AMERICAN DUPLICITY

ERIC ZUESSE—During the coup, eight busloads of Crimeans, who had come to Kiev to demonstrate against the oust-Yanukovych Maidan demonstrations, hurriedly reboarded their buses in order to flee from nazis who were attacking them, and they finally got cornered en-route home, by those pursuing attackers, in the town of Korsun, and some of their buses were burnt, and many of these Crimeans got clubbed to death by the nazis.

Then, during the interim between the Korsun massacre and the 16 March 2014 Crimean referendum on rejoining the Russian Federation, a Ukrainian federal prosecutor from Crimea, who opposed the coup and managed safely to flee back home by her own private means, was interviewed on local Crimean television and recounted how terrified she had been by the nazis. She was asked whether Crimeans had the right to vote in a referendum to return to being Russians, and she said, “Citizens of Crimea, you have every right in the world” to do that.

CHRIS HEDGES—The two warring factions within the ruling elite, which fight primarily over the spoils of power while abjectly serving corporate interests, peddle alternative realities. If the deep state and Venezuelan socialists or Russia intelligence operatives are pulling the strings no one in power is accountable for the rage and alienation caused by the social inequality, the unassailability of corporate power, the legalized bribery that defines our political process, the endless wars, austerity and de-industrialization. The social breakdown is, instead, the fault of shadowy phantom enemies manipulating groups such as Black Lives Matters or the Green Party.

For those who have been paying attention over the years, it is no secret that Facebook has become a leviathan of censorship and data mining. Facebook users are no more customers of the company than chickens in a processing factory are there voluntarily. When you use Facebook, you are the product. This notion became even more popular this year with the release of the chilling documentary, The Social Dilemma. While the issues presented in the documentary have been known for several years, during a Monday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was accused of something far more sinister than simply pimping out users for ad revenue.

JONATHAN COOK—Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning – on the rare occasions he appeared – suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth. But then again, if Trump could lead the world’s only superpower for four years, how hard can it really be? He showed that those tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists might be right after all: maybe the president is largely a figurehead, while a permanent bureaucracy runs much of the show from behind the curtain. Were Ronald Reagan and George W Bush not enough to persuade us that any halfwit who can string together a few cliches from a teleprompter will suffice?

THE ISTER—In 2003, Khodorkovsky was criminally prosecuted by Putin for tax evasion and fraud for which he ended up serving 10 years in prison. His protege Leonid Nevzlin was convicted of ordering multiple contract murders on Khodorkovsky’s behalf, and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. Associate Platon Lebedev was also convicted and imprisoned. This wave of prosecution sent a message and gave Putin a strong position, which was used to negotiate a “grand bargain” with the remaining oligarchs: they retained most of their existing assets in return for alignment with Putin’s vertical rule of Russia. The era of financial gangsterism from the 1990s was over.