Eric Zuesse

Salman, the new Saudi King.

It’s not “because we’re addicted to their oil.” That reason ended long ago, but the popular belief that we’re allied with hardline Islamic Arab states, Sunni-run nations in the Middle East, because of the oil-issue — that they have oil, and we need their oil — continues on as popular lore, long after the reality ended, because it’s constantly being pumped by the U.S. aristocracy’s ‘news’ media and the journalists they hire.

If you want to know why we despise Tom Friedman, NYTimes columnist, warmonger, arrogant billionaire, and hypocrite, click on the bar below.

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Friedman: an ego as inflated as his bank account. White Charger of the warmongering punditocracy.

[learn_more]

This video from the USA is called: Greenwash Guerrillas Pie Thomas Friedman on Earth Day.

Thomas Friedman, the author and NY Times columnist, was invited to Brown University to give a keynote speech on Earth Day, before a packed auditorium. His talk, titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” was about how corporate environmentalism (based on putting a price on the atmosphere, and investing in biofuels and techno-fixes) can restore America to its “natural place in the global order.” Luckily, this outrageous neoliberal capitalist propaganda was interrupted with a surprise visit from the Greenwash Guerrillas. Leaflets were thrown to the crowd, stating: Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face… * Because of his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet * For telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand. * For helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged * For his long-standing support for the US Occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Such committed support to the US War Machine and its proxy states overseas cannot be masked behind any twisted mask of “green” – the US Military is the largest single emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. * For his pure arrogance.

On behalf of the earth and all true environmentalists — we, the Greenwash Guerrillas, declare Thomas Friedman’s “Green” as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip covering his face.[/learn_more]

American leaders have been close and sometimes ostensibly subservient to the Saudi royal despots for generations, but the Bush clan has taken the affiliation to new, undignified heights. Photo: George W Bush with the late King Abdullah.

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[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ome historical background of America’s evolving relationship with the Saudi royal family is necessary in order to understand in a truthful way, U.S.-Saudi (and broader U.S-Arabic) relations. (On the Saudi side, incidentally, that refers to relations between the U.S. Government and the King of Saudi Arabia, because the King is  the Government of Saudi Arabia: he’s an absolute dictator there, and he owns not just the Government, but much of the economy. For example, ever since 1980, the Saudi Government, the King, has owned 100% of Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. Aramco’s reserves are more than 250 billion barrels, which at $40/barrel are, alone, worth $1 trillion, but Forbes  and Bloomberg refuse to calculate the fortunes of royalty and other heads-of-state; so, the fiction is spread, by those business-publishers and others, that the world’s richest person is instead Bill Gates, at a mere $79.2 billion (according to Forbes), which is far less than a tenth of King Salman’s fortune. The Saudi King owns the Saudi Government, and the Saudi Government owns Aramco and lots more — a fortune that’s probably worth several trillion dollars. The U.S. is allied with the Saudi King. But it’s no longer because of all the oil he has.)

There is no more communism — it’s just raw greed and power-politics, which have now grown like a cancer to obliterate other priorities of the U.S. Government in international relations.

FDR: A visionary and authentic democrat or cunning capitalist defender?

Hillary with King Salman: polishing the Saudi apple.

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

 

On 11 February 2004, this is how the pro-Western Moscow Times, which wikipedia refers to as “the first Western daily to be published in Russia,” described “Putin and the Chechen War: Together Forever”:

Kadyrov: Moscow’s man in Chechnya, but more independent than many think.

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]l Jazeera television, which is controlled by gas-rich Qatar’s anti-Russian Sunni royal family, the Thanis, has criticized Putin for his placing in control of Chechnya the anti-jihadist Chechen Muslim, Ramzan Kadyrov. Thanis are also the chief financial backers for the Muslim Brotherhood, and, along with the Saud family (the main financial backers of Al Qaeda), are also among the main financial backers of the Syrian warriors who are fighting to replace the secular Shiite leader, Assad, by a sectarian Sunni Islamic regime in Syria.

Brzezinski

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]ot all of this has remained as being secret. There have even been some proud public participants in the American aristocracy’s hatred of Russians. For example: the child of dispossessed Polish nobility who emigrated to the United States and who as an adult was brought by the oil-baron heir David Rockefeller into several U.S. Presidential Administrations, Zbigniew Brzezinski (who co-founded with Rockefeller the Trilateral Commission) was quite proud of his anti-Russian hatred. (He had actually been born near Lviv, in the most pro-Nazi and anti-Russian part of present-day Ukraine. A racist hatred of Russians was intense there.) He was interviewed on page 76 of France’s Le Nouvel Observateur, on 15 January 1998, translated by Bill Blum, posted at Global Research by Michel Chossudovsky:

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

PRESIDENT!

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]e really can’t recommend this documentary enough.  It is made by Russian state TV, (Russia Channel 1 TV) and so presents a favorable view of Putin, and is profoundly successful in rebutting the frankly preposterous mudslinging that has become so commonplace in Western media.

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Putin’s Way: Frontline propaganda garbage, dressed as brave journalism.)

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We think, and we keep telling everyone this, that Putin has done a remarkably good job running his country, and seems to be a very admirable man.  It’s hard to disagree with this after watching this movie.
…

This article originally appeared at Sott.net

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The folks of Vox Populi Evo have pulled through again, providing an English translation and subtitles for Rossiya-1’s latest documentary, PRESIDENT, hosted by Russian TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov and which first aired in Russia on April 26. VPE had previously made Crimea: The Way Back Home available for English viewers, and we recommend that readers check that one out too.

The film contains never-seen-before footage from some of the biggest highlights of Putin’s career, and of Russia’s history for the last decade and a half: the war in Chechnya, the battle with the oligarchs, the Kursk submarine tragedy, Beslan, the 2008 crisis. Among the revelations Putin makes in his interview sections is the admission of direct involvement of Western intelligence agencies in supporting Islamic terrorism in Chechnya. While it’s no surprise to the alternative media, it’s the first time Putin has officially confirmed such involvement. Nothing has changed since the CIA created the mujaheddin to battle the Soviets in Afghanistan. (Note: if the embedded videos do not play correctly, follow the link to the original LiveLeak page by clicking on the episode title.)

ADDENDUM

Segments, as distributed via LiveLeak. These segments may not play as reliably as the Vimeo version above. 

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

BLACK LINE HERE

PBS documentary Putin’s Way: Half-truths and lies in the service of US warmongering against Russia

By Andrea Peters

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ast week, PBS, the major public broadcaster in the United States, re-aired the one-hour exposé Putin’s Way on its “Frontline” television program. It is currently available for streaming on the “Frontline” web site.

The film was initially released in January 2015. Created by writer, director and producer Neil Docherty, it features the work of investigative reporter Gillian Findlay.

Putin’s Way is not so much a documentary as a propaganda piece intended to justify Washington’s confrontation with Russia and make the case for regime-change in Moscow, if necessary by military means. Proponents of the anti-Putin campaign among intellectuals and in the government and media are no doubt delighted by the combination of half-truths, omissions and hypocritical expressions of moral indignation that characterize the film. But the viewer genuinely seeking to understand the origins and character of the oligarchy ruling Russia will find little insight.

Putin’s Way begins by promising its audience “the inside story of the Russian president’s rise to power.” It provides a smattering of facts about Vladimir Putin’s childhood and early life and a rudimentary outline of his evolution from KGB officer working in East Germany, to deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg working under the tutelage of Anatoly Sobchak, to prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, and finally to the Russian presidency. This narrative is accompanied by a menacing, horror film-like score.

Along the way, the film presents evidence of corruption involving Putin and his allies. Examples include the future president filching money amassed through the sale of state resources for the designated purpose of purchasing food for Saint Petersburg; Putin’s use of his position as Saint Petersburg’s chair of foreign economic relations to cut special deals with overseas investors; the funneling of government money intended for construction projects into the purchase of vacation villas; cooperation with organized crime; and turning a blind eye to money laundering.

The documentary is filled with out of context images and narrative calculated to convey the suggestion we are in the presence of a depraved and unprincipled autocrat—a”new czar”.

The documentary asserts that corruption in Russia today is more systematic that at any previous time in the country’s history. Russian investigators whose work has been censored speak to the camera.

SIDEBAR | PATRICE —————————————————————————

Docherty

Putin’s Way, the shameful hatchet job produced by Frontline for PBS should have been called Putin’s in the way…of American Imperial Hegemony, because that’s the true nature and underhanded motivation behind this pretentious pseudo documentary. From the first frames, it’s obvious the film is transparently devoid of decency, not to mention a mature, balanced, and contextual understanding of world events and Russian affairs. As the author of this article states, this program is nothing but a nonstop concatenation of outright lies and innuendo, the exercise all the more irritating because of the sheer hypocrisy of the producers and the perfidy of their goals. One is moved to ask: Who do these Anglo-Americans think they are, this cynical, sanctimonious, careerist mob that has no qualms whitewashing the most morally corrupt and criminal empire in the modern world, to hurl stones at Russia and Putin in the name of higher values? For an answer you might want to ask Neil Docherty, the Scottish-born Canadian responsible for this vehicle, now firmly embedded in Frontline’s self-congratulatory subculture, but I doubt he’d say anything remotely truthful or worth repeating here.  If Docherty believes in the claptrap he produced, he’s worse than a fool, he’s a fool in a position of power. But if he doesn’t believe in the program’s value or intent, and yet did the job for careerist reasons, or pure vainglory, he’s a certifiable whore. Either way, he’s no example of true journalism. Below, the program’s trailer, and the blurb accompanying its presentation on YouTube.—PG

FRONTLINE investigates the accusations of criminality and corruption that have surrounded Vladimir Putin’s reign (sic) in Russia. Tracing his career back over two decades, “Putin’s Way” reveals how the accumulation of wealth and power has led to autocratic rule (sic) and the specter of a new Cold War.

END OF SIDEBAR

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]merican professor Karen Dawisha, who recently published the book Putin’s Kleptocracy, notes that the process of theft began in the 1990s. In relation to the stealing of money intended to purchase food supplies for Saint Petersburg, she indignantly declares, “So millions, millions were made in just that episode alone!”

Dawisha

Dawisha (left) and the filmmaker leave out of this tale two critical facts. First, during the 1980s and 1990s, the United States and Europe wholeheartedly supported the regimes of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Russian President Boris Yeltsin, under whose oversight the widespread theft of state-owned property was initiated and then expanded to staggering levels. Second, the privatization “shock therapy” policies that underlay this process and led to the immense inequality Dawisha laments later in the documentary were crafted in Washington. The approach to privatization in Russia became known as the “Washington consensus.”

Harvard academics, working alongside representatives of the Clinton administration, the International Monetary Fund and right-wing reformers inside Russia, drew up measures they knew would place vast wealth in the hands of a tiny minority. Both former Communist Party insiders like Vladimir Putin and overseas investors from the US, Europe and elsewhere—i.e., those individuals who would have been sitting in the lobby of Putin’s office when he oversaw Saint Petersburg’s foreign economic affairs—fed at the trough.

In his book Post-Soviet Russia: A Journey Through the Yelstin Era, Roy Medvedev lists a string of revelations published in the Russian press during the mid-1990s documenting how major resources, including portions of the country’s military-industrial complex, disappeared into private hands with hardly a penny in compensation to the state. But, as Anatoly Chubais, one of the main architects of this process and a darling of Washington, said in 1997, “I held, and I still hold, that the creation of private property in Russia was an absolute value [to strive for]. In order to achieve this goal, it was necessary at times to sacrifice certain schematic notions of economic efficiency.”

“The widespread theft of state-owned property was initiated and then expanded to staggering levels…[under Gorbachev and especially Yeltsin] and the policies that underlay this process and led to the immense inequality Dawisha laments later in the documentary were crafted in Washington.”

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n 1993, when a conflict erupted between the Yeltsin regime and the parliament over these deeply unpopular policies, the Russian president bombarded the parliament building, killing hundreds. US President Bill Clinton endorsed these actions, declaring, “President Yeltsin had no other alternative but to try to restore order.” At that time, Washington had no objection to the profoundly anti-democratic methods of the new Russian ruling elite.

While the film later complains that Putin did not “take Russia on a path closer to the West—democratic, liberal and capitalist,” in reality, the present state of affairs is the direct outcome of the bureaucracy’s liquidation of the Soviet Union through an alliance between Western capitalism, Communist Party bureaucrats and sections of the USSR’s aspiring petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. Putin’s Way intentionally omits this history in an effort to cover up the central role played by American imperialism in the political and socio-economic calamity that brought Putin and the forces he represents to power.

Furthermore, the billions stolen by Russia’s oligarchs pale in comparison to the colossal theft that occurred during and after the 2008-2009 world economic crisis, which saw the
US and global financial industry bailed out to the tune of trillions even as the home values, pensions and jobs of ordinary people were wiped out. The documentary’s efforts to portray Putin as the world’s greatest financial criminal are preposterous and hypocritical. When an exercised Dawisha describes the Russian parliament as a “pay-to-play system” and implies that the audience ought to be incensed by the level of wealth inequality in Russia, one wants to retort, “Who are you kidding?”

Changing what needs to be changed, the film’s exposures of grotesque levels of inequality could easily be mistaken for an exposé of the situation in the United States.

Khodorkovsky

As one gets further into Docherty’s film, it becomes clear that those behind Putin’s Way do not actually have a problem with criminal oligarchs. They have a problem only with those oligarchs who are insufficiently subservient to Washington. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was once the richest man in Russia, is featured prominently. His ill-gotten wealth comes from swindling in Russia’s nascent banking industry in the early 1990s and control over Yukos, one of the country’s energy giants, established through the “loans for shares” scam of the shock therapy era.

This oligarch, who was jailed by Putin in 2003 on tax evasion charges, says he came into conflict with the Kremlin because, in response to the passage of US legislation making it illegal to do business with companies that engage in bribe-taking and other corrupt practices, he suggested that Russian firms clean up their act. Khodorkovsky tells us he thought Putin would “choose the European model… because it was obviously more beneficial for the country.”

The viewer is meant to believe that if only the likes of Khodorkovsky were in power, Russia would be delivered from the terrible grip of the Putin machine. Sergei Kolesnikov and Valeri Morozov, wealthy tycoons who abandoned the Kremlin, are also called upon to give testimony against the regime from which they profited handsomely.

While Docherty portrays Russia’s oligarchs-turned-anti-Putinists in a flattering light, he derides ordinary people. Observing that in 2011 Putin’s regime was the target of mass anti-government protests, Putin’s Way bewails the Kremlin’s subsequent resurgence in popularity on the basis of anti-Westernism. Clips from pro-Putin demonstrations are intended to make the population look like dupes.

The middle chapters of Putin’s Way deal with the murky circumstances under which Putin, a little known government bureaucrat, was elevated to the presidency. The documentary describes the decrepit state of the Yeltsin regime and the ailing president’s need to find a replacement who would block investigations into corruption. Putin is chosen as the man for the job, but the conditions have to be created to put him in power and turn the country’s attention away from a burgeoning domestic crisis.

The film moves on to the September 1999 apartment bombings in Russia, which the Kremlin linked to the ethnic-nationalist conflict in the breakaway region of Chechnya. Despite evidence that the country’s security services were involved, the attacks were used as a pretext to launch a second war in Chechnya. This coincided with the assumption of the presidency by Putin, who portrayed himself as a national hero fighting to deliver the country from the grip of terrorists. Several commentators recount the ways in which investigations into the apartment bombings were blocked and critics jailed.

The narrator recounts this sequence of events indignant and outraged at the very notion of a government using a terrorist attack to rescue itself from a domestic crisis and start a war. One wonders if Docherty thinks his audience is infinitely gullible and stupid. There are clear parallels between Putin’s rise to power and the disputed origins of the Bush administration, which took office on the basis of a stolen election and used the 9/11 attacks—which have never been seriously investigated—to stoke up patriotic sentiment and launch wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One of the clearest expressions of the political bias of Putin’s Way is the absence of any mention of the US-orchestrated, far-right coup in Ukraine in February 2014 that brought to power a violently anti-Russian government, which has been brutally repressing Ukraine’s Russian-speaking population and all those opposed to its fascistic policies. The purpose of this omission is to portray Russia as an imperialist power and the aggressor in Eastern Europe.

We are told by the narrator, “Putin has invaded Crimea and redrawn the map of Ukraine, claiming he is protecting ethnic Russians,” as if the Kremlin’s intervention in Ukraine was an aggressive action, rather than a defensive response to the US and German drive to turn Ukraine into a client state of Western imperialism and reduce Russia to a semi-colonial status.

Furthermore, Docherty leaves out the fact that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was validated by a popular referendum, whose legitimacy has not been questioned. In a turnout of more than 80 percent of the voting age population, over 95 percent of voters supported rejoining Russia.

One accusation is heaped on another. Without presenting a shred of evidence, Putin’s Way implies that the Kremlin was behind the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

The “Frontline” documentary ends on a particularly ugly note. Referring to Putin, Dawisha declares, “I haven’t seen any evidence that he’s willing to back down. And it’s not his style at all, ever. He doesn’t back down.” Then, Natalia Gevorkyan, a biographer of Putin, concludes a story of the Russian president in which she compares him to a cornered rat. “He will not say, ‘OK, let’s talk,’ he will jump,” she says.

What is the point of all this? If Putin is not a man with whom one can negotiate, then, like vermin, he should be stamped out. And if, as the film implies, the majority of the population are also pro-Putin, why should they not be treated the same way?

ANDREA PETERS is a cultural and media critic with wsws.org.

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