The 'We-Hate-Putin' Group Think

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

08 March 14

he U.S. political-media elites, which twisted themselves into a dangerous "group think" over the Iraq War last decade, have spun out of control again in a wild overreaction to the Ukraine crisis. Across the ideological spectrum, there is rave support for the coup that overthrew Ukraine's elected president - and endless ranting against Russian President Vladimir Putin for refusing to accept the new coup leadership in Kiev and intervening to protect Russian interests in Crimea.

The "we-hate-Putin" hysteria has now reach the point that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has deployed the "Hitler analogy" against Putin, comparing Putin's interests in protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine with Hitler citing ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe to justify aggression at the start of World War II.

"I just want people to have a little historic perspective," the reputed 2016 Democratic presidential frontrunner told a question-and-answer session at UCLA on Wednesday, confirming reports of her using the Hitler analogy during an earlier private fundraiser.

Some Clinton backers suggested she made the provocative comparison to give herself protection from expected right-wing attacks on her for having participated in the "reset" of U.S. policy toward Russia in 2009. She also was putting space between herself and President Barack Obama's quiet effort to cooperate with Putin to resolve crises with Iran and Syria.

But what is shocking about Clinton's Hitler analogy - and why it should give Democrats pause as they rush to coronate her as their presidential nominee in 2016 - is that it suggests that she has joined the neoconservative camp, again. Since her days as a U.S. senator from New York - and as a supporter of the Iraq War - Clinton has often sided with the neocons and she's doing so again in demonizing Putin.

Democrats might want to contemplate how a President Hillary Clinton would handle that proverbial "3 a.m. phone call," perhaps one with conflicting information about a chemical weapons attack in Syria or muddled suspicions that Iran is moving toward a nuclear bomb or reports that Russia is using its military to resist a right-wing coup in neighboring Ukraine.

Would she unthinkingly adopt the hawkish neocon position as she often did as U.S. senator and as Secretary of State? Would she wait for the "fog of war" to lift or simply plunge ahead with flame-throwing rhetoric that could make a delicate situation worse?

There's also the question of Clinton's honesty. Does she really believe that Putin protecting ethnic Russians from an illegitimate government that seized power in a right-wing coup on Russia's border is comparable to Hitler invading Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland?

Media Endorsement

Normally, anyone who uses a Hitler analogy is immediately chastised for both absurd hyperbole and anti-Semitism. Besides the extreme exaggeration involved, the Hitler analogy trivializes the scope of Hitler's crimes both in provoking World War II and carrying out the Holocaust against European Jews.

Usually neocons are among the first to protest this cheapening of the Holocaust's memory, but apparently their determination to take down Putin for his interference in their "regime change" plans across the Middle East caused some neocons to endorse Clinton's Hitler analogy. One of the Washington Post's neocon editorial writers, Charles Lane, wrote on Thursday: "Superficially plausible though the Hitler-Putin comparison may be, just how precisely does it fit? In some respects, alarmingly so."

Yet, outside of this mad "group think" that has settled over Official Washington, Clinton's Hitler analogy is neither reasonable nor justified. If she wanted to note that protecting one's national or ethnic group has been cited historically to justify interventions, she surely didn't have to go to the Hitler extreme. There are plenty of other examples.

For instance, it was a factor in the Mexican-American War in the 1840s when President James Polk cited protecting Texans as a justification for the war with Mexico. The "protect Americans" argument also was used by President Ronald Reagan in justifying his invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983. Reagan said he was protecting American students at the St. George's Medical School, even though they were not in any real physical danger.

In other conflicts, human rights advocates have asserted the right to defend any civilians from physical danger under the so-called "responsibility to protect" - or "R2P" - principle. For example, neocons and various U.S.-based "non-governmental organizations" have urged a U.S. military intervention in Syria supposedly to protect innocent human life.

However, if anyone dared compare Ronald Reagan or, for that matter, R2P advocates to Hitler, you could expect the likes of Charles Lane to howl with outrage. Yet, when Putin faces a complex dilemma like the violent right-wing coup in Ukraine - and worries about ethnic Russians facing potential persecution - he is casually compared to Hitler with almost no U.S. opinion leader protesting the hype.

Who Were the Snipers?

There is also new evidence suggesting that the sniper shootings in Kiev - a pivotal moment in the uprising to overthrow President Viktor Yanukovych - may have been the work of neo-Nazi provocateurs trying to foment a coup, not the police trying to stop one.

According to an intercepted phone conversation between Estonia's Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and European Union foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton, Paet reported on a conversation that he had with a doctor in Kiev who said the sniper fire that killed protesters was the same that killed police officers. As reported by the UK Guardian, "During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga - who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor - blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters."

Paet said, "What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides.

"So she also showed me some photos, she said that as medical doctor, she can say it is the same handwriting, the same type of bullets, and it's really disturbing that now the new coalition, that they don't want to investigate what exactly happened. … So there is a stronger and stronger understanding that behind snipers it was not Yanukovych, it was somebody from the new coalition."

Ashton replied: "I think we do want to investigate. I didn't pick that up, that's interesting. Gosh."

However, the sniper fire has been cited by the U.S. government and major U.S. news outlets as evidence of Yanukovych's depravity, thus justifying his violent removal from office last month when he was forced to flee for his life after neo-Nazi militias seized control of government buildings.

Yet, despite the new evidence suggesting that the coup-makers may have been responsible for instigating the violence, the mainstream U.S. press continues to revise the preferred narrative by putting white hats on the coup-makers and black hats on the Yanukovych government. For instance, the New York Times has stopped reporting that more than a dozen police officers were among the 80 or so people killed as protests in Kiev turned violent. The typical new version in the U.S. press is simply that Yanukovych's police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, killing 80 of them.

And to take a contradictory view of this conventional wisdom marks you as "crazy." When Yanukovych and Putin raised questions about who actually opened fire, the U.S. news media dismissed their suspicions as "conspiracy theories" and proof of "delusional" thinking. It is now a virtual consensus across the U.S. news media that Putin is "unstable" and "disconnected from reality."

The Washington Post called Putin's Tuesday news conference "rambling." However, if you read the transcript, it is anything but "rambling" or "delusional." Putin comes across as quite coherent, expressing a detailed understanding of the Ukraine crisis and the legal issues involved.

Putin begins his response to reporters' questions by puzzling over the reasons for the violent overthrow of Yanukovych, especially after the Ukrainian president agreed to European terms for surrendering much of his power, moving up elections and ordering police to withdraw. But that Feb. 21 agreement lasted only two hours, ended by neo-Nazi extremists seizing control of government buildings and forcing Yanukovych to flee for his life.

Putin said, "There can only be one assessment: this was an anti-constitutional takeover, an armed seizure of power. Does anyone question this? Nobody does. There is a question here that neither I, nor my colleagues, with whom I have been discussing the situation in Ukraine a great deal over these past days, as you know - none of us can answer. The question is why was this done?

"I would like to draw your attention to the fact that President Yanukovych, through the mediation of the Foreign Ministers of three European countries - Poland, Germany and France - and in the presence of my representative (this was the Russian Human Rights Commissioner Vladimir Lukin) signed an agreement with the opposition on February 21.

"I would like to stress that under that agreement (I am not saying this was good or bad, just stating the fact) Mr. Yanukovych actually handed over power. He agreed to all the opposition's demands: he agreed to early parliamentary elections, to early presidential elections, and to return to the 2004 Constitution, as demanded by the opposition.

"He gave a positive response to our request, the request of western countries and, first of all, of the opposition not to use force. He did not issue a single illegal order to shoot at the poor demonstrators. Moreover, he issued orders to withdraw all police forces from the capital, and they complied. He went to Kharkov to attend an event, and as soon as he left, instead of releasing the occupied administrative buildings, they [the armed militias] immediately occupied the President's residence and the Government building - all that instead of acting on the agreement.

"I ask myself, what was the purpose of all this? I want to understand why this was done. He had in fact given up his power already, and as I believe, as I told him, he had no chance of being re-elected. Everybody agrees on this, everyone I have been speaking to on the telephone these past few days. What was the purpose of all those illegal, unconstitutional actions, why did they have to create this chaos in the country?"

Now, there also is independent evidence suggesting that elements of the right-wing militias may have killed both protesters and police to destabilize the Ukrainian government and justify the coup.

U.S. Hypocrisy

In the same news conference, Putin noted the U.S. government's hypocrisy in decrying Russia's intervention in Crimea. He said: "It's necessary to recall the actions of the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, where they acted either without any sanction from the U.N. Security Council or distorted the content of these resolutions, as it happened in Libya. There, as you know, only the right to create a no-fly zone for government aircraft was authorized, and it all ended in the bombing and participation of special forces in group operations."

There is no denying the accuracy of Putin's description of U.S. overreach in its interventions in the Twenty-first Century. Yet, Secretary of State John Kerry has ignored that history in denouncing Russia for using military force in the Crimea section of Ukraine. Kerry said on Tuesday: "It is not appropriate to invade a country and at the end of a barrel of gun dictate what you are trying to achieve. That is not Twenty-first Century, G-8, major-nation behavior."

Despite Kerry's bizarre lack of self-awareness - as a senator he joined in voting to authorize the U.S. invasion of Iraq - it is Putin who gets called "delusional." While virtually all mainstream U.S. news outlets join in the demonization of Putin, there have been almost no words about the truly delusional hypocrisy of U.S. officials. Ignored is the inconvenient truth that the U.S. military invaded Iraq, still occupies Afghanistan, coordinated a "regime change" war in Libya in 2011, and has engaged in cross-border attacks in several countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

Though we've seen other examples of the U.S. political/media elite losing its collective mind - particularly during the crazed run-up to war in Iraq in 2002-2003 and the near stampede into another war with Syria in 2013 - the frantic madness over Putin and Ukraine is arguably the most dangerous manifestation of this nutty Official Washington "group think."

Not only does Putin lead a powerful nation with a nuclear arsenal but his cooperation with President Obama on Syria and Iran have been important contributions toward tamping down the fires of what could become a wider regional war across the Middle East.

Yet, it is perhaps Putin's assistance in finding peaceful ways out of last year's Syrian crisis as well as getting Iran to negotiate seriously over its nuclear program - rather than pressing for violent "regime change" in the two countries - that earned Putin the undying enmity of the neocons who still dominate Official Washington and influence its "group think."

Maybe that enmity explains part of the mysterious why behind the Ukraine crisis and the endless demonization of Putin.

Elliott Abrams, a leading neocon who oversaw Middle East policy on President George W. Bush's National Security Council staff, was quick to pounce on the Ukraine crisis and the pummeling of Putin to urge a new push for legislation that would pile on more sanctions against Iran, a move that President Obama has warned could kill negotiations.

"This would be a very good time for Congress to pass the Menendez-Kirk legislation," Abrams wrote. "One lesson of events in Ukraine is that relying on the good will of repressive, anti-American regimes is foolish and dangerous. Another is that American strength and strength of will are weakened at the peril of the United States and our friends everywhere."

While at the NSC, Abrams was one of the neocon hardliners - along with Vice President Dick Cheney - who "were all for letting Israel do whatever it wanted" regarding attacking Iran's nuclear facilities, according to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates in his memoir, Duty.

That attack-Iran argument nearly carried the day during the final months of the Bush-43 administration since, according to Gates, "Bush effectively came down on Cheney's side. By not giving the Israelis a red light, he gave them a green one."

But a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate, representing the views of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, concluded that Iran had stopped work on a nuclear weapon four years earlier. Bush has acknowledged that this NIE stopped him from going forward with military strikes on Iran.

The neocons, however, have never given up that dream. Now, with the "we-hate-Putin" group think gripping Official Washington, they may feel they have another shot.

Four Ways to Evolve Beyond Capitalism

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

07 March 14

n my previous article, I explained how all of the economic problems we currently face are natural results of capitalism. From rising poverty in the midst of record-high corporate profits, polluted air and dwindling water, private prison systems that rely on mass incarceration, students going deep into debt while the government books student loan profits, foreclosures, stagnant wages, all of these economic problems can be addressed once we acknowledge our seriously flawed economic system and vow to fix it.

Now that we're having a serious conversation about capitalism, we can also have a conversation about solutions. Along with calling out flaws of capitalism, I'm proposing four solutions that would fix the most glaring problems in capitalism and blaze a new path forward for the next generation.

1. Break Corporate Monopolies and "Free Trade" Agreements

There's nothing wrong with starting a business to make and sell goods that people want to buy. But the problem begins when large corporate giants force local small businesses to shutter their operations. This peer-reviewed study looked at data from 3,000 counties and found that, on average, each new Walmart that opens kills approximately 150 retail jobs in the county. This means that for every job created by a new Walmart, 1.4 jobs on average are lost.

The explosion of corporate giants swallowing up small business competition and killing jobs is a consequence of "free trade" entities like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is currently being negotiated behind closed doors.

At the time NAFTA was signed, there was no trade deficit between the United States and Mexico. As of 2012, that trade deficit has ballooned to $276 billion in lost jobs and wages as a result of skyrocketing imports and stagnant exports. While the Clinton administration promised 1,000,000 new jobs because of NAFTA, over 1,000,000 jobs had been lost by 2004.

The trade deficit between the US and China reached a record $30.1 billion as of July 2013. In the ten years that passed between China joining the WTO in 2001 and 2011, the US lost $37 billion in wages, mostly in the manufacturing sector. As manufacturing workers who lost jobs were re-employed in other sectors, an average of $13,504 in wages was lost for each displaced worker.

One main argument used by defenders of capitalism is that consumer spending dictates the market, so bad corporate actors will be punished by more consumers buying from their competitors. Advocates of capitalism also argue that if pay or work conditions are insufficient, workers will logically quit their jobs and seek employment elsewhere.

But when the new Walmart shuts down the local grocery, hardware, and auto parts stores, workers who are upset with being paid poverty wages have nowhere else to work if they want to quit. When the local auto manufacturing plant gets outsourced to Mexico, those auto workers have no other choice than to work at a place like Walmart. And when consumers have nowhere else to spend their money but at places like Walmart, then Walmart gets all the business.

2. Guarantee Full Employment

While defenders of capitalism oppose almost any regulation of business, such regulations were largely responsible for the long period of economic prosperity that followed World War II. During FDR's administration, there was full employment in the United States, and everyone had an income.

Increased public investment meant Americans all had jobs that provided them with steady income. As a result of direct government involvement in the economy, FDR inadvertently created the middle class just a decade after the Great Depression robbed most Americans of their jobs, homes, and savings. When more people had more money to spend, local businesses thrived on the extra demand, and more jobs were created to meet the increased demand.

Jobs that were created as a result of public investment, like FDR's New Deal, injected new money into the economy as programs like the Works Progress Administration put 3 million people to work rebuilding critical infrastructure. Congressional obstruction of New Deal programs and neoliberal economic advisers convinced FDR to scale back government spending, sending the country into recession in 1937-38. The US only bounced back from that recession due to tight economic controls in place during the war effort.

The government became the prime buyer of half the goods manufactured in the US. When ALCOA's monopoly on the aluminum market became a threat, the government subsidized Reynolds aluminum to force ALCOA to compete fairly, and also got into the aluminum manufacturing business to make sure raw materials were in steady supply. When Ford refused to abide by the National Labor Relations Act that gave private sector workers the right to organize unions, FDR cancelled a top-dollar contract. A wartime tax on windfall profits prevented corporations from becoming large enough to absorb competitors.

While President Eisenhower didn't regulate business as tightly as FDR did during World War II, he did make huge investments in public infrastructure. In building the 46,000-mile interstate highway system, creating NASA, and expanding national parks, the government put 3.5 million people to work during the Eisenhower years. The interstate highway system alone cost $114 billion then, which would be roughly $450 billion in new government spending today. Such projects were made possible by keeping the top tax rate on the richest households and corporations at a 90 percent rate - the interstate highway was made possible by drivers paying an extra penny per gallon in gas taxes. The tax code was also much simpler in the Eisenhower years, without any of the special exemptions, loopholes, credits, subsidies, and other giveaways that corporate lobbyists have inserted in the tax code today.

3. Wage War on Climate Change, Poverty, Inequality and Greed

FDR and Eisenhower's economic controls were the result of war; FDR wanted to create national solidarity around the war effort, and Eisenhower wanted the interstate highway system built to better move troops and supplies during war. By drastically changing what we value in society and fostering the political will to change it, we can also change our economic circumstances through a new war effort - call it the war on climate change, the war on poverty, the war on inequality, and the war on greed.

In a winner-take-all system like capitalism, in which the biggest and baddest reap all the rewards, there must be strict regulations and high taxation on multinational corporations, and numerous subsidies and tax benefits for small businesses. This has to also be combined with the complete reinstatement of tariffs on foreign exports to the US that were eliminated in free trade agreements, uninhibited rights for all workers to organize unions, and strict penalties for companies who attempt to crush those unions.

In waging a war on climate change and poverty, we can create millions of new jobs by making heavy public investments in creating a widespread sustainable energy grid, powered by wind turbines and solar farms. A side effect of that will be lower greenhouse gas emissions, and decreased consumption of the planet's finite resources. A new Works Progress Administration could stay in business permanently, providing a never-ending supply of jobs repairing not just schools, roads and bridges, but building and maintaining broadband internet infrastructure, high-speed rail, city parks, bike paths, community gardens, housing cooperatives, and other projects. These jobs can never be outsourced.

We can win the war on inequality and greed by instituting a maximum wage for executives of all companies that get any tax credits or do any business with the government, making sure that no CEO makes more than 50 times what their lowest-paid worker makes. We could also double the tax rates of those who make more than $5,000,000 a year, those who inherit their wealth from previous generations, and those who make money from having money (capital gains). However, merely taxing income isn't sufficient enough to melt the glacier of wealth that the wealthiest 0.1 percent have amassed. When such a small number of people have accumulated such a vast amount of resources, such one-sided distribution has to be corrected.

While some defenders of capitalism would call this unwarranted class warfare, the only ones affected by such a tax increase would be, in 2007 numbers, just 46,000 taxpayers who collectively had over $670 billion in taxable income. Since over 96 million people filed taxes that year, that amounts to just one-half of the top one percent of taxpayers. And out of those 46,000 taxpayers, less than 14,000 estate tax returns were filed in 2008. That means only one-sixth of the top one percent of taxpayers would be affected by this tax increase. Daily Kos diarist "clammyc" originally proposed this idea, and called it the "fat cat," "rich brat," and "trust fund baby" tax. Over $100 billion could be generated each year with these new taxes, which would go a long way in paying for the aforementioned public investments.

4. Build a New Populist Political Party

Several readers responded to my previous article about capitalism by asking me if I favored socialism or communism. I honestly don't know what -ism I would use to describe the economic system described above, and I don't personally believe in communicating values and goals through -isms.

And while this may look to some like pie-in-the-sky utopianism, it can be achieved if we start building populist political power now. My anarchist friends advocate living off the grid, generating their own solar powered-electricity, hunting and gathering their own food, and self-governing through tribal principles. While I don't oppose that, I also recognize that there are those of us who want to see truly systemic change in our lifetimes.

Both Democrats and Republicans have become captive to the same industries and oligarchs responsible for the rampant climate change, poverty, inequality, and greed destroying our economy. And the only alternative parties that currently exist don't propose any real challenge to the Democratic/Republican stranglehold on our politics. These parties are usually led by a figurehead who runs as a perennial candidate in presidential elections, meaning none of these parties really exist outside of presidential elections. These figureheads are almost always white males, and come from positions of privilege, widening the disconnect between themselves and the rest of the population. The currently existing alternative parties also have to battle with being branded as perennial losers, steering people away before their candidates even have a chance to make their case.

However, a new party that actively opposes capitalism and unites people around the basic ideas of meeting human needs would be widely respected and immediately acknowledged. This new party could stand apart from the two corporate-owned parties by refusing to take campaign donations from corporations, banks and developers, standing up for the rights of immigrants and indigenous people, calling for sustainable energy and development, making education for all a top priority, and believing in universal access to healthcare as a human right. While it would take time, focusing on building power first at the local and county level is the surest way to make lasting change.

Who's in?

Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.