America loves its military. It should because it’s the most expensive defense force of all time. $778B was allocated for defense spending in 2022. China comes in a distant second at $229B.
All of which prompts a provocative question: What if the Marine Corps publishes a landmark study that claims recipients of the US government defense budget are collectively responsible for accelerating the danger of climate change to very dangerous levels, in fact, to unlivable levels?
As of June 2022, that’s precisely what’s happened.
The world’s militaries, intelligence agencies, foreign affairs strategies, and think tanks are unwittingly advancing the hyperthreat, which is an acceleration of climate and environmental change leading to Hothouse Earth. This startling information is explained in detail in an eye-opening analysis in which hyperthreat is the primary subject, to wit: Plan E: A Grand Strategy for the Twenty-first Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats by Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD, Publisher – Journal of Advanced Military Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2022.
The analysis is published in two parts in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies and by the US Marine Corps University Press, which is a professional university of the US Marine Corps located in Quantico, Virginia, listing the analysis as: An Introduction to PLAN E.
The publications contain the following clause: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Marine Corps University, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Department of the Navy, or the U.S. government.
Publishing an article is ordinarily consistent with some level of tacit approval of its general tenor, especially when the article points an accusing finger at the publishing entities’ main source of existence. That’s tacit approval, in spades. Further to the point, by all appearances, the military seems to want Boulton’s thesis in the public domain as a wake up call and more likely as a brilliant strategy going forward.
The analyst/author Elizabeth G. Boulton, PhD (Australian National University) and MA of Climate Policy (University of Melbourne) is a former army major in the Australian Defence Force, serving in East Timor (1999) and Iraq (2004) and undertaking logistics work in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan, and a lead research officer at army headquarters.
All quotations within this article come from Boulton’s article or from the following synopsis of the article: Defence Agencies ‘Accelerating’ Risk of ‘Hothouse Earth’, US Military Study Warns, David Spratt, Climate Code Red, June 27, 2022.
A key finding in the landmark study, which applies war theory and military strategy to the dynamics of the climate and ecological crises, states that activities of military and intelligent agencies are: “Accelerating the likelihood of triggering a worst-case ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario that would make the planet ‘unlivable for most species.”
That’s a very powerful statement that’s seldom found outside of spirited scientific analyses. Yet, it is lodged within the heartbeat of the US Marine Corps, a tacit endorsement that’s desperately needed for the political establishment to get the hint, hello out there, all is not well. For decades now Congress has handled climate change like a hot potato. That’s an amateurish way to approach an existential threat.
Moreover, and even more damning, the study argues that various agencies of government “have become the biggest danger to planetary security, in effect, working to accelerate the ‘hyperthreat’ of climate and environmental change.”
According to the study: “The hyperthreat impact is an unprecedented combination of rapid global warming and the unraveling of Earth’s ecological systems.” Of heightened concern, the study warns that the hyperthreat’s most dangerous course of action is provoking cascading tipping elements thereby accelerating a transition to: “Hothouse Earth state uninhabitable for most species.”
That statement has strong endorsements throughout the world of science, to wit: “In 2019, Ripple and colleagues (2020) warned of untold suffering and declared a climate emergency together with more than 11,000 scientist signatories from 153 countries. They presented graphs of planetary vital signs indicating very troubling trends, along with little progress by humanity to address climate change. On the basis of these data and scientists’ moral obligation to ‘clearly warn humanity of any catastrophic threat,’ they called for transformative change.” (Source: World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021, BioScience, Oxford Academic, September 9, 2021)
Timeline for Action
The Boulton study places a timeline on taking action in order to prevent a worst case scenario: “Without concerted global action between 2022 and 2025, the most dangerous course of action is also the most likely course of action.”
Failure to address the danger within the 2022-25 timeline with proactive real time actual policies is explained in war terms: “The hyperthreat has ‘war-like destructive capabilities’ that make it hard to recognize the enormity of its destructive impacts or ‘who is responsible for its hostile actions.’ This is a phenomenon that humanity has never encountered before.”
The study identifies the difficult-to-grasp and stealthy nature of the hyperthreat by focusing on the main centre of gravity, which is its freedom of movement via invisibility and unknowability and human hesitancy to respond: “Human activity that fuels the hyperthreat is (1) often legal (2) has social license or (3) is understood as legitimate business or security activity; its contribution to slow violence is often obscured.”
For example, legitimate activity includes plans to exploit fossil fuel and natural ecological resources at rates and scales that exceed safe planetary boundaries: “Indeed, while declaring all manner of ‘net zero’ commitments, oil and gas firms continue to plan vast fossil fuel production projects. If executed, these would drive climate change beyond internationally-agreed temperature limits, leading to potentially catastrophic impacts.”
The world’s biggest oil and gas companies are projected to spend $932 billion by the end of 2030 developing new oil and gas fields, according to a new analysis of Rystad Energy, data by Global Witness and Oil Change International… And by the end of 2040, this figure grows to an even more staggering $1.5 trillion.” (Source: World’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Firms Projected to Spend Almost a Trillion Dollars on New Oil and Gas Fields by 2030, Global Witness and Oil Change International, April 12, 2022)
But, what if that same $1.5T was spent on renewables and mitigation measures, e.g., retrofitting buildings to maximum energy efficiency or sustainable public transportation or enhancing carbon sinks?
As for coal, China is now building or planning to build in China and elsewhere in the world new coal plants amounting to 176 gigawatts of coal capacity, enough to power 123 million homes. (New Scientist, April 26, 2022)
Additionally, “India Expected to Commission 10 Thermal Coal Power Plants in 2022-23, add 7,010 MW.” (S&P Global Commodity Insights, June 3, 2022)
“By seeking to protect the existing fossil fuel system, humanity’s security agencies are in effect working for the enemy.” Yet, this is not intentional behavior, rather, it’s the effect of national security institutions entangled within the status quo. It’s normal operational behavior.
Further clarification by Boulton: “After the Second World War, military strategy traditionally involved securing resources and protecting supply chains – all considered crucial to post-war rebuilding and prosperity narratives. But it is now clear that this very system, which military and security strategies are designed to support, is the primary driver of global insecurity.”
In a twisted manner, the very resources regarded as good and critical for functioning of the global system now threaten all forms of planetary life. “By applying economic, diplomatic, military, and other tools of force and power to participate in the ‘race for what’s left’ of Earth’s resources, humanity is unwittingly aiding the hyperthreat.”
Plan E
Dr. Boulton has elaborate plans to head off the biggest threat of all time, including a radical transformation of security paradigms. The next 8 years are pivotal. Defense resources need to develop a “whole of society approach, bringing into the fold numerous civilian capabilities to leverage Earth’s entire human population as an asset.”
The list of recommendations is beyond the scope of this article, but a couple of ideas follow herein:
For a full explanation, the link to Dr. Boulton’s article in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies, Marine Corps University Press go to: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/857233
One idea is establishment of a Global Climate Emergency Peace Treaty from 2022 to 2030 to allow nations to focus on the emergency hyper-response.
Another idea is to use international diplomacy to create a new, neutral, rules-based governing architecture for the world based on “ecological survival and safe Earth requirements… For this, we need to reimagine the role of great powers in the world, realigning geopolitical security with the overarching aim of containing the hyperthreat.”
Dr Boulton explores how ecological thinking can be used to reinvent traditional political institutions. Multilateralism should become ecomultilateralism to facilitate cooperation on caring for ecosystems and disaster response. “Earth citizenship’ could allow nations to mobilise the world’s 18 million work-ready forcibly displaced people in hyper-response work.”
In essence, Plan E or a Grand Strategy for the Twenty-first Century Era of Entangled Security and Hyperthreats utilizes a transdisciplinary approach to the idea of framing climate and environmental change as a new type of threat, a hyperthreat and when properly framed: “This approach contrasts to prior literature and longstanding geopolitical discourse that identify the risks of taking a securitization approach.” Instead, the author argues that it is now risker not to consider climate and environmental change within a mainstream geopolitical and nation-state security strategy.
Dr. Boulton’s detailed analysis, combined with a generous layout of how to tackle the issue, is perhaps one of the finest approaches extant, bringing together a well-reasoned all-in all-together approach of forces to defeat a monster by the same forces that bred and fed the monster at its inception.
The Boulton thesis is an extraordinarily important statement of facts about the invisibility and difficultly of identifying risks that, in point of fact, are normal operating behavior inbred into the socio-economic fabric of late stage capitalism which, according to the Boulton thesis, can be detoured and maybe even defeated but only by well-directed powerful universal action commencing this decade.
But, the window for achievement is narrow.
Postscript: The US Supreme Court has declared war against the EPA by hampering, effectively eliminating, public policy to control polluting fossil fuels. This dangerous ruling effectively pokes a stick in the eye of military security concerns about Hothouse Earth by its own military and tens of thousands of scientists throughout the world, as the US takes one more gigantic step backwards into an era known as the Wild West when rugged individualism ruled the domain with guns blazing.
Robert Hunziker is a writer from Los Angeles
(Dedicated to the memory of Ghassan Kanafani, an iconic Palestinian leader and engaged intellectual who was assassinated by the Israeli Mossad on July 8, 1972)
This is, according to the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci, the ‘interregnum’- the rare and seismic moment in history when great transitions occur, when empires collapse and others rise, and when new conflicts and struggles ensue.
The Gramscian ‘interregnum, however, is not a smooth transition, for these profound changes often embody a ‘crisis,’ which “consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born”.
“In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” the anti-fascist intellectual wrote in his famous “Prison Notebooks”.
Even before the Russia-Ukraine war and the subsequent deepening of the Russia-NATO crisis, the world was clearly experiencing an interregnum of sorts – the Iraq war, the Afghanistan war, the global recession, the rising inequality, the destabilization of the Middle East, the ‘Arab Spring’, the refugee crisis, the new ‘scramble for Africa’, the US attempt at weakening China, the US’ own political instability, the war on democracy and decline of the American empire ..
Recent events, however, have finally given these earth-shattering changes greater clarity, with Russia making its move against NATO expansion, and with China and other rising economies – BRICS nations – refusing to toe the American line.
To reflect on all of these changes, and more, we spoke with the world’s ‘most cited’ and respected intellectual, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky.
The main objective of our interview was to examine the challenges and opportunities facing the Palestinian struggle during this ongoing ‘interregnum’. Chomsky shared with us his views about the war in Ukraine and its actual root causes.
The interview, however, largely focused on Palestine, Chomsky’s views of the language, the tactics and solutions affiliated with the Palestinian struggle and the Palestinian discourse. Below are some of Chomsky’s thoughts on these issues, taken from a longer conversation that can be viewed here.
Chomsky on Israeli Apartheid
Chomsky believes that calling Israeli policies towards Palestinians “apartheid” is actually a “gift to Israel”, at least, if by apartheid one refers to the South-African style apartheid.
“I have held for a long time that the Occupied Territories are much worse than South Africa. South Africa needed its black population, it relied on them,” Chomsky said, adding: “The black population was 85% of the population. It was the workforce; the country couldn’t function without that population and, as a result, they tried to make their situation more or less tolerable to the international community. (…) They were hoping for international recognition, which they didn’t get.”
So, if the Bantustans were, in Chomsky’s opinion, “more or less livable,” the same “is not true for the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Israel just wants to get rid of the people, doesn’t want them. And its policies for the last 50 years, with not much variation, have been just somehow making life unlivable, so you will go somewhere else.”
These repressive policies apply in the entirety of the Palestinian territory: “In Gaza, (they) just destroy them,” Chomsky said. “There’s over two million people now living in hideous conditions, barely survivable. International law organizations say that they are not likely to even be able to survive in a couple of years. (…) In the Occupied Territories, in the West Bank, atrocities (take place) every day.”
Chomsky also thinks that Israel, unlike South Africa, is not seeking the international community’s approval. “The brazenness of Israeli actions is pretty striking. They do what they want, knowing the United States will support them. Well, this is much worse than what happened in South Africa; it’s not an effort to somehow accommodate the Palestinian population as a suppressed workforce, it’s just to get rid of them.”
Chomsky on the New Palestinian Unity
The events of May 2021 and the popular unity among Palestinians are “a very positive change”, in Chomsky’s opinion. “For one thing, what has severely impeded the Palestinian struggle is the conflict between Hamas and the PLO. If it’s not resolved, it’s a great gift to Israel.”
Palestinians also managed to overcome the territorial fragmentation, according to Chomsky: “Also, the split between the legal boundaries” separating Israel from “the expanded area of greater Palestine” was always a hindrance to Palestinian unity. That is now being overcome, as the Palestinian struggle “is turning into the same struggle. Palestinians are all in it together.”
“B’tselem and Human Rights Watch’s description of the whole region as a region of apartheid – though I don’t entirely agree with it for the reasons I mentioned, because I think it’s not harsh enough – nevertheless, it is a step towards recognizing that there is something crucially in common between all this area.”
“So, I think this is a positive step. It is wise and promising for Palestinians to recognize ‘we’re all in it together’, and that includes the diaspora communities. Yes, it’s a common struggle,” Chomsky concluded.
Chomsky on One State, Two States
Though support for a one state has grown exponentially in recent years, to the extent that a recent public opinion poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center (JMCC), concluded that a majority of Palestinians in the West Bank now supports the one-state solution, Chomsky warns against discussions that don’t prioritize the more urgent conversation of Tel Aviv’s colonial quest for a “greater Israel.”
“We should not be deluded into thinking that events are developing towards a one-state outcome or towards a confederation, as it’s now being discussed by some of the Israeli left. It’s not moving in that direction, that’s not even an option for now. Israel will never accept it as long as it has the option of greater Israel. And, furthermore, there is no support for it in the international community, none. Not even the African states.”
“The two-states, well, we can talk about it but you have to recognize that we have to struggle against the ongoing live option of a greater Israel.” Indeed, according to Chomsky, “much of the discussion of this topic seems to me misplaced.”
“It is mostly a debate between two states and one state that eliminates the most important option, the live option, the one that’s being pursued, namely greater Israel. Establishing a greater Israel, where Israel takes over whatever it wants in the West Bank, crushes Gaza, and annexes – illegally – the Syrian Golan Heights .., just takes what it wants, avoids the Palestinian population concentrations, so, it doesn’t incorporate them. They don’t want the Palestinians because of what is called the democratic Jewish state, the pretense of a democratic Jewish state in which the state is the sovereign state of the Jewish people. So, my state, but not the state of some Palestinian villager.”
Chomsky continues, “To maintain that pretense, you have to keep a large Jewish majority, then you can somehow pretend it’s not repressive. But so the policy is a greater Israel, in which you won’t have any demographic problem. The main concentrations of Palestinians are excluded in other areas, they are basically being expelled.”
Chomsky on BDS, International Solidarity
We also asked Chomsky about the growing solidarity with Palestinians on the international stage, on social media, and the support for the Palestinian struggle among many public personalities and celebrities.
“I don’t think mainstream celebrities mean that much. What matters is what is happening among the general population in the United States. In Israel, unfortunately, the population is moving to the right. It is one of the few countries I know, maybe the only one, where younger people are more reactionary than older ones.”
“The United States is going in the opposite direction,” Chomsky continued, as “young people are more critical of Israel, more and more supportive of Palestinian rights.”
Regarding the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), Chomsky acknowledged the significant role played by the global grassroots movement, though he noted that BDS “has a mixed record”. The movement should become “more flexible (and) more thoughtful about the effects of actions”, Chomsky noted.
“The groundwork is there,” Chomsky concluded. “It is necessary to think carefully about how to carry it forward.”
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is “Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak out”. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
Many progressives are excited about the electoral victory of so-called leftist, Gustavo Petro, who defeated both the centrist candidate representing the status quo and the right wing Rodolfo Hernández. “So-called” leftist is the key word here, because, to quote Petro, he is fighting for “democracy and peace, not socialism.” 1 He wants to raise taxes on the rich, combat hunger, increase access to health care and education, and halt oil exploration, but he envisions accomplishing this by allying himself with liberal politicians in order to “ pass progressive liberal reforms.”2
As President, Petro would command 228,000 soldiers and 172,000 police, the second biggest military In South American and the recipient in millions of dollars of US aid.3 Although Petro has criticized the military for corruption, promised some reforms, and even fought against them as a youthful member of the guerilla group M-19, he is not planning to dismantle the institution.
Petro hopes that will not be overthrown by a US-backed coup, although he has raised this possibility. Tellingly, Biden sent his Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the same person sent to engineer the pro-US coup in Ukraine in 2014, to oversee the election in Colombia.4 So whether it be by violence with which the US was complicit, as with Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Allende in Chili in 1970, and Zelaya in Honduras in 2009 or fraud accusations as against Evo Morales in Bolivia in 2019 (to name a few), reformers in Latin America cannot expect to stay in office for long.
Workers’ Power Comes From the Barrel of a Gun
Because Petro is not a Marxist or a revolutionary, he fails to deal with the question of power. Who holds power — that is what decides the ability of a system to determine and implement its priorities. Under capitalism, the capitalist class, the owners of industry and banks, holds power, ultimately through its control of the military and police. Capitalists never have and never will give up power voluntarily. The only way for workers to overturn the system in order to erase the concept of profits is to organize millions, including as many soldiers as possible, to fight the capitalist class. There is no other path to create a system with totally new priorities, in which production is for what people need rather than for what sells and in which services to maximize health, education, housing, and creativity are the priority. A politician alone without organized armed backing cannot reorder social priorities.
By definition, profit is made only by returning to the working class less than the value it produces – a simple relation elucidated by Marx 150 years ago. If a capitalist nation is doing well relative to others, controlling resources and markets and not facing military threats, it may be able to treat workers relatively well, as did the US after World War II. But if profits are threatened by low productivity, poor trade relations, loss of hegemony, then workers will pay the price. Thus we see a decline in wages and services in the US, now being out produced by China, and a continually low standard of living for workers in the countries of the global south.
Not all capitalists agree about the degree to which workers should be exploited or the amount of services they should be provided, but the bottom line is that, overall, profits must be maintained. Petro and many other reformers in Latin America and social democrats like Bernie Sanders in the US believe that it is possible to require or pressure capitalists to provide workers with good wages and services without removing them from power. They take this position because their greatest fear is that the working class should actually take power.
Fake Leftists Steer Protestors to the Ballot Box
Ever since gaining independence 200 years ago, Colombia has been ruled by a small elite that is protected by the armed forces that depend on US dollars, the largest recipient in the hemisphere. Ever since 1921 US aid has been aimed at containing any communist threat throughout the hemisphere, so much so that Colombia fought along with the US in World War II, Korea, and has been named a partner of NATO. Ever since the Reagan administration this military aid has been given under the cover of the “war on drugs,” although it has mainly been used to quell local and regional guerilla, leftist and protest movements.4.5
Today Colombia is one of the two largest cocaine producers and distributors in the world. At least 130,000 small farmers make their living growing coca, and the drug profits are so great that many politicians, judicial officials and security forces are bribed to facilitate the trade.6 Petro’s only solution is to gradually replace the coca crops with legal ones such as marijuana, but even his mild opposition to the drug war threatens the US plan to continue its armed presence.7
As recently as 2019 there were mass protests in Colombia over 19 percent tax increases on many everyday goods and services. The more than 42 percent of the population that already lives in poverty would have had trouble just surviving. Health and pension cuts would have also affected the middle class. Thus huge numbers of workers and neighborhood organizations, students, young people and minority groups mobilized to protest.8 At least 45 demonstrators were killed by security forces and 1649 arrested.
Rather than taking a lead in this popular struggle, Petro discouraged militant tactics like blockades and urged reliance in elections.9 On April 17, 2021, he addressed the nation and appealed for calm. “The police aren’t the enemy,” he said in the video published on social media. “The enemy is the tax reform.” Once tax reform was rescinded, he urged strikers to go home.10 Nonetheless only 48 percent of potential voters participated in the recent election.11
What is Needed
Thus it is unlikely, impossible, that Petro’s victory will resolve the problems of working class Colombians. Even if Petro is not soon assassinated or deposed, the wealthy elite and the military they control jointly with the US will not allow any reforms that threaten their wealth or the priorities of US foreign policy. The greatest danger and the greatest tragedy is that the mass movement that developed from 2019-21 has become quiescent and may be discouraged by Petro’s failures. We can hope that it restarts and sees the necessity of actually seizing power as a mass movement, that same necessity for workers everywhere.
References
- https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/the-evolution-of-colombias-gustavo-petro/
- https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/colombia-protests-strike-2021-duque-uribismo-neoliberalism-police.
- https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220506-colombia-military-bristles-at-rise-of-leftist-presidential-hopeful
- https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/05/27/will-biden-accept-a-leftist-president-of-colombia/
- https://www.e-ir.info/2017/08/22/imperialism-by-another-name-the-us-war-on-drugs-in-colombia/
- https://colombiareports.com/colombia-drug-trafficking/
- https://www.tni.org/en/article/colombias-popular-uprisings
8.https://www.democracynow.org/2018/8/10/meet_gustavo_petro_colombian_former_guerilla
- https://jacobin.com/2019/12/colombia-protests-paro-nacional-ivan-duque-farc
- https://apnews.com/article/colombia-23b7d9e1823e288a90e19942b249f579
- https://www.idea.int/data-tools/country-view/82/40
Ellen Isaacs is a physician and long time anti-racist and anti-capitalist organizer. She is co-editor of multiracialunity.org and can be reached at eisaacs66@gmail.com. This article first appeared on multiracialunity.org
False Bias #4. The US Is Fighting Against Corruption. The previous essay about authoritarianism referred to the 2019 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee for the Senate Hearing of the National Defense Strategy presented by Damon Wilson, President of the National Endowment for “Democracy,” who stated: “Our nation and its closest friends agree that the great challenge of the 21st century will be the competition between the free world and authoritarian corrupt state-led capitalism, chief among them China and Russia.”
In this essay, we’ll look at the second term in Wilson’s label for Russia: “corrupt.” According to Wilson, the US is defending the “free world” against “authoritarian corrupt state-led capitalism.” But is the US fighting corruption? My understanding is that some US policymakers are striving to reduce corruption. But fighting against corruption has never been a reason for the US to wage war or proxy war against another nation. If it were, it would have to attack itself first. After all, the US government has nothing to boast about with regard to its own ethics.
Consider the bloated, unaudited Pentagon budget,[1] with its lucrative cost-plus contracts, no-bid contracts, exorbitantly jacked-up prices,[2] the shamefully huge CEO salaries,[3] its endless build-up of conventional and nuclear weapons which somehow are just not built right to ever be adequate, its exploration into chemical, biological, and space weapons because the nukes and conventional weapons still aren’t enough, the US weapon industry’s massive millions of dollars in annual so-called “campaign contributions,” a.k.a. bribes, to politicians,[4] and the bribes paid by the weapon industry and tax dollars paid by the US government to foreign nations, such as Saudi Arabia, just to get them to agree to purchase US weapons.[5]
How can anyone look at all that and fail to see that the US government runs on corruption? We, the American taxpayers, are subsidizing the American weapon industry, even though it’s killing us, economically and physically. We’re even paying foreigners to buy US weapons, not only through bribes, but through Foreign Military Financing. No one asked us for our permission or our opinion. We’re just brainwashed to believe it’s right or kept in the dark. Is the purchase of US policy by the wealthy so endemic that it’s falsely accepted as democracy rather than plutocracy?
On the 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index posted by Transparency International, the US ranked 27th out of 180, with 180 being the worst. That’s about one-sixth of the way down the list. In addition to a ranking, each nation also receives a score out of 100. The top three nations ranked together as 1st, Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand, each received an 88. The US received a 67.
In this war supposedly motivated in part by this belief that the US is defending the “free world” against “authoritarian, corrupt state-led capitalism,” US policymakers’ ally, Ukraine, is ranked 122, while US policymakers’ enemy, Russia, is ranked 136. In terms of scores, Ukraine received a 32 and Russia a 29 (out of 100). How can US policymakers possibly state that this war is in part a war of the free world against corruption, when its ally received a 32/100 and its enemy received 29/100? Will US policymakers stop fighting Russia once its gets a whopping 32 as a score and moves from a rank of 136 to a rank of 122?
I think not. After all, other US corrupt allies have ranks even lower than Russia: Pakistan 140, Uzbekistan 140, Kyrgyzstan 144, Tajikistan 150, Iraq, which the US supposedly liberated, 157, and Afghanistan, the nation into which the US funneled billions of dollars and expended so much effort for 20 years to build democracy, 174 (out of 180).[6]
Nearly every one of these US-allied nations is violently authoritarian, as well! Yet despite their corruption and authoritarianism, US policymakers haven’t expressed the need to create what Wilson calls a “permanent deterrence” posture against those nations as they have against Russia.
On the contrary, the US sends them weapons, a nice little tool to prop up their violent authoritarianism. Gee, I wonder why these corrupt, extremely violent authoritarian nations are considered US allies—good guys, but Russia’s alleged authoritarianism and corruption requires this “permanent deterrence” posture? Is it because corruption, authoritarianism, and violent oppression actually don’t matter that much to US policymakers as long as the foreign leaders are malleable putty, subservient to US policymakers’ self-centered, avaricious goals?
And notice that US policymakers are calling Putin’s Russia corrupt, but they weren’t upset about Yeltsin’s rule, when Russia was plagued with corruption. In fact, it was the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and US-advised economic policies that kick-started all of this corruption![7] Moreover, US policymakers were totally involved in interfering in Russia politics in order to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election. As Andre Damon points out on the World Socialist Web Site, “The intervention of the US government and President Bill Clinton personally to secure the reelection of Boris Yelstin in the 1996 Russian election was so brazen that Time magazine featured on its July 15, 1996 cover a caricature of Yeltsin holding an American flag, accompanied by the headline, “Yanks to the Rescue.”[8] If the US is fighting corruption, why was it promoting Yeltsin?
According to Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, Putin seems to be the alpha and omega of corruption in Russia. I haven’t read the book myself, but I’ve read an article about it published in NED’s publication, Journal of Democracy, and I’ve read readers’ reviews, some of which point to the book’s enormous listing of bad events that imply they’re Putin’s fault, that “Vlad’s Bad,” but without firm attempts to actually connect all the bad things listed in the book to Putin. Details of events may be numerous in the book, but proof and connections may be a weakness. However, I haven’t read the book and can’t confirm the accuracy of these criticisms.
Dawisha’s book is reviewed in the Journal of Democracy, an official publication of NED and John Hopkins University Press, which includes on its editorial board Robert Kagan, one of the co-founders of the infamous US-hegemony-seeking Project for the New American Century, described in the previous essay, Part 3B. In the journal, Harley Balzer explains that Dawisha demonstrates her theory that Russia, under Putin, was intentionally developed into a predatory state that allows his colleagues to reap incredible benefits.
Yet even in Balzer’s article, there is this tendency to mention bad things without proving they’re Putin’s fault, even bad things that were occurring in Russia when Putin was not yet president. It’s as if the reader is supposed to take a hint and jump to conclusions. For example, he writes that in 1999, prior to Putin’s presidency, nearly three hundred people were killed in some apartment bombings. He then writes, “Dawisha provides an astonishing account of convenient accidents, murders, and unsolved disappearances of whistleblowers, disaffected cronies, journalists, and people whose businesses or other assets were attractive acquisitions.”[9] However, it’s not clear that any of these are definitively linked with Putin. Isn’t it possible that many hands were at play?
In fact, in her book, Corruption in America, Sarah Chayes writes of numerous aspects of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union that one would think had much more to do with a general state of corruption played out by innumerable actors rather than the result of deliberate malicious intentions of predation by Putin and “his cronies.” Considering the enormous effect upon the economy, ownership of assets, poverty, health, crime, human relations, and values that resulted from the collapse of Communism, it seems entirely too simple and convenient to place the brunt of the blame for current corruption in Russian upon Putin and “his cronies.” In fact, I would call this blame-flinging, for US policymakers, once again, are not taking any blame for their own role in struggling so long to topple Communism without apparently having put significant thought into the types of effective and safe steps Russia could take once Communism was destroyed.
As Chayes observes, “For the rest of the world, the most consequential event of the decade was the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Overnight, entire government institutions and incalculably valuable assets that had been the collective property of everyone in that vast empire were Russia’s alone. The stage was set for the wholesale transfer of those assets to private hands.” And such a transfer set the stage for selfishness, crime, and violence.
Chayes writes of Misha Glenny’s McMafia, which concludes, “The collapse of the Communist superpower. . . is the single most important event promoting the exponential growth of organized crime around the world in the last two decades.” Chayes adds, “The violence was unheard of too, as private security companies staffed by former murderers or weightlifters or KGB operatives enforced business contracts. It was as though the whole former Soviet bloc was mainlining the Midas disease.”
She explains:
“Classic organized crime is one lens through which to view the madness. Equally fateful was the wholesale transfer of Russian public property to a few individuals. After a phase of privatization open only to the nomenklatura—those with connections—came a voucher program. It was designed by US advisors in league with members of President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. The theory was that the faster enterprises passed into private hands, the sooner the economy would become efficient.”
Harvard University’s Institute for International Development and President Clinton’s inner circle were all involved, with some using “their insider positions to trade in privatized assets for themselves.” Chayes explains, “The whole thing was a lavishly funded laboratory experiment in the Reagan-era unfettered pro-business principles that the Clinton administration was validating. Harvard, with its liberal reputation, added to the validation.”
Yet violence and crime were only some of the negative consequences of the 1991 collapse of Communism. The “shock therapy” of capitalism, believed to be so salubrious for Russia, had disastrous effects. A 2001 UNICEF report found that the capitalist reforms imposed upon Russia in the 1990s caused 3.2 million excess deaths, resulting in a six-year life-expectancy decline for men. Capitalism caused over one-third of the Russian population to live in poverty. Unemployment became massive. Child malnutrition escalated as did HIV and tuberculosis. Not until 22 years later, in 2011, did Russia climb back up to the level of life expectancy it had had under socialism in 1989.[10]
Chayes notes that along with the collapse of Communism came a change in values, with a priority placed on the garish display of wealth and a loss of the sense of civic responsibility.[11] The rejection of Communism and rise of poverty combined with world condemnation of Communism and its themes of economic equality and giving to society may have led to a 180-degree twist in viewpoints where luxury, selfishness, and the display of individual wealth became popular as cheap signs of status, in the most shallow sense of the word, and independence, in the ugliest sense of the word. I would think it was almost a sense of drowning, as people must struggle to maintain a living and feverishly, selfishly protect any wealth or power they’ve gained. While I haven’t read any reports on values and attitudes within Russia following 1991 in a cross-sectional analysis throughout society, according to Chayes, at least in some circles of Russia, these types of changes were reported. This decline in traditional morality and social responsibility could easily lead to the rise in violence, chaos, and corruption, which in turn could provoke a subsequent reaction of authoritarianism.
None of these dizzying fallout-effects of the collapse can be easily blamed on Putin’s leadership. It all began even before he was president! More responsibility should be placed on those who thoughtlessly pushed to precipitate the collapse. Reportedly, NED was involved in promoting the dissolution of the USSR. And, as noted in a previous essay, President Carter and US National Security Advisor Brzezinski of Poland deliberately tried to give the USSR its own quagmire of a Vietnam in the form of Afghanistan, a quagmire to suck away its wealth and morale.[12] I would think that these actors also should take some blame for the current state.
Another feature of Putin and “his cronies” that Dawisha reveals is the “close-knit nature” of the players in Russia who are reportedly preying upon Russian resources. While this may be true, this same “close-knit nature” is a despicable feature of a few centuries of US policymakers. Look through US history: administration after administration, it’s the same names, families, lawyers, bankers, railroad owners, military men, weapon manufacturers, and fossil fuel corporations running the government and walking through the revolving door from big business, the military, and law offices to government and then back again to business consultant.
Putin is condemned for having been a KGB member, yet the CIA certainly has had its agents in different offices of US government, including that of President George Bush, Sr., who was formerly the Director of the CIA. For some unknown reason, military experience is also regarded as an indicator of leadership qualities, even though it’s not. The close-knit nature of US policymakers with businessmen, lawyers, and bankers for the past few centuries is quite incestuous and, at the same time, exclusive. Most Americans aren’t invited to the club.
As just one of multiple examples within each administration, look at the role of James Baker as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury for President Reagan, White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of State for Bush Sr., a consultant to the infamous Enron, and the manager of Bush Jr.’s legal team during the Florida recount for the 2000 presidential elections.
Baker became a senior partner in the law firm Baker Botts, “deeply involved in the fight for oil and gas of the Caspian Sea,” and a senior counselor to the infamous investment firm the Carlyle Group. According to Baker Botts website, its clients include industries pertaining to energy—including pipeline projects and liquified natural gas—technology, biology, pharmaceutical companies, the media, and telecommunications, including some of the world’s largest media conglomerates and global telecommunications providers.
In 2003 it was Baker whom was dispatched by Bush Jr. to Georgia, which lies between the Black and Caspian Seas, to supposedly inform Eduard Shevardnadze that elections must be “free and fair,” even though Georgia’s elections were more free and fair than several other nations in that region. Four months later Shevardnadze, who, much to the dismay of US policymakers, had made some fossil fuel deals with Russia, was overthrown. Next, Bush Jr. appointed Baker as an envoy to Iraq for restructuring its foreign debt.
Mark Briody, author of The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, commented on Democracy Now! in 2003 regarding Bush Jr.’s appointment of Baker to Iraq:
“[Baker] has had a similar role in the Carlyle group as George Bush Sr. had when he was working with them and that is to be in some ways an envoy for the company, someone to meet with foreign leaders, and both political and business leaders in order to cut deals and open up wallets overseas, encourage people to invest in the company. . . . he’s not an official employee of the government. I think he’s only allowed to work 130 days a year or something like that, which gives him a status that enables him to keep his job at the Carlyle group, and at Baker Botts so he doesn’t have to worry about certain conflicts of interest. But at the same time, you know, a position like this will give him access to the investment community and a firsthand knowledge of dollar flow overseas, that no one else would be able to see.”
Isn’t it a little too close-knit to have a lawyer for a law firm trying to get American hands on Caspian Sea fossil fuels being so heavily involved in government policy? As Briody states, neither the Carlyle Group nor Baker Botts are required to divulge their client lists, so it’s not even known whether Baker’s goals were to further the interests of the Iraqi and American people or to serve the clients of Carlyle Group and/or Baker Botts.[13] Yet cases like this abound in US government, where those in the fossil fuel, nuclear energy, or weapon industries either are in government themselves or have “cronies,” to use the word that Putin’s associates are called, in government doing the work they want done for them, paving the way for their industry to reap major profits.
Dawisha’s work in seeking to divulge the close-knit nature and predations upon Russian resources of Putin’s colleagues in operating Russia is important and I’m not trying to diminish any value of her work, yet US policy and media makers should not view her work in isolation from the highly close-knit nature and self-centered predations of the US policymaker-businessmen-lawyer-banker circle that runs the US. And certainly, US policymakers have no right to consider such defects in Russia to be justification either for war against Russia or proxy war against Russia or a coup, unless they mean to wage war against their own close-knit nature and self-centered predations upon US and foreign wealth and promote a coup against themselves. Americans would do better to use their tax dollars and resources to clean up US government rather than meddle abroad and send billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine to wage proxy war against Russia.
Since US policymakers are guilty of the very corruption and close-knit wheeling-and-dealing of which they accuse Putin, could it be that US policymakers are angry with Putin because, by nationalizing the energy and banking sectors, he’s made Russia’s economy a bit more closed off to US and other foreign investors and their profit-hungry hands?[14] It’s a hot topic kept under wraps that we’ll discuss further in a later essay.
Are they also upset with Putin because he spoke in favor of mutual disarmament, spoke against the militarization of space, and justly spoke out against the US “nearly uncontained hyper use of force” and disdain for international law at the 2007 Munich security conference?[15] Do they not like leaders who remind them of universal ethics? Do they not like Putin because he didn’t placidly accept US-promoted coups in Ukraine and Georgia prompted by US policymaker desires for pipelines, fossil fuels, and energy markets for liquified natural gas?
Another weakness in this entire argument about saving the Free World and fighting corruption is that the US government’s dearly beloved ally, Ukraine, is overflowing with corruption. How dare the US issue the false propaganda, replete with false black-and-white thinking, that the US fights against corruption and Putin promotes it! As Putin states in his July 2021 essay and here, quoted, in his February 21, 2022 speech, “Corruption, which is certainly a challenge and a problem for many countries, including Russia, has gone beyond the usual scope in Ukraine. It has literally permeated and corroded Ukrainian statehood, the entire system, and all branches of power.” According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, which is based on the perceptions of experts and businessmen, Russia may be even more corrupt. But how many US policymakers even admit that corruption is a problem in the US government?
And don’t overlook the role US policymakers played in creating the corrupt Afghan government. Prior to the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban had “cultivated a reputation for relatively clean government. During the Taliban’s previous reign, from 1996 until 2001, bribes were uncommon, and the justice system was viewed as comparatively honest (and certainly less corrupt than that of the Western-backed government established after the Taliban’s ouster).”[16] It was US policymakers who replaced the relatively uncorrupt Taliban with corrupt warlords, and it was US policymakers who corrupted them further by making alliances, not based upon Afghans’ reputations of integrity, kindness, humanity, justice, and trustworthiness, but based upon which Afghans would respond to lures of guns and money. Billions of US tax dollars went into Afghanistan. But somehow, the money didn’t make it to where it needed to go.[17] During the US occupation, justice in those areas under Taliban control were popular amongst Afghans “precisely because they perceive it as less corrupt and more efficient.”
What kind of person in his right mind would think to form a democratic, uncorrupt national government by buying off allies with guns and money and then putting them into positions of political power? The very process is just begging to attract people of the lowest common denominator who are venal, immoral, and corrupt! But then again, as books such as Sarah Chayes’ On Corruption in America describe in detail, this is how US policies are made and US policymakers are bought and elected, through bribery, intimidation, and “campaign contributions,” so perhaps US policymakers thought that since this was the American way, it was the democratic way to create a government. After all, their usual shorthand logic is that anything US policymakers do is democratic, by definition. It makes you wonder what credentials US policymakers can possibly have to establish an actual democracy.
That leaves us with two more words in Wilson’s “authoritarian, corrupt, state-led capitalism” term. You can bet they like “capitalism,” but what US policymakers really don’t like is the word “state-led”—not because it’s government-led, but because it’s not US-government-led. As stated, Russia’s “state-led” capitalism re-nationalized some industries such as energy and banking, preventing US businessmen and bankers from accessing all of Russia’s wealth the way they probably want to. Based on the US track record abroad, it’s likely that what’s really bothering US policymakers who are waging this anti-Putin smear campaign is the fact that the Russian government has more control than the US government over the Russian economy. It just doesn’t seem fair to US policymakers who, with a pouting stamp of the foot, find Russian control over Russia’s economy to be downright adversarial, aggressive, authoritarian, and undemocratic.
For US policymakers, there seems to be nothing more unnerving, nothing more indicative of authoritarianism, corruption, inhumanity, aggression, and hidden weapons of mass destruction to boot, then a foreign government that doesn’t put the satisfaction of US policymakers’ interests as the top priority. If a foreign leader won’t put US policymakers’ wishes first, then that cinches it, he’s authoritarian, corrupt, and dangerous. For US policymakers who like their interests and their decisions to be at the core of other nations’ and regions’ planning—as we already saw specifically expressed in the earlier essay about the Project for the New American Century—“state-led” is far too independent from the US government.
In the earlier essay Part 4B and also in the previous essay, we discussed how the black-and-white thinking that is characteristic of what Gordon Allport called the Prejudiced Personality can skew a person’s perception and understanding of reality. Whether these US policymakers actually realize their own cognitive distortions isn’t clear. Do they realize that they’re being selfish and self-centered? Or does black-and-white thinking literally force their brains to perceive the world as good vs. bad, thus compelling their minds to see US policies as moral and Russian motives and goals as evil, despite all evidence to the contrary? Does the Prejudiced Personality’s characteristic of selective perception—seeing and remembering only what one is looking for—prevent their minds even from ingesting other information and integrating it into minds, from developing and changing when learning information that contradicts their beliefs?
Clearly, labeling the US government as a force against corruption and Putin as a force for corruption is a false dichotomy, either a result of deliberate deceit or a result of distorted, black-and-white thinking and thoughtless groupthink of US policy and media makers. While such falseness is bad and harmful enough, the extremely dangerous consequence is that US policymakers are using this and other false dichotomies as justification for a proxy war against Russia. Even worse, they could next use these false dichotomies as justification for a coup, a drone attack, biological weapon attack, or conventional or nuclear weapon attack upon Russia.
Kristin Christman has been independently researching US foreign policy and peace since 9/11. Her channel focuses on US-Russian relations at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNEw9-10lk-CwU-5vAElcg. Kristin graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in Russian, and she holds Master’s degrees in Slavic languages from Brown University and public administration from SUNY Albany. She has been a guest with former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter and UNAC coordinator Joe Lombardo on Cynthia Pooler’s program, Issues that Matter, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDlaLNJih7U. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice recently published her article on suicide, culture, and peace in their special edition on suicide, Vol. 33 No. 4. kristinchristman956@gmail.com
Notes
[1] Robert Greenwald and John Amick, “Defense Spending: There’s No Better Way to Talk about the Corrosive Effect of Money on Politics,” Huffington Post, Aug. 29, 2012.
[2] William D. Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: Nation Books, 2012), 23, 72-76, 82, 88, 136, 148.
[3] Susan Webb, “Blood Money? U.S. Is World’s Top Arms Dealer,” Jan. 26, 2016, People’s World, http://www.peoplesworld.org.
[4] Ammo.com, “An Inconvenient Truth: How the Obama Administration Became Earth’s Largest Arms Dealer,” https://ammo.com.
Ariel Gans, “Defense Lobbying Hits Eight-Year High Ahead of Defense Spending Bill,” Open Secrets, Dec. 9, 2021, https://www.opensecrets.org.
Hartung, Prophets of War, 29.
[5] Hartung, Prophets of War, 115-32.
Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (New York: Picador, 2012), 262-72.
[6] Transparency International, “Corruption Perceptions Index,” 2021, https://www.transparency.org.
[7] Sarah Chayes, Corruption in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 269-79.
Greg Rosalsky, “How ‘Shock Therapy’ Created Russian Oligarchs and Paved the Path for Putin,” Mar. 22, 2022, https://www.npr.org.
[8] Andrew Damon, “The US Government and the Russian Election,” World Socialist Web Site, Dec. 27, 2017, https://www.wsws.org.
[9] Harley Balzer, “Stealing Russia Blind,” Journal of Democracy, Apr. 2015, Vol. 26, 165-69, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org.
[10] Benjamin Norton, “German EU Official Uses Racist Rhetoric Claiming Russians Don’t Value Life,” Apr. 15, 2022, https://multipolarista.com.
[11] Sarah Chayes, Corruption in America, 269-79.
[12] Bill Van Auken, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, Architect of the Catastrophe in Afghanistan, Dead at 89,” World Socialist Web Site, May 29, 2017, https://www.wsws.org.
Nick Turse, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (New York: Verso, 2010), Chalmers Johnson, “Abolish the CIA!” 31-32.
David N. Gibbs, “The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998),” Translated by William Blum and David N. Gibbs, https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu.
[13] Democracy Now!, “Saving President Bush: Send in James Baker,” Dec. 8, 2003, https://www.democracynow.org.
[14] Richard J. Anderson, “A History of President Putin’s Campaign to Re-Nationalize Industry and the Implications for Russian Reform and Foreign Policy,” Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Defense Technical Information Center, Feb. 8, 2008, https://apps.dtic.mil.
[15] Vladimir Putin, 43rd Munich Conference on Security and Policy, Feb. 11, 2007, https://russialist.org.
[16] Josh Von Trapp, “Will Afghanistan’s New Taliban Rulers Govern Corruptly?” The Global Anticorruption Blog, Nov. 1, 2021, https://globalanticorruptionblog.com.
[17] Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021).False Bias #4. The US Is Fighting Against Corruption. The previous essay about authoritarianism referred to the 2019 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee for the Senate Hearing of the National Defense Strategy presented by Damon Wilson, President of the National Endowment for “Democracy,” who stated: “Our nation and its closest friends agree that the great challenge of the 21st century will be the competition between the free world and authoritarian corrupt state-led capitalism, chief among them China and Russia.”
In this essay, we’ll look at the second term in Wilson’s label for Russia: “corrupt.” According to Wilson, the US is defending the “free world” against “authoritarian corrupt state-led capitalism.” But is the US fighting corruption? My understanding is that some US policymakers are striving to reduce corruption. But fighting against corruption has never been a reason for the US to wage war or proxy war against another nation. If it were, it would have to attack itself first. After all, the US government has nothing to boast about with regard to its own ethics.
Consider the bloated, unaudited Pentagon budget,[1] with its lucrative cost-plus contracts, no-bid contracts, exorbitantly jacked-up prices,[2] the shamefully huge CEO salaries,[3] its endless build-up of conventional and nuclear weapons which somehow are just not built right to ever be adequate, its exploration into chemical, biological, and space weapons because the nukes and conventional weapons still aren’t enough, the US weapon industry’s massive millions of dollars in annual so-called “campaign contributions,” a.k.a. bribes, to politicians,[4] and the bribes paid by the weapon industry and tax dollars paid by the US government to foreign nations, such as Saudi Arabia, just to get them to agree to purchase US weapons.[5]
How can anyone look at all that and fail to see that the US government runs on corruption? We, the American taxpayers, are subsidizing the American weapon industry, even though it’s killing us, economically and physically. We’re even paying foreigners to buy US weapons, not only through bribes, but through Foreign Military Financing. No one asked us for our permission or our opinion. We’re just brainwashed to believe it’s right or kept in the dark. Is the purchase of US policy by the wealthy so endemic that it’s falsely accepted as democracy rather than plutocracy?
On the 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index posted by Transparency International, the US ranked 27th out of 180, with 180 being the worst. That’s about one-sixth of the way down the list. In addition to a ranking, each nation also receives a score out of 100. The top three nations ranked together as 1st, Denmark, Finland, and New Zealand, each received an 88. The US received a 67.
In this war supposedly motivated in part by this belief that the US is defending the “free world” against “authoritarian, corrupt state-led capitalism,” US policymakers’ ally, Ukraine, is ranked 122, while US policymakers’ enemy, Russia, is ranked 136. In terms of scores, Ukraine received a 32 and Russia a 29 (out of 100). How can US policymakers possibly state that this war is in part a war of the free world against corruption, when its ally received a 32/100 and its enemy received 29/100? Will US policymakers stop fighting Russia once its gets a whopping 32 as a score and moves from a rank of 136 to a rank of 122?
I think not. After all, other US corrupt allies have ranks even lower than Russia: Pakistan 140, Uzbekistan 140, Kyrgyzstan 144, Tajikistan 150, Iraq, which the US supposedly liberated, 157, and Afghanistan, the nation into which the US funneled billions of dollars and expended so much effort for 20 years to build democracy, 174 (out of 180).[6]
Nearly every one of these US-allied nations is violently authoritarian, as well! Yet despite their corruption and authoritarianism, US policymakers haven’t expressed the need to create what Wilson calls a “permanent deterrence” posture against those nations as they have against Russia.
On the contrary, the US sends them weapons, a nice little tool to prop up their violent authoritarianism. Gee, I wonder why these corrupt, extremely violent authoritarian nations are considered US allies—good guys, but Russia’s alleged authoritarianism and corruption requires this “permanent deterrence” posture? Is it because corruption, authoritarianism, and violent oppression actually don’t matter that much to US policymakers as long as the foreign leaders are malleable putty, subservient to US policymakers’ self-centered, avaricious goals?
And notice that US policymakers are calling Putin’s Russia corrupt, but they weren’t upset about Yeltsin’s rule, when Russia was plagued with corruption. In fact, it was the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 and US-advised economic policies that kick-started all of this corruption![7] Moreover, US policymakers were totally involved in interfering in Russia politics in order to ensure Yeltsin’s re-election. As Andre Damon points out on the World Socialist Web Site, “The intervention of the US government and President Bill Clinton personally to secure the reelection of Boris Yelstin in the 1996 Russian election was so brazen that Time magazine featured on its July 15, 1996 cover a caricature of Yeltsin holding an American flag, accompanied by the headline, “Yanks to the Rescue.”[8] If the US is fighting corruption, why was it promoting Yeltsin?
According to Karen Dawisha’s Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?, Putin seems to be the alpha and omega of corruption in Russia. I haven’t read the book myself, but I’ve read an article about it published in NED’s publication, Journal of Democracy, and I’ve read readers’ reviews, some of which point to the book’s enormous listing of bad events that imply they’re Putin’s fault, that “Vlad’s Bad,” but without firm attempts to actually connect all the bad things listed in the book to Putin. Details of events may be numerous in the book, but proof and connections may be a weakness. However, I haven’t read the book and can’t confirm the accuracy of these criticisms.
Dawisha’s book is reviewed in the Journal of Democracy, an official publication of NED and John Hopkins University Press, which includes on its editorial board Robert Kagan, one of the co-founders of the infamous US-hegemony-seeking Project for the New American Century, described in the previous essay, Part 3B. In the journal, Harley Balzer explains that Dawisha demonstrates her theory that Russia, under Putin, was intentionally developed into a predatory state that allows his colleagues to reap incredible benefits.
Yet even in Balzer’s article, there is this tendency to mention bad things without proving they’re Putin’s fault, even bad things that were occurring in Russia when Putin was not yet president. It’s as if the reader is supposed to take a hint and jump to conclusions. For example, he writes that in 1999, prior to Putin’s presidency, nearly three hundred people were killed in some apartment bombings. He then writes, “Dawisha provides an astonishing account of convenient accidents, murders, and unsolved disappearances of whistleblowers, disaffected cronies, journalists, and people whose businesses or other assets were attractive acquisitions.”[9] However, it’s not clear that any of these are definitively linked with Putin. Isn’t it possible that many hands were at play?
In fact, in her book, Corruption in America, Sarah Chayes writes of numerous aspects of the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union that one would think had much more to do with a general state of corruption played out by innumerable actors rather than the result of deliberate malicious intentions of predation by Putin and “his cronies.” Considering the enormous effect upon the economy, ownership of assets, poverty, health, crime, human relations, and values that resulted from the collapse of Communism, it seems entirely too simple and convenient to place the brunt of the blame for current corruption in Russian upon Putin and “his cronies.” In fact, I would call this blame-flinging, for US policymakers, once again, are not taking any blame for their own role in struggling so long to topple Communism without apparently having put significant thought into the types of effective and safe steps Russia could take once Communism was destroyed.
As Chayes observes, “For the rest of the world, the most consequential event of the decade was the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. Overnight, entire government institutions and incalculably valuable assets that had been the collective property of everyone in that vast empire were Russia’s alone. The stage was set for the wholesale transfer of those assets to private hands.” And such a transfer set the stage for selfishness, crime, and violence.
Chayes writes of Misha Glenny’s McMafia, which concludes, “The collapse of the Communist superpower. . . is the single most important event promoting the exponential growth of organized crime around the world in the last two decades.” Chayes adds, “The violence was unheard of too, as private security companies staffed by former murderers or weightlifters or KGB operatives enforced business contracts. It was as though the whole former Soviet bloc was mainlining the Midas disease.”
She explains:
“Classic organized crime is one lens through which to view the madness. Equally fateful was the wholesale transfer of Russian public property to a few individuals. After a phase of privatization open only to the nomenklatura—those with connections—came a voucher program. It was designed by US advisors in league with members of President Boris Yeltsin’s inner circle. The theory was that the faster enterprises passed into private hands, the sooner the economy would become efficient.”
Harvard University’s Institute for International Development and President Clinton’s inner circle were all involved, with some using “their insider positions to trade in privatized assets for themselves.” Chayes explains, “The whole thing was a lavishly funded laboratory experiment in the Reagan-era unfettered pro-business principles that the Clinton administration was validating. Harvard, with its liberal reputation, added to the validation.”
Yet violence and crime were only some of the negative consequences of the 1991 collapse of Communism. The “shock therapy” of capitalism, believed to be so salubrious for Russia, had disastrous effects. A 2001 UNICEF report found that the capitalist reforms imposed upon Russia in the 1990s caused 3.2 million excess deaths, resulting in a six-year life-expectancy decline for men. Capitalism caused over one-third of the Russian population to live in poverty. Unemployment became massive. Child malnutrition escalated as did HIV and tuberculosis. Not until 22 years later, in 2011, did Russia climb back up to the level of life expectancy it had had under socialism in 1989.[10]
Chayes notes that along with the collapse of Communism came a change in values, with a priority placed on the garish display of wealth and a loss of the sense of civic responsibility.[11] The rejection of Communism and rise of poverty combined with world condemnation of Communism and its themes of economic equality and giving to society may have led to a 180-degree twist in viewpoints where luxury, selfishness, and the display of individual wealth became popular as cheap signs of status, in the most shallow sense of the word, and independence, in the ugliest sense of the word. I would think it was almost a sense of drowning, as people must struggle to maintain a living and feverishly, selfishly protect any wealth or power they’ve gained. While I haven’t read any reports on values and attitudes within Russia following 1991 in a cross-sectional analysis throughout society, according to Chayes, at least in some circles of Russia, these types of changes were reported. This decline in traditional morality and social responsibility could easily lead to the rise in violence, chaos, and corruption, which in turn could provoke a subsequent reaction of authoritarianism.
None of these dizzying fallout-effects of the collapse can be easily blamed on Putin’s leadership. It all began even before he was president! More responsibility should be placed on those who thoughtlessly pushed to precipitate the collapse. Reportedly, NED was involved in promoting the dissolution of the USSR. And, as noted in a previous essay, President Carter and US National Security Advisor Brzezinski of Poland deliberately tried to give the USSR its own quagmire of a Vietnam in the form of Afghanistan, a quagmire to suck away its wealth and morale.[12] I would think that these actors also should take some blame for the current state.
Another feature of Putin and “his cronies” that Dawisha reveals is the “close-knit nature” of the players in Russia who are reportedly preying upon Russian resources. While this may be true, this same “close-knit nature” is a despicable feature of a few centuries of US policymakers. Look through US history: administration after administration, it’s the same names, families, lawyers, bankers, railroad owners, military men, weapon manufacturers, and fossil fuel corporations running the government and walking through the revolving door from big business, the military, and law offices to government and then back again to business consultant.
Putin is condemned for having been a KGB member, yet the CIA certainly has had its agents in different offices of US government, including that of President George Bush, Sr., who was formerly the Director of the CIA. For some unknown reason, military experience is also regarded as an indicator of leadership qualities, even though it’s not. The close-knit nature of US policymakers with businessmen, lawyers, and bankers for the past few centuries is quite incestuous and, at the same time, exclusive. Most Americans aren’t invited to the club.
As just one of multiple examples within each administration, look at the role of James Baker as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury for President Reagan, White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of State for Bush Sr., a consultant to the infamous Enron, and the manager of Bush Jr.’s legal team during the Florida recount for the 2000 presidential elections.
Baker became a senior partner in the law firm Baker Botts, “deeply involved in the fight for oil and gas of the Caspian Sea,” and a senior counselor to the infamous investment firm the Carlyle Group. According to Baker Botts website, its clients include industries pertaining to energy—including pipeline projects and liquified natural gas—technology, biology, pharmaceutical companies, the media, and telecommunications, including some of the world’s largest media conglomerates and global telecommunications providers.
In 2003 it was Baker whom was dispatched by Bush Jr. to Georgia, which lies between the Black and Caspian Seas, to supposedly inform Eduard Shevardnadze that elections must be “free and fair,” even though Georgia’s elections were more free and fair than several other nations in that region. Four months later Shevardnadze, who, much to the dismay of US policymakers, had made some fossil fuel deals with Russia, was overthrown. Next, Bush Jr. appointed Baker as an envoy to Iraq for restructuring its foreign debt.
Mark Briody, author of The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group, commented on Democracy Now! in 2003 regarding Bush Jr.’s appointment of Baker to Iraq:
“[Baker] has had a similar role in the Carlyle group as George Bush Sr. had when he was working with them and that is to be in some ways an envoy for the company, someone to meet with foreign leaders, and both political and business leaders in order to cut deals and open up wallets overseas, encourage people to invest in the company. . . . he’s not an official employee of the government. I think he’s only allowed to work 130 days a year or something like that, which gives him a status that enables him to keep his job at the Carlyle group, and at Baker Botts so he doesn’t have to worry about certain conflicts of interest. But at the same time, you know, a position like this will give him access to the investment community and a firsthand knowledge of dollar flow overseas, that no one else would be able to see.”
Isn’t it a little too close-knit to have a lawyer for a law firm trying to get American hands on Caspian Sea fossil fuels being so heavily involved in government policy? As Briody states, neither the Carlyle Group nor Baker Botts are required to divulge their client lists, so it’s not even known whether Baker’s goals were to further the interests of the Iraqi and American people or to serve the clients of Carlyle Group and/or Baker Botts.[13] Yet cases like this abound in US government, where those in the fossil fuel, nuclear energy, or weapon industries either are in government themselves or have “cronies,” to use the word that Putin’s associates are called, in government doing the work they want done for them, paving the way for their industry to reap major profits.
Dawisha’s work in seeking to divulge the close-knit nature and predations upon Russian resources of Putin’s colleagues in operating Russia is important and I’m not trying to diminish any value of her work, yet US policy and media makers should not view her work in isolation from the highly close-knit nature and self-centered predations of the US policymaker-businessmen-lawyer-banker circle that runs the US. And certainly, US policymakers have no right to consider such defects in Russia to be justification either for war against Russia or proxy war against Russia or a coup, unless they mean to wage war against their own close-knit nature and self-centered predations upon US and foreign wealth and promote a coup against themselves. Americans would do better to use their tax dollars and resources to clean up US government rather than meddle abroad and send billions of dollars in weapons to Ukraine to wage proxy war against Russia.
Since US policymakers are guilty of the very corruption and close-knit wheeling-and-dealing of which they accuse Putin, could it be that US policymakers are angry with Putin because, by nationalizing the energy and banking sectors, he’s made Russia’s economy a bit more closed off to US and other foreign investors and their profit-hungry hands?[14] It’s a hot topic kept under wraps that we’ll discuss further in a later essay.
Are they also upset with Putin because he spoke in favor of mutual disarmament, spoke against the militarization of space, and justly spoke out against the US “nearly uncontained hyper use of force” and disdain for international law at the 2007 Munich security conference?[15] Do they not like leaders who remind them of universal ethics? Do they not like Putin because he didn’t placidly accept US-promoted coups in Ukraine and Georgia prompted by US policymaker desires for pipelines, fossil fuels, and energy markets for liquified natural gas?
Another weakness in this entire argument about saving the Free World and fighting corruption is that the US government’s dearly beloved ally, Ukraine, is overflowing with corruption. How dare the US issue the false propaganda, replete with false black-and-white thinking, that the US fights against corruption and Putin promotes it! As Putin states in his July 2021 essay and here, quoted, in his February 21, 2022 speech, “Corruption, which is certainly a challenge and a problem for many countries, including Russia, has gone beyond the usual scope in Ukraine. It has literally permeated and corroded Ukrainian statehood, the entire system, and all branches of power.” According to the Corruption Perceptions Index, which is based on the perceptions of experts and businessmen, Russia may be even more corrupt. But how many US policymakers even admit that corruption is a problem in the US government?
And don’t overlook the role US policymakers played in creating the corrupt Afghan government. Prior to the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban had “cultivated a reputation for relatively clean government. During the Taliban’s previous reign, from 1996 until 2001, bribes were uncommon, and the justice system was viewed as comparatively honest (and certainly less corrupt than that of the Western-backed government established after the Taliban’s ouster).”[16] It was US policymakers who replaced the relatively uncorrupt Taliban with corrupt warlords, and it was US policymakers who corrupted them further by making alliances, not based upon Afghans’ reputations of integrity, kindness, humanity, justice, and trustworthiness, but based upon which Afghans would respond to lures of guns and money. Billions of US tax dollars went into Afghanistan. But somehow, the money didn’t make it to where it needed to go.[17] During the US occupation, justice in those areas under Taliban control were popular amongst Afghans “precisely because they perceive it as less corrupt and more efficient.”
What kind of person in his right mind would think to form a democratic, uncorrupt national government by buying off allies with guns and money and then putting them into positions of political power? The very process is just begging to attract people of the lowest common denominator who are venal, immoral, and corrupt! But then again, as books such as Sarah Chayes’ On Corruption in America describe in detail, this is how US policies are made and US policymakers are bought and elected, through bribery, intimidation, and “campaign contributions,” so perhaps US policymakers thought that since this was the American way, it was the democratic way to create a government. After all, their usual shorthand logic is that anything US policymakers do is democratic, by definition. It makes you wonder what credentials US policymakers can possibly have to establish an actual democracy.
That leaves us with two more words in Wilson’s “authoritarian, corrupt, state-led capitalism” term. You can bet they like “capitalism,” but what US policymakers really don’t like is the word “state-led”—not because it’s government-led, but because it’s not US-government-led. As stated, Russia’s “state-led” capitalism re-nationalized some industries such as energy and banking, preventing US businessmen and bankers from accessing all of Russia’s wealth the way they probably want to. Based on the US track record abroad, it’s likely that what’s really bothering US policymakers who are waging this anti-Putin smear campaign is the fact that the Russian government has more control than the US government over the Russian economy. It just doesn’t seem fair to US policymakers who, with a pouting stamp of the foot, find Russian control over Russia’s economy to be downright adversarial, aggressive, authoritarian, and undemocratic.
For US policymakers, there seems to be nothing more unnerving, nothing more indicative of authoritarianism, corruption, inhumanity, aggression, and hidden weapons of mass destruction to boot, then a foreign government that doesn’t put the satisfaction of US policymakers’ interests as the top priority. If a foreign leader won’t put US policymakers’ wishes first, then that cinches it, he’s authoritarian, corrupt, and dangerous. For US policymakers who like their interests and their decisions to be at the core of other nations’ and regions’ planning—as we already saw specifically expressed in the earlier essay about the Project for the New American Century—“state-led” is far too independent from the US government.
In the earlier essay Part 4B and also in the previous essay, we discussed how the black-and-white thinking that is characteristic of what Gordon Allport called the Prejudiced Personality can skew a person’s perception and understanding of reality. Whether these US policymakers actually realize their own cognitive distortions isn’t clear. Do they realize that they’re being selfish and self-centered? Or does black-and-white thinking literally force their brains to perceive the world as good vs. bad, thus compelling their minds to see US policies as moral and Russian motives and goals as evil, despite all evidence to the contrary? Does the Prejudiced Personality’s characteristic of selective perception—seeing and remembering only what one is looking for—prevent their minds even from ingesting other information and integrating it into minds, from developing and changing when learning information that contradicts their beliefs?
Clearly, labeling the US government as a force against corruption and Putin as a force for corruption is a false dichotomy, either a result of deliberate deceit or a result of distorted, black-and-white thinking and thoughtless groupthink of US policy and media makers. While such falseness is bad and harmful enough, the extremely dangerous consequence is that US policymakers are using this and other false dichotomies as justification for a proxy war against Russia. Even worse, they could next use these false dichotomies as justification for a coup, a drone attack, biological weapon attack, or conventional or nuclear weapon attack upon Russia.
Kristin Christman has been independently researching US foreign policy and peace since 9/11. Her channel focuses on US-Russian relations at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNEw9-10lk-CwU-5vAElcg. Kristin graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in Russian, and she holds Master’s degrees in Slavic languages from Brown University and public administration from SUNY Albany. She has been a guest with former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter and UNAC coordinator Joe Lombardo on Cynthia Pooler’s program, Issues that Matter, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDlaLNJih7U. Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice recently published her article on suicide, culture, and peace in their special edition on suicide, Vol. 33 No. 4. kristinchristman956@gmail.com
Notes
[1] Robert Greenwald and John Amick, “Defense Spending: There’s No Better Way to Talk about the Corrosive Effect of Money on Politics,” Huffington Post, Aug. 29, 2012.
[2] William D. Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: Nation Books, 2012), 23, 72-76, 82, 88, 136, 148.
[3] Susan Webb, “Blood Money? U.S. Is World’s Top Arms Dealer,” Jan. 26, 2016, People’s World, http://www.peoplesworld.org.
[4] Ammo.com, “An Inconvenient Truth: How the Obama Administration Became Earth’s Largest Arms Dealer,” https://ammo.com.
Ariel Gans, “Defense Lobbying Hits Eight-Year High Ahead of Defense Spending Bill,” Open Secrets, Dec. 9, 2021, https://www.opensecrets.org.
Hartung, Prophets of War, 29.
[5] Hartung, Prophets of War, 115-32.
Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (New York: Picador, 2012), 262-72.
[6] Transparency International, “Corruption Perceptions Index,” 2021, https://www.transparency.org.
[7] Sarah Chayes, Corruption in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 269-79.
Greg Rosalsky, “How ‘Shock Therapy’ Created Russian Oligarchs and Paved the Path for Putin,” Mar. 22, 2022, https://www.npr.org.
[8] Andrew Damon, “The US Government and the Russian Election,” World Socialist Web Site, Dec. 27, 2017, https://www.wsws.org.
[9] Harley Balzer, “Stealing Russia Blind,” Journal of Democracy, Apr. 2015, Vol. 26, 165-69, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org.
[10] Benjamin Norton, “German EU Official Uses Racist Rhetoric Claiming Russians Don’t Value Life,” Apr. 15, 2022, https://multipolarista.com.
[11] Sarah Chayes, Corruption in America, 269-79.
[12] Bill Van Auken, “Zbigniew Brzezinski, Architect of the Catastrophe in Afghanistan, Dead at 89,” World Socialist Web Site, May 29, 2017, https://www.wsws.org.
Nick Turse, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (New York: Verso, 2010), Chalmers Johnson, “Abolish the CIA!” 31-32.
David N. Gibbs, “The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998),” Translated by William Blum and David N. Gibbs, https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu.
[13] Democracy Now!, “Saving President Bush: Send in James Baker,” Dec. 8, 2003, https://www.democracynow.org.
[14] Richard J. Anderson, “A History of President Putin’s Campaign to Re-Nationalize Industry and the Implications for Russian Reform and Foreign Policy,” Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Defense Technical Information Center, Feb. 8, 2008, https://apps.dtic.mil.
[15] Vladimir Putin, 43rd Munich Conference on Security and Policy, Feb. 11, 2007, https://russialist.org.
[16] Josh Von Trapp, “Will Afghanistan’s New Taliban Rulers Govern Corruptly?” The Global Anticorruption Blog, Nov. 1, 2021, https://globalanticorruptionblog.com.
[17] Craig Whitlock, The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021).
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