Russia Specialist David Kerans: The West Is Trying to Drive a Wedge Between Russia and Eastern Europe — Victor Olevich interviews David Kerans

The deeper question is why the US has continued to target Russia beyond the West’s victory in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And here we have to speak openly about the corruption of the US political and economic system over the last few decades, and how it has hijacked foreign policy to serve the interests of a narrow elite, not the nation as a whole.

Corruption has blossomed exponentially in the US over the last generation. For the most part, we are talking about “corruption, American-style”, as economist Joseph Stiglitz called it. In contrast to most other countries, where vultures pay off officials to look the other way, powerful people in America find ways to suborn legislatures into arranging laws and regulations to cater to their interests. For example. the financial crisis of 2008 stemmed largely from the manipulation and twisting of regulations to allow financial elites to enrich themselves beyond all measure – and crash the economy in the process.

Corruption has also flourished in the US defense sector, but here, I’m afraid, it has been more primitive. Consider first the mushrooming of military spending. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq served as an excuse to inflate the defense budget by 44 percent over the first decade of the century, adjusted for inflation. The base defense budget for the decade was $5.9 trillion. Meanwhile, monitoring and control of these funds are shamefully weak. Already in 2001, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the Pentagon could not track $2.3 trillion in expenditures made over many previous years. And as budget allocations increased thanks to the wars, waste and misappropriation seem to have accelerated. Thus, we know that in 2005 both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Office of Management and Budget singled out the Pentagon for being particularly lax in managing its money. And figures made available in 2009 showed an astonishing $300 billion in research cost overruns for 96 ongoing weapons programs. Further, the scale of the overruns had jumped sharply, from an average of 27 percent in 2001 to 42 percent in 2008.

The Pentagon’s response to evident mismanagement on an enormous scale was telling: the Department of Defense reduced audits of its contracts with equipment and service providers, inviting ever more rampant abuse, in the form of overpricing-plus-kickback schemes. By 2010, the value of non-competitively sourced contracts had nearly tripled from 2001, to $140 billion. The percentage of non-competitive contracts in the military sector finds no parallel elsewhere in US government. And, not surprisingly, the officials dispensing these contracts reap rewards on leaving government service for private industry. The number of Pentagon functionaries leaving through the “revolving door” has doubled since the 1990s.

Congress is aware of the escalating waste and malfeasance in the defense sector, and it could take steps to clean the sector up. A model is at hand, namely the experience of the US Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, popularly known as the Truman Committee, which functioned from 1941 to 1948. the Truman Committee genuinely rooted out corruption and war profiteering, and during the mid-2000s, a number of Senators agitated openly for establishment of a similar effort. But the Bush administration actively resisted this proposal, and it got little support in Congress. This raises another question, of course: what is to explain Congress’s disinterest in monitoring the use of the funds it sends to the defense sector? The answer is not merely payoffs, campaign donations, and revolving door employment offers, but also the structural dependency of the economies of a large minority of congressional districts on military projects. As researcher Rebecca Thorpe outlines in a recent book, The American Warfare State, the US made a conscious effort from the end of the Second World War to broaden the geographical apportionment of defense sector contracts. In consequence, large numbers of districts depend heavily to this day on the defense sector. A large minority of congressmen, therefore, are predisposed to vote up defense allocations at every opportunity.

So the upshot is that prodigious amounts of defense sector money are sloshing around Washington, which would suffice all by itself to tilt America’s foreign policy posture towards confrontation with real or imagined enemies. Combine this with a large and intractable constituency in Congress for ever increasing military spending, and you get a system geared to projecting power beyond its borders. It is a system which does not serve the needs of the American people or the US economy. It is also a system that needs enemies, and Russia is a primary legacy candidate.

Again, follow the money.

Russia Insider

Russia Specialist David Kerans: The West Is Trying to Drive a Wedge Between Russia and Eastern Europe

Victor Olevich interviews David Kerans

Stratfor — The West Hems in Russia Little by Little

Not the whole story according to George Friedman, head of Stratfor. According to a talk that Friedman gave which was taped and excerpts put on YouTube, what is actually happening is that the US is creating a cordon sanitaire from the Baltics to the Black Sea, which accounts for the US led coup in Ukraine and the US running Ukraine through a puppet government. (Friedman regards this as transparent.)

Note this is the US acting alone in creating the cordon, not NATO, which would likely not approve the strategy since NATO policy requires unanimous consent of the member states and this is not in everyone's interest.

The US strategy is ostensibly to isolate and contain Russia. But the hidden agenda is to create a US military controlled corridor separating Europe from Russia in order to prevent the development of Russian-European cooperation and perhaps an eventual alliance based on economic and trade benefits — and especially to prevent a German-Russian alliance should Germany listen to Putin's overtures about the advantages of this.

According to Friedman, the worst nightmare of the Anglo-Americans beginning with German unification under Prussian leadership has been development of a German-Russian alliance, which would unite Germany's economic and technological expertise with Russian natural resources, giving this alliance effective control of strategist Halford Mackinder's heartland of Eurasia and as a consequence control of the world island. This is fundamental to the Brzezinski doctrine, too. 

A German-Russian alliance is essentially the only really viable threat to continuing US world hegemony through military control of the sea, air and space, at least for the foreseeable future.

According to Friedman, everything hangs on Germany, and Germany hasn't yet made up it mind. The US is not waiting to find out, since there is a lot of pressure by German business to dump the US in favor of a closer relationship with Russia, which would be much more in Germany's economic interest (meaning their economic interest).

Friedman admits its cynical but hey, this is hard ball.

Stratfor — Geopolitical Diary
The West Hems in Russia Little by Little

John Helmer — The Think-Tank That Blasts From The Past – The Case Of CASE, Cronies Against Self-Sacrifice In Europe

Think tanks, geopolitics, and clandestine operations. Connecting the dots (people).

On April 25, 2013, President Putin publicly identified [Jonathan] Hay as a CIA agent. Referring to Hay’s work on Russian asset privatization for Chubais, and the subsequent US prosecution, Putin said: “we learned today that officers of the United States’ CIA operated as consultants to Anatoly Chubais. But it is even funnier that upon returning to the US, they were prosecuted for violating their country’s laws and illegally enriching themselves in the course of privatisation in the Russian Federation. They did not have the right to do this as active CIA officers. In accordance with US law, they were not allowed to engage in any kind of commercial activity, but they couldn’t resist – it’s corruption, you see.” Note Putin’s reference to when he was briefed – April 25, 2013. According to Boyarchuk of CASE Ukraine, Hay was then supervising that organization.

Dances with Bears

The Think-Tank That Blasts From The Past – The Case Of CASE, Cronies Against Self-Sacrifice In Europe

John Helmer

Michael Hudson — The New Cold War’s Ukraine Gambit

The following article is from a new book, Flashpoint in Ukraine, edited by Stephen Lendman. It is currently available from Clarity Press as an e-book, and soon to be printed.

Finance in today’s world has become war by non-military means. Its object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute. In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices. It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for U.S. and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain....

The past century has seen a counter-revolution against the Enlightenment, classical economics and its culmination in socialist hopes to steer industrial capitalism to evolve into democratic socialism. What is occurring today is a self-destructive financial dynamic of impoverishment, dependency and breakdown in many ways like what happened when Rome’s creditor oligarchy plunged the Empire into the Dark Age two thousand years ago. The post-feudal real estate and financial oligarchies, the landed aristocracies of Europe and the great banking families and American trust builders have made a comeback, and the New Cold War is intended to lock in their victory. Ukraine is simply the latest battlefield, and battlefields end up devastated.

Michael Hudson
The New Cold War’s Ukraine Gambit