Putin discusses the horrible track record of the US empire, its criminality and cynicism, and says in so many words, politely but firmly, that this type of behaviour will no longer be allowed.
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EDITOR—The Russians, always a remarkably creative and resilient civilization, have recently come up with a medical discovery, a crucial breakthrough in the management of Covid 19, that could have enormous repercussions in many other fields, including the management of immune response in cancer therapies, transplants, etc. Ahh, what a world this could be if we had peace and collaboration with Russia, China, Iran, Korea, and other important countries in the human family, instead of constant warmongering and the deliberate sowing of hatred and distrust toward them.
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MOA—I am not that optimistic. The Blob is resistant to change because those who are inside it tend to bite away anyone with even a slightly different view.
Consider the case of Matthew Rojansky, Director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is known as a middle-of-the-road expert of U.S. and Soviet/Russian relations – not a hawk, but also not an appeaser.
Rojansky was supposed to chair the Russia desk in Biden’s National Security Council. As soon as that became know the ‘Putin Whisperers’ came out in force to fight the nomination. Axios led the charge: Rojansky has been praised for his scholarship on Russia and is frequently cited in U.S. media for his expert commentary. But his work has drawn criticism — including in a 2018 open letter from Ukrainian alumni of Kennan that blasted the think tank he runs as an “unwitting tool of Russia’s political interference.”
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ALASTAIR CROOKE—The alternative way simply is to privatise these ‘public goods’ (as in the West), where they are provided at a financialized maximum cost – including interest rates, dividends, management fees, and corporate manipulations for financial gain.
‘It’ is then a truly different economic approach. To give one example: New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension cost $6 billion, or $2 billion per mile – the most expensive urban mass transit ever built. The average cost of underground subway lines outside the U.S. is $350 million a mile, or a sixth of New York’s cost.
How does this ‘it’ change everything? Well, just imagine for a moment: the biggest element in anyone’s budget today is housing at 40%, which simply reflects high house prices, based on a debt-fuelled market. Instead, imagine that proportion at 10% (as in China). Suppose too, you have low-cost public education. Well then, you are rid of education-led debt, and its interest cost. Suppose you have public healthcare, and low priced transport infrastructure. Then you would have the capacity to spend – It becomes a low-cost economy, and consequently it would grow.
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SCOTT RITTER—From the moment Russia dispatched its armed forces to Syria in September 2015 to prevent the collapse of the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad at the hands of US-backed Islamist terrorists, it has found itself at the nexus of competing geopolitical games. One of the main issues confronting Russia was avoiding conflict in its airspace between its air force and the anti-Islamic State coalition headed up by the United States. This task was complicated by the fact that the US was really using the campaign to counter Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) as a cover for training and equipping Islamist forces dedicated to the removal of President Assad. The US also sought to leverage its influence with Syrian Kurds to create an autonomous region in northeast Syria that operated outside the control of Damascus.
