10 March 2014

U.S. Reinforces Black Sea Naval Squadron: Coincidence, or Another Deliberate Escalation in the Ukrainian Crisis?

WAR FEARS ARE again intensifying as the United States puts additional pressure on Russia by reinforcing a U.S. naval squadron in the Black Sea. The squadron, now reportedly of three vessels, is said to include a Marine expeditionary unit, a newly added guided missile destroyer (USS Truxton), a guided missile frigate (USS Taylor) and an amphibious-operations command ship (USS Mount Whitney). An accompanying submarine escort, if any, would typically be unannounced, its existence most likely classified Top Secret.

While U.S. Navy sources claim the frigate and the command ship were dispatched to render aid if terrorists attacked the Winter Olympics at Siochi,  Robert Parry's ongoing disclosures of USian sponsorship and funding of the Ukrainan neo-Nazi coup  suggests the squadron was more likely pre-positioned in the Black Sea to provide support for the new regime in Kiev.

Though I respect Parry's work, I reject his (perhaps obligatory) suggestion Obama has lost control of his government to a neocon cabal. As I said on the associated comment thread, “the pre-inaugural immediacy of (the president's) transformation from Obama the Orator to Barack the Betrayer tells us he was the neocons' Manchurian Candidate (actually the Neoconian Candidate) from day one – that his 2008 “change we can believe in” campaign was the biggest Big Lie ever fed the U.S. electorate. Now it seems to me just as likely Obama is again demonstrating his signature deviousness, painting himself as the good guy, no doubt in hope of salvaging the 2014 elections, which as of now are a looming Republican landslide – not because of GOP popularity, but because of the bottomless, throw-the-bastards-out unpopularity of the treacherous Democrats. Meanwhile the “my advisors did it” excuse is as old as politics itself...” 

Whether ordered by the president or by his ever-more-openly aggressive cabinet and general staff, the naval squadron's reinforced presence undoubtedly intensifies the perceived magnitude of the Ukrainian coup's challenge to Russia's centuries-old policy of maintaining a warm-water seaport – that is, one not closed by winter ice – with year-round access to the Mediterranean and the world's oceans. The port in question (see map accessible via the link in the first paragraph) is Sevastopol,  in the now-contested Crimea. Despite Russia's huge land mass – she is by far the largest country in the world – Sevastopol is her only warm-water port. Not only is it headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet; it is of growing commercial importance and a favorite summer resort for Eastern Europeans.

Because the United States has so many warm-water ports, there is no possibility of a directly analogous threat – nothing as legitimately alarming to the U.S. as the Ukrainian coup is legitimately alarming to Russia. But a coup installing a hostile government in Mexico, perhaps backed by the People's Republic of China and threatening reconquista of California, would surely be regarded as equally provocative, particularly given the naval and port facilities at San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Such a hypothetical scenario should thus help clarify why Russia is so troubled by the Ukrainian situation. (My apologies to overseas readers for these brief lessons in third-grade geography and sixth-grade world history, but we USian Empire subjects are so oppressed by deliberately imposed ignorance, I felt the review was essential.) 

Meanwhile, USian mass media remains notably silent on the geopolitics of the Ukrainian Crisis – so much so the apparent censorship, by which Josef Goebbels would be delighted, seems not only methodical but maliciously warmongering. That's why we should be profoundly thankful to Parry on the Left and Patrick Buchanan on the Right. Parry's work has provided most of the source material for my commentaries, and Buchanan's debunking of Hillary Clinton's outrageous denunciation of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a latter-day “Hitler”  is compelling in its own right, particularly for its wealth of historical information. 

As to Hillary herself, I have long assumed she is a female George Bush in Democratic disguise – far more intelligent than Bush of course, probably even brighter than his ideological successor Obama, but with the same I-wanna-be-Emperor-of-the-World complex that now seems to be the defining quality of presidents and presidential candidates from both the Democrat and Republican factions of the one Ruling Class Party. Hence my (slightly edited) comment on Parry's alarming report of the “'we-hate-Putin' hysteria”  being ginned up throughout the USian Homeland:

The ugly truth about Hillary, who is not only a neocon but a Christian theocrat, is revealed by Jeff Sharlet on pgs. 272-277 of The Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Harper: 2008). Sharlet reports Hillary secretly collaborates with the notorious Sam Brownback and his fanatical ilk to impose Biblical Law by “tunneling beneath” the constitutional wall between church and state.

That said, Hillary's Hitler analogy is clinically interesting because it is a classic psychological projection of the USian Empire's “American Century” agenda of global conquest. In this context, the so-called military “withdrawal” cited by a poster below is a Big Lie because it never voluntarily occurs until conquest has ensured the triumph of capitalism and its enslavement of the indigenous population.

Thus, just as Putin notes, the USian Empire has assumed the role of international aggressor that characterized the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis. Indeed, had the Bankers Plot of 1934 succeeded in ousting President Roosevelt, the U.S. would have been the fourth Axis partner.

Thus too the genocidal (and therefore definitively neo-fascist) social-service cuts now sponsored by both ruling parties – actually one party of two names. Cuts in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment compensation etc. are undoubtedly intended to kill those of us who no longer exploitable for profit. Killing by neglect rather than in death camps merely avoids the odium of the latter.
 
Could this – the fact a major war would exterminate vast numbers of workers rendered permanently jobless by the for-profit downsizing of the USian Homeland economy – be another reason the empire has so radically escalated its warmongering? Before you answer, remember the One Percenters, who include Hillary and her ilk, all assume they will be protected by their own posh, heavily fortified bunkers – that their obscene wealth will thus keep them safe from bombs, radioactive fallout, disease, famine and all the other horrors of thermonuclear war. We on the other hand will be abandoned – just as the African-American residents of New Orleans were abandoned after Katrina – to live or die as fate and happenstance decree.
 
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Insurance-Company Atrocities in Obamacare: an Anthology of Horrors
Truthout's William Rivers Pitt – a man I often scorn for his refusal to admit that disciplined socialism is the only adequate response to capitalism's ever-intensifying savagery – has written a Pulitzer-class exposé of what Barack the Betrayer enabled when he killed public-option health care and thus indentured the entire U.S. population to the vampires of the for-profit insurance mafia. Entitled “Worse than the Mob: the Insurance Industry Is Organized Crime,” his detailed and heart-wrenching report of the devastating injuries Obamacare inflicted on his wife will of course win no USian journalism award nor ever be published in any mainstream USian journal. Hence – though I did not comment on its associated thread because there was nothing I could say beyond an emphatic “please read this” that in context would have been redundant – I am linking it here.  It is well done, a work of which Pitt and his publishers should damn well be proud, as fine a piece of truth-telling as I have witnessed in this lifetime. 

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Outside Agitation on Other Websites: a busy week – the usual first-of-the-month chores drawn out by the fact I am too poor to own an automobile but reside amongst voters who despise mass-transit users in a region that officially disdains mass transit – with my time squandered accordingly on herky-jerky buses. Nevertheless...
 
Lets Make Capitalism a Dirty Word  Carl Gibson of Reader Supported News details the hardships capitalism maliciously inflicts on the 99 Percent and triggers an interesting discussion-thread to which I contribute three posts. The first repeats statements I've made many times: “All defenders of capitalism are either deluded or dishonest. Precisely as defined by its messiah Ayn Rand, capitalism is infinite greed elevated to maximum virtue – the rejection, with malice aforethought, of every humanitarian precept our species has ever articulated. It is therefore, as proven by its anti-humanitarian and anti-environmental depredations, the closest approximation to absolute evil yet manifest on Earth...(that's why) capitalism's momentum is always toward ever-more-vicious tyranny.” The second refutes a poster who seemed to idolize Hitler and Nazism. The third, refuting a capitalist disciple, poster notes an increasingly obvious truth about all such discussion threads: “Interesting how class war manifests even here on this website: the obvious division between those (few) who have profited via capitalism and therefore defend it, versus the masses, we the now-permanently impoverished proletarians and peasants who are capitalism's victims and angrily seek its replacement.” 

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Four Ways to Evolve Beyond Capitalism  Alas, Gibson's sequel to the above piece carefully avoids any mention of socialism, a failure that, to my mind, discredits him. In fact it suggests he is yet another apologist for the status quo and possibly a clandestine operative for the (increasingly desperate) Democratic Party. I respond accordingly (the comment slightly revised for posting here): “A growing third party already exists, and precisely as Mr. Gibson suggests, it is 'building power first at the local and county level.' It is called Socialist Alternative. It has defeated huge odds to elect Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council, and it is increasingly active in many other U.S. cities. Its website is here. By its cutting-edge leadership in the campaign for a $15-per-hour minimum wage, SA is already a huge factor at the national level. It has scared Obama into trying to restore the Democratic Party's humanitarian image and has even frightened a few Democrats into joining its '$15 Now' campaign.” 

LB/9 March 2014 

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