeted whom?  Who has deployed nuclear weapons at whose border?  Who has financed and orchestrated a hostile coup adjacent to whose territory?  Who has carried out non-stop ideological hysteria against whom?

In the world as it now exists, it is worth asking whether Russia could plausibly assume the role of imperial aggressor in its dealings with the world’s leading superpower?   Consider that in 2017 the total Russian GDP as barely 1.5 trillion dollars, roughly one-twelfth that of the U.S. ($19.5 trillion) and not even one-tenth that of the European Union ($14 trillion).  Military spending breaks down accordingly: nearly one trillion for the U.S. and $250 billion for NATO compared to $61 billion for Russia.  As for intelligence operations, the imbalance worsens – a budget of six billion dollars for the FSB and military GRU combined, compared to $75 billion for Washington not counting another $45 billion for the DEA and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) in tandem.

In fact Russia, despite its nuclear prowess, does not have the leverage and resources to threaten American (much less broader Western) geopolitical objectives – the real “threat” coming from the stubborn fact of Russian independence that was squelched during the Clintonite 1990s, when Washington used its power to reduce post-Soviet Russia to puppet status under Boris Yeltsin.   During the Yeltsin period the U.S. was never content with simple “meddling” in Russian affairs: it propped up a weak president, dismantled the public infrastructure, coddled an emergent stratum of oligarchs, and then spent $2.5 billion to sway the 1996 election in favor of a weak and unpopular Yeltsin.  Only with Putin’s emergence in 1999 did the nation regain a semblance of independence, restoring economic and political sovereignty, much to the disgust of Western ruling interests.

American intrusion into domestic Russian affairs is never explored by Isikoff and Corn, as it would undermine their one-sided tract. Nor do the authors have much to say about the post-Soviet eastward march of NATO, which allowed the U.S. and its allies to partially encircle Russia with both nuclear and conventional forces. The opening salvo of this strangulation gambit was President Bill Clinton’s “humanitarian” war against Serbia ending with the 1999 U.S./NATO bombings.   This was followed by President George W. Bush’s decision to scrap the crucial ABM Treaty with Russia in 2002 before invading Iraq in 2003.  CIA and State Department efforts to orchestrate regime change in Ukraine, ultimately achieved in 2014, came soon thereafter.

The ongoing Western campaign of economic warfare, media propaganda, and military provocations directed at Russia has only served to bolster Putin’s legitimacy, as shown by his overwhelming support in the 2018 election.  Yet Isikoff and Corn can write: “He [Putin] was a Russian nationalist to the core.  He wanted to extend Russian power. . . [as] an autocrat in the long tradition of Russian strongmen and had little interest in joining the club of Western liberal democracies – or winning its approval.”  Given the rampant imperial behavior of Washington and its European partners, Putin would have to be certifiably insane to respond in a manner that would permit further Western encroachments.

It is the expansionist U.S./NATO alliance that has maliciously targeted Russia, not the other way around.  Putin is surely a nationalist, but why not?  That just means he will fight for Russian national integrity against Western efforts to isolate and destabilize the country.  Any cyberwarfare activities launched by the Russians will appear to the rational observer as quite intelligible, a proven method to gain information about the plans of a vastly superior adversary overflowing with anti-Russia venom.

Like other Russia-bashing ideologues, Isikoff and Corn see terrible “oligarchs” everywhere, all naturally cozy with Putin. We have references to “Putin and his oligarch friends,” as if large-scale business interests could somehow have nothing to do with government.  They note that payments to IRA trolls “were being made through a holding company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and restaurateur close to the Russian president and known as ‘Putin’s chef”.”  Along with this disturbing revelation we are told that a “clique of [oligarchic] hardliners was able to outgun Russian moderates – a group including Yury Kovalchuk, billionaire owner of Rossiya bank and friend of the president “known as Putin’s banker”.  It would be a mistake to overlook the infamous Aras Agalarov, a real-estate mogul identified as “Putin;s Builder”.  Left out was any reference to “Putin’s Gardener”.

The authors deftly uncover a clique of diabolical oligarchs colluding with Putin to launch attacks on the West.  It might be useful to clarify the meaning of “oligarch”. One generally held definition is that they are exceedingly wealthy and powerful business and financial elites – the same interests that Washington zealously supported in Russia during the 1990s. These would be aligned with the very corporate and banking interests that dominate the global capitalist system, everywhere seeming to enjoy close relations with their governments.  American oligarchs (multibillionaires) in fact far outnumber their Russian counterparts – 565 to 96 – and possess many times the wealth and influence.  Further, if Washington really despises oligarchs, why did it install billionaire Petro Poroshenko as Ukraine ruler after the 2014 coup?

For Isikoff and Corn, Hillary Clinton might have been a terribly flawed candidate, but her loss nonetheless would not have occurred in the absence of “Putin’s underhanded intervention”.  No one questions whether Russian trolls and hackers were active in 2016 – or that Facebook ads were placed – but no evidence of their actual effectiveness has been presented, much less their capacity to determine an election outcome.

As they righteously celebrate the virtues of multiculturalism, diversity, and tolerance, liberal Democrats – now more than ever a neocon party of war – have come to embrace just the opposite: fierce hostility against other nations and cultures, smug provincialism, a recycled McCarthyism that spews hatred at even the slightest dissent from super-patriotic orthodoxy.  They pretend victim status when they are the ones targeting, attacking, smearing, and warmongering.

Worse yet, to satisfy their narrow political agendas they are perfectly ready to risk military confrontation with a nuclear power – a conflict that could lead to unprecedented global catastrophe.  Nowhere in this parochial text do the authors express the slightest concern for the horrors that might result from years of U.S./European hostility toward Russia.  Despite an unlevel economic and political playing-field, it is worth remembering that in nuclear matters Russia has rough parity with the West.  This might deter the neocons of both parties or it might not, the sad reality being is that liberal Democrats exemplified by Isikoff and Corn have little to offer the world beyond continuous war shrouded in a flimsy, desperate identity politics.

Henry Kissinger, longtime counsellor to the world's top scumbags, dispensing wisdom at Davos. To his right Shimon Peres.

27 January 2018

Thousands of business executives, central bankers and world leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum this week in Davos, Switzerland. The general mood was one of apprehension over every aspect of global politics and economics, from the possibility of a financial collapse on the scale of 2008 to the threat of a new world war and the growth of social anger around the world.

Even though a typical billionaire attendee will have been nearly 20 percent richer than he was last year, and will have acquired more than a few new houses, airplanes, paintings, boats and jewels, “Davos man” was nervous.

Perhaps never in the forum’s 47-year existence has its program reflected such unease. The vapidly resolute topics of recent years, such as “Resilient Dynamism” and “The Reshaping of the World,” have been replaced with a more sober theme: “A Fractured World.”

The event’s official summary contrasts the utopian vision promoted at the turn of the century, based on the belief that “greater economic interdependence among countries, buttressed by liberal democratic institutions, would ensure peace and stability well into the new century,” with the “changed” reality that “geostrategic fissures have re-emerged on multiple fronts with wide-ranging political, economic and social consequences.”

The most serious of these fissures is the imminent threat of a war between major world powers. As the summit ended, this reality was brought home by a cover story in the Economist, published online Thursday, “The next war: The growing danger of great-power conflict.”

The article’s introductory paragraphs paint a bleak picture: “In the past 25 years war has claimed too many lives. Yet even as civil and religious strife have raged in Syria, central Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq, a devastating clash between the world’s great powers has remained almost unimaginable.”

“No longer,” declare the magazine’s editors. Amid the erosion of “the extraordinary military dominance that America and its allies have enjoyed,” war “on a scale and intensity not seen since the second world war is once again plausible. The world is not prepared.”

The Economist noted the publication on January 19 of the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which declared that “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security,” and argued for an aggressive expansion of the United States’ nuclear forces that could potentially put it in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.

In the week following the publication of that document, an extraordinary series of events has reaffirmed its central message that “great power” conflict is now on the agenda.

On Tuesday, General Sir Nick Carter, the head of the British Army, proclaimed that the present global situation has “parallels with 1914,” declaring, “Our generation has become used to wars of choice since the end of the Cold War, but we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia.”

Trump spreading his trademark imbecility at Davos in 2018, His fleecing of the masses to benefit the plutocracy however endears this clown to the sociopathic privileged mob gathering in Davos. 

Also on Tuesday, US CIA Director Mike Pompeo broached the possibility of a preemptive strike on North Korea. Two days later, General Robert Neller, the head of the US Marine Corps, publicly discussed the possibility of a ground invasion of the impoverished country, declaring that such a war “will be a very, very kinetic, physical, violent fight.”

To back up its threats, the US this month deployed nuclear-capable B-2 bombers to Guam, bringing nuclear strikes by supersonic stealth aircraft against North Korea within the realm of possibility. Any war with North Korea could quickly expand to involve China and Russia.

The Davos summit took place against the backdrop of the widening offensive by Turkey against Kurdish militias backed by the United States, raising the danger that “US and Turkish soldiers, two NATO allies, could soon clash,” as the Wall Street Journal bluntly put it. The expanding war in Syria involves not only the US and Turkey, but Iran and Russia as well. Adding to the tensions is the fact that the tanks being used to pound the positions of US-backed militias had been supplied by Germany, which has grown increasingly distant from its transatlantic NATO ally.

While the United States has played the most aggressive role in stoking up global tensions, the world leaders at Davos made it clear that they would not be out-done by American belligerence. German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech to the forum in which she declared "that Europe has not been the most active continent on foreign policy, and that we often depended on the United States, which is now concentrating more on itself, must compel us to say: we have to assume more responsibility; we have to take our fate into our hands.” That is, Germany and Europe must remilitarize.

The threat of war was only one of the threats vexing the Davos elite. The past week saw a spate of warnings that red-hot stock markets are on the verge of a meltdown. William White, the chairman of the OECD review board, declared this week: “All the market indicators right now look very similar to what we saw before the Lehman crisis.” Among the most contentious summit panels was one titled, “Could 2018 Be the Year of the Next Financial Crisis?"

Even more imminent was the threat of trade war, implying the potential breakdown of the dollar-denominated international monetary system. Trump, despite his relatively subdued (for him) closing address, went to Davos guns blazing, having just slapped tariffs of up to 50 percent on imports of solar panels and washing machines.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sparked a substantial selloff of the dollar this week after he declared that “a weaker dollar is good,” leaving the greenback down by 10 percent for the year and spurring warnings of a competitive devaluation of the euro in a retaliatory trade war measure.

And yet, amid all of these dangers, panel moderator Heather Long declared that the “biggest topic at Davos” and the “biggest topic around the world,” was “inequality.” A newly-released report by Oxfam showed that just one percent of the population accumulated 82 percent of all social wealth created in the past year.

In his annual letter to CEOs attending Davos, Blackrock Chief Executive Larry Fink warned that even though “those with capital have reaped enormous benefits… popular frustration and apprehension about the future simultaneously reached new heights” amid “low wage growth” and “inadequate retirement systems.”

After enumerating the various geopolitical tensions and social crises gripping the world, the summit’s official program summary sanguinely pronounced that “By coming together at the start of the year, we can shape the future by joining this unparalleled global effort in co-design, co-creation and collaboration” in order to create a “shared future.”

Few to none of the assembled billionaires took this feel-good nonsense seriously. When they step off their private jets from Davos, they will resume their daily business of plotting wars, scheming to enrich themselves, and devising ways to suppress and repress social discontent—although perhaps with a heightened awareness that, if the world is in crisis, the working class may soon hold them responsible.

Andre Damon