Biden to Pick Country at Random to Remove US Troops to Show Russia How to Do It

 

In an effort to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine, President Biden is taking the unprecedented foreign policy step of leading by example and pulling troops out of a country the US has invaded.  

As an added show of good faith, he will choose that country at random by covering his eyes and pointing at a map randomly.

When asked by reporters if any countries will be exempt, he said, "Of course!  We're not going to give up countries that grow our bananas or cocaine, make our clothes for pennies a day, or have natural resources our extraction companies can profit from.  That would just be stupid."

The puzzled press corps asked which countries that left.

"Wherever those Barbery pirates came from, and some of our troops just ran out of gas in Lichtenstein and decided to stay for the Licht festival.

Another reporter asked what would happen if he accidentally pointed to part of the United States.

"Come on, man!  We're not going to give up all that stuff we won from Mexico!  If we did that, where the hell would we go for vacation? Florida? Jesus, it's too damn humid and the alligators would eat my grandkids.

Speaking of Florida, if I happen to land on that, I will return it to the Queen of Spain, but she's gotta take Trump and that Rick DeMentos or whatever the hell his name it. That's non-negotiable."

Post Trump Letters to My Democratic Senators

As much as know-nothings and racists, corrupt Democrats who don't listen to or fight for their constituents cost their party the presidency.

Here's one of my letters to my three Democratic senators (one is being replaced at the end of this term by another). I live in a Republican House district, so I have no rep to contact there.

Feel free to copy and send it to your own senators, reps, and state and national party officials.


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Sen. Dianne Feinstein

United States Senate

331 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

November 13, 2016

Sen. Feinstein,

As a Democratic voter old enough to remember the George W. Bush years, I urge you to fight against Republicans and fight for progressive values rather than repeat the shameful enabling that Democrats in both chambers did for nearly all of the Bush presidency.

I am under no illusions that Democrats made some faulty tactical political decisions to pursue a greater good. 

The reality is too many elected Democrats take their marching orders from Wall Street banks and other corporations even when what they want conflicts with the best interests and wishes of the overwhelming majority of your constituents.  This has been especially true on issues like Wall Street deregulation and  bailouts, instead of regulation and vigorous prosecution, enabling the privatization of public education and prisons, and not publicly challenging the business and geopolitical goals of our foreign policy and means of implementing them.

A profound example of this was Obamacare that was written largely by insurance companies with seemingly no provision to control their arbitrary price increases instead of something like Medicare for All or at least a public option that would have served as a threat to private insurers that if they didn't act ethically, their customers could leave them for that.

Democrats in Congress have also supported rather than opposed our profoundly dishonest and criminal policies in Middle East.  Our allies in the Gulf, and indirectly (barely) our own government are supporting groups like ISIS to undermine secular regimes like the one in Syria, and the past one in Libya.

Likewise, the recently declassified Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 make it clear that Saudi Arabia funded and supported the 9/11 hijackers, which our government did nothing about.  This makes it clear that terrorism is not a problem our government is fighting but a tool and excuse it is using to pursue other goals.  No one in the leadership of Democrats in Congress has ever clearly articulated what those goals are and consistently fought this agenda that I know of.

Worse, once the Cold War ended and Russia became at least as capitalist as us, rather than find a way to cooperate with them, we have violated our word, expanded NATO to their borders, and fomented coups in places like the Ukraine to install regimes hostile to Russian security and economic interests like the transit of oil and gas from Russia to European markets.  A lot of people like myself balked at voting for Hillary Clinton since she had enthusiastically implemented this policy as Secretary of State and during her campaign, announced even more confrontational policies that could have lead to war with nuclear armed Russia.  While we might "win" such a war, millions would lose their lives and trillions dollars would be wasted to benefit very, very few.

While you have been progressive on many domestic issues, your family’s profiting from war contracts makes your support of any policy in that area suspect to say the least.  

Senator Feinstein, I urge you to help make the Democratic Party represent working people instead of just being the corporate party that doesn't pander to bigots.

Urge your colleagues to fight for leaders of the Democratic minority in Congress who will fight for progressive values.  Wall Street tools like Chuck Schumer should not even be considered an option.

Democratic voters will no longer tolerate politicians who give us lip service during election season, their back after, and their loyalty to Wall Street.

Sincerely,

 Professor Smartass

selfish reasons for Americans to worry about what happens to Russia

It seems that since the end of the Cold War, the financial elite have become more brazen in screwing the middle and working class (and even a lot of the rich) and buying politicians more openly to help them do so.

They may have been more circumspect in the past because for all its flaws, communism would look more attractive to Europeans and Americans if we were still treated the way we were in the robber baron era, and while the Soviet Union was a going concern, it would look like a realistic rather than hypothetical option.

So we got the original "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism, smoothing the corners and rough edges off capitalism enough that people didn't think too much about alternatives.

Once the Soviet Union was gone, the financial elite seem to believe Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement that it was the end of history and they had won. Without an alternative for people to look to, the Third Way became three-quarters of the way to fascism and back to the era of Charles Dickens--smoothing the edges off capitalism was too expensive when the rich could just keep the tax money that costs in their pocket, and then privatize any surviving government services, so the tax dollars that are collected end up back in their hands.

If that is how they treat us now, regardless of whether you think Putin is a nice guy, do you think the financial elite are going to treat us any better once they don't even have Russia as a major REGIONAL obstacle?

If they replace every government that doesn't do business on terms the IMF, World Bank, Wall St, oil companies and the like dictate, is that going to make life any better for the rest of us?

When the sun never set on the British Empire, far from helping the folks back in England, those were the darkest days of the Industrial Revolution, when men, women, and children worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

Have our lives gotten any better since we've gone from one of two superpowers to the SOLE superpower in the world?

If not why should we expect to get any better if the continue to isolate Russia and take away their oil and gas business until they become a super-sized Somalia?

Previous post on Russia post-Cold War

Gov't reaction to Wall Street meltdown like ''punishment'' of Prescott Bush for hiding Nazi money

If an ordinary citizen gave aid and comfort to our arch-enemy in World War II, they would have at minimum expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison or more likely, ended up like the Rosenbergs, executed for helping the Soviets.

Prescott Bush's bank was managing assets of a Nazi financier, including a steel plant that made heavy use of concentration camp labor. Far from being unaware of this, Bush mentioned it in correspondence and was concerned that his bank's ''interests be protected.'' The government found this activity troubling enough that they seized the banks assets under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

Bush's punishment for his involvement?

You would think he would have at least ended up like John Walker Lind, stripped naked, blind-folded, and held in solitary until the trial that put him in prison for life (or shortened his life).

Instead, the whole business was hushed up and he later won a Senate seat.

It seems that something similar is going on with Wall Street today. Can anyone doubt that Wall Street's concerted effort to get themselves deregulated, their Rube Goldberg maze of shell corporations and off-shore accounts, and intentional defrauding of ordinary investors, mortgage holders, and retirees has done more damage to our economy than Tim McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and all the other terrorists to ever blow up anything in the US combined?

And in fact, the connection to terrorism is not just by analogy, but literal. To the degree that we face a legitimate terrorist threat, it is because business interests demand to be put ahead of human rights, democracy, and even the national security of the United States.

The foremost example of this is how we treated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev hoped to transition to a European-style social democracy, but the investor class and banks wanted a Russia that was easy to plunder of their natural resources and industry. The result was the standard of living and even life expectancy in Russia DROPPED after the fall of communism, and Putin succeeds partly because he is trying to reclaim their dignity by standing up to us. Oil companies interest in stripping Russia of their oil, gas, and pipeline income further antagonizes a Russia that we now no longer have an ideological beef with. In effect, for the sake of corporate profits, we are reigniting a Cold War with an enemy with thousands of nuclear weapons.

Worse, business is a direct cause of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administrations failure to bring a quick conclusion to the War on Terror. Those in the Islamic world do not hate us for our freedom, but because we take theirs away to ensure that our oil companies have compliant governments to deal with, from overthrowing the democratically elected secular government of Iran in the 1950s to backing the oppressive Saudi government for decades. Oddly, even though the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found direct involvement of the Saudi government in the attacks nothing was done about it. Whether this was done because we didn't want to jeopardize business ties with Saudis or because the Saudis were doing the Bush administration a favor with the attack, neither is acceptable.

And yet, the punishment of the wealthy who endanger and loot us like this will be much like Prescott Bush's. The public will use our taxpayer dollars to clean up their mess, and they will continue to live lives of leisure and be free exercise their power as ''masters of the universe'' even though they are masters of nothing but moving our money into their pockets.

I have no problem with capitalism in theory, but in practice, we can no longer afford a financial elite that not only ignores the law, but buys our politicians and makes the indefensible legal.

Any solution to this current problem has to involve putting the fear of God or at least fear of the wrath of the American people into these spoiled sociopathic trust fund babies, the likes of which no financial elite has felt since the Russian or even French Revolution.

Anything less than that leaves America and the world at risk from more attacks by these economic terrorists who make 9/11 look like a toddler's temper tantrum.

You can get Sarah Palin's foreign policy experience in just 2 seconds!

All you have to do is look at these photos of Russia's Big Diomede Island, which can be seen from Alaska.

The Russian island has been uninhabited since World War II. The American one has a population of 146.

The island on the left is part of the United States.
The one on the right is Russian.

Here's a better view of just the Russian one:


And our rock island and Russia's from space:

Man, I don't know about you, but after looking at those photos, I feel much more qualified to talk to Vladimir Putin about strategic nuclear weapons, which countries to let into NATO, and whether we are risking a world war by trying to encroach on Caspian Sea oil or by attacking Iran.

Don't you feel it too?

Thank you, Sarah Palin, for helping so many of us to become foreign policy experts by looking at a rock that happens to belong to another country.

Bush says NO WMD in Russia was reason for weak Georgia response

At a press conference yesterday, President George W. Bush said he did not send troops to back Georgia in their brief war with Russia because Russia had no WMD.

"Look, I'm concerned when nations cross the borders of other nations and bomb and kill innocent people, but the fact is, Russia has no weapons that can reach the United States and no WMD. They just aren't a threat to us."

When pressed further, Bush said he had his staff review the public statements of his vice president Dick Cheney, his secretary of defense, Condi Rice, and former secretary of defense Don Rumsfeld over the last seven years and found that only two or three countries in the world may have nuclear weapons and other "WMD."

"Look, we know for sure Saddam Hussein was seconds from getting a nukes which he could have used to blackmail the world, and now Iran is trying to do the same, but no one else has that kinda technology. Not even us."

Asked about North Korea he said, "They might have them, but it's not they got missiles that could fly over Japan or anything. Hell, I don't even think they got the Wii yet."

Reporters asked about the Cold War arms race, Russia's history of nuclear tests, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. After consulting his teleprompter and 3x5 cards for several seconds, touching his ear and saying, "Karen? Karl? You guys fall asleep in there?" He finally replied, "Look the Cold War was decades ago. That's ancient history. We can't let history effect how we act in the present. And we don't know that that conflict had anything to do with Weapons of Mass Destruction."

Later, a senior official at the State Department speaking off the record in her shiny new Ferragamo shoes clarified the president's statement.

"I would like to respond to the unfair and frankly conspiracy theory inspired questions posed to th president about Russia nuclear weapons. First, the Cold War was primarily about ideology, defeating godless communism not any particular 'weapons system.'"

She said the photos of Soviet missiles that were frequently published in newspapers and still survive in textbooks were actually part of a robust space programs that launched thousands of weather and communications satellites. Some had to be stored in hardened bunkers and submarines because of Russia's harsh climate.

US satellite photos of alleged Soviet nuclear missile tests, seemingly confirmed by seismographic and radiation data were actually a wave of large meteors striking the Soviet Union, according to her. "As the world's largest land mass, it is only reasonable & logical that we would see more meteors hit that country than any other."

She said that the Cuban Missile Crisis was about Castro's attempt to develop nuclear weapons, which the United States should have invaded to prevent; however, once Soviet cargo ships and military vessels arrived, it was clear to President Kennedy that it was all a misunderstanding.

"We need to focus on real threats, not hypothetical ones," the source concluded. "If we expended our military resources chasing imaginary nuclear stockpiles we would break our military, bankrupt our country, and alienate all of our historical allies in fairly order."

Georgia & Russia all about OIL

The US is trying to cut Russia out of the profits and control of Caspian Sea oil. There is no other story in Georgian-Russia conflict, there are only details about innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire.

The way our network news covers it is a little like talking about the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima without mentioning the atom bomb. But they are only following the lead of our elected officials.

It is to the undying shame of American democracy that this is not part of what our elected leaders tell us about the decisions they are making.

KEY EXCERPTS:




Russia and Georgia: All About Oil

Michael Klare | August 13, 2008

This struggle commenced during the Clinton administration when the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea basin became independent and began seeking Western customers for their oil and natural gas resources. Western oil companies eagerly sought production deals with the governments of the new republics, but faced a critical obstacle in exporting the resulting output. Because the Caspian itself is landlocked, any energy exiting the region has to travel by pipeline – and, at that time, Russia controlled all of the available pipeline capacity. To avoid exclusive reliance on Russian conduits, President Clinton sponsored the construction of an alternative pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia and then onward to Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast -- the BTC pipeline, as it is known today.

The BTC pipeline, which began operation in 2006, passes some of the most unsettled areas of the world, including Chechnya and Georgia’s two breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. With this in mind, the Clinton and Bush administrations provided Georgia with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid, making it the leading recipient of U.S. arms and equipment in the former Soviet space. President Bush has also lobbied U.S. allies in Europe to “fast track” Georgia’s application for membership in NATO.

All of this, needless to say, was viewed in Moscow with immense resentment. Not only was the United States helping to create a new security risk on its southern borders, but, more importantly, was frustrating its drive to secure control over the transportation of Caspian energy to Europe. Ever since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, Moscow has sought to use its pivotal role in the supply of oil and natural gas to Western Europe and the former Soviet republics as a source both of financial wealth and political advantage. It mainly relies on Russia’s own energy resources for this purpose, but also seeks to dominate the delivery of oil and gas from the Caspian states to the West.

FULL TEXT

We treated Post-Soviet Russia like Post-WW I Germany: why expect different outcome?

After World War I, the Allies imposed brutal terms on the defeated Germans, imposing not only reparations for war costs, but maintaining a starvation blockade AFTER surrender, and stripping Germany of territory.

After the Fall of the Soviet Union, we had a chance to steer Russia toward a stable, European-style social democracy.

Instead, the Wall Street types insisted that any economic aid come at the price of radical free market reforms that actually lowered the standard of living and even life expectancy compared to Soviet days.

Likewise, the breaking away of former Soviet Republics may have been inevitable, but their quick integration into NATO and America siding strongly with political candidates in those countries based on how quickly they would open up to foreign investments. shed their social safety net, and allow us to use their soil as a base for military operations was a continual slap in the face of the critically injured but not dead Russia.

There are, however, a couple of critical differences between Germany after WWI and Russia after Communism.

Germany was a great industrial power, which could make her a powerful military adversary but she was poor in the natural resource to power expansionist ambitions: oil. Hitler didn't seize enough oil-rich territory in time to fight the allies indefinitely and ran out of gas.

By contrast, Russia sits on the Caspian Sea Basin, where some of those oil reserves Hitler needed were, and American oil companies are trying to quietly pick them out of Russia's pocket, one former republic and pipeline at a time. One of those is in Georgia.

We have not only beaten Russia, we have taken their watch and are now trying to pry loose their fillings. How would you expect them to respond?

Russia also correctly sees us as trying to control all of the major oil producing countries in the Persian Gulf, adding occupied Iraq to our "ally" Saudi Arabia, and now Bush & Cheney are eying Iran's reserves as well. Would we allow Russia to gain control of so much of the world's oil and on top of that, cozying up to Mexico to suck oil from under our border?

Another way Russia is unlike Germany is Russia has about as many nuclear warheads as we do, and unlike the phantom menace from Iraq, Russia has the means to deliver them and a possible motive. This makes the Wall Street post-communist plan to belittle and plunder Russia suicidal. If you beat someone to pulp and keep pounding, if the only weapon he has to fight back is a hand grenade, he just might pull the pin even if it means killing himself as well as you.

Our Wall Street first foreign policy has led us into a costly war in Iraq, and if we attack Iran or make a misstep on Georgia, it could lead to World War that could cost billions of lives. And whichever corporations profit from the war, none of them will share the loot with average Americans anymore than they are sharing their massive profits from running up the price of oil with wars and threats of war.

The great flaw of the Wall Street first foreign policy is it expects people to respond like sheepish employees given the pink slip and escorted out of the office. But when you are being forcibly removed from your means of survival, as is the case in Iraq, and we are now seeing in Russia, people do not go quietly, and more innocent bystanders than guilty parties end up dead.

Peace with dignity and security for all parties involved may mean less short term profits for Wall Street speculators, but as we saw with the Marshall Plan after World War II, a well-fed and well-treated former adversary doesn't take up arms against you again, and both sides can prosper.

We must choose between modest profits for most, stability and life for all, or quick profits for a few, and war and death for everyone else.

Which will end up having shorter reign: soviet style communism or Friedman's free market extremism?

I'm reading THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, and the ''free market'' scam of forced debt, privatization, deregulation, and dissolving of government services looks scarcely less destructive than what Bush is doing with bombs and bullets in Iraq.

I'm no fan of communism. I think the Keynesian balance between business and government is good enough though euro social democracy would be better.

What the corporate elite have done to the rest of the world the last couple of decades and has finally tried to turn on the US in full force after 9/11 has more in common with Mao's Great Leap Forward or Pol Pot chasing everybody out of the cities into the fields in Cambodia than it does with any rebalancing of the business/government relationship in the West.

The three that really haunt me are Poland, Russia, and South Africa because each had that moment of hope and triumph of democracy and that victory was snatched away from them by these free market extremists. Infant morality, income inequality, and unemployment all went up and life expectancy went down.

In the case of Russia, they not only crushed the hopes of those people, they destabilized and antagonized a nuclear power, keeping the possibility of a nuclear holocaust alive.

All so a very, very few could profit.

They deserve their own circle of hell, wiping the asses of other moral filth.

So how long will this last compared to the Soviet model's 70-ish years?

Short video on Shock Doctrine by director of Children of Men

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

FREE MARKETS BY FORCE

A good brief summary of neoliberalism

How ''economic hit men'' set it up and enforce it

How Bush is plundering Iraq's OIL

Klein on the plunder of Iraq

Which will end up having shorter reign: soviet style communism or Friedman's free market extremism?
	Friedmanism is like gravity or evolution. It is just a law of the universe that will last forever
	It will be a thousand year reich like feudalism
	It won't be a thousand years, but given the rise of the surveillance state, it will be a long time before it's taken down
	It will last about as long as soviet communism then rot apart at the top
	The natives are already collecting their torches and pitchforks (they've already chased their Friedman overlords out of most of South America)
	I don't know what the fuck you are talking about
	I'm George W. Bush, and you should be worrying about yur family and terrist, and leave the worrying about money to people who have it
	I'm forwarding this poll to Homeland Security and the Chamber of Commerce. What size orange jumpsuit would you like at Gitmo?
	Jeeves! Turn on the electric fence! The serfs are trying to get in again.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

GRAPHS & VIDEOS: Who exactly is a nuclear threat to us?

With the Bushies trotting out the same nuclear boogey man stories to sell the Iran War that they used in Iraq. The essence of the claim is that if some country gets a couple of dozens nukes or even one, they can blackmail us or even hold the whole world hostage.

We seem to be suffering from collective amnesia of some basic math about nuclear weapons most people, including our enemies, knew during the Cold War.

Here's a quick refresher:

These are the nuclear arsenals of most of the countries in the world.

Damn! They could do us some damage couldn't they?

But it looks a little different when you add us and Russia into the picture:

And if you throw in the extra nukes we and the Russians have in mothballs:

If some country nuked us or gave nukes to a terrorist who nuked us, we have enough nukes to burn that country off the map, and not even miss the warheads we used.

Here's a couple of 60 second videos that put it another way:

It’s worth noting that Israel has some nuclear missile submarines too, so if any of their neighbors nuke them, no matter how successfully, Israel could give them a very bad day.

Every world leader knows that not only do we have enough nukes to destroy the whole world several times over, we are the only country who has ever used them. They know that it would be suicidal to nuke us or give a nuke to terrorists to nuke us. That's why the Soviets never attacked us even when they had roughly as many or slightly more nukes than us.

Someone will say the threat of even one nuke going off here is too great. However, the leaders of countries are like chess players. They got into power by being able to accurately predict how their opponents would react to their actions. That's why there are few any examples in history of numerically, technologically, and economically inferior countries launching attacks on a superior country's home turf.

A nuclear attack on us even if successful in itself, would have zero chance of having positive political or economic results for the country that launched it.

You probably already knew this, but you can send it to your righty friends as Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity, Savage, and the other snake oil salesmen get their knickers in a knot about the threat from Iran.

war profiteering iran iraq war wmd terrorism oil nuclear weapons president george w bush warheads nuclear arsenal nuclear weaponsstrategic access nuclear threat north korea republican nuclear+program mutually assured destruction professor smartass iraq propaganda corporation fascism chamber of commerce george w bush war on terror false flag northwoods smartass comments resistance censored news rebel veneuzuela big oil soviet russia israel islamofascism worst president ever failure war criminal idiot retard