JackRiddler
JackRiddler's JournalIt wasn't his to stop, see?
He makes a statement saying it shouldn't happen, just like the Western powers and orgs did. What else should he do, send in troops to stop the Eastern Ukrainians from voting?
And then those people just went and did it anyway! If they'd been ethnic Ukrainians overthrowing an elected government in Kiev, you'd be calling it a "democratic revolution."
I didn't say there was a Western-sponsored coup in Ukraine. It was Arseniy Yatsenyuk himself informing you and the world that he's sponsored by NATO, the State Department, and the CIA ("NED"
.
He seems eager to advertise it:
Partners of the Ukrainian coup d'etat prime minister...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024946300
It will serve him well once he's set up at Harvard or Oxford or wherever else his sinecure for Service to Banksterdom awaits.
Release the Fracken: Biden's Son Joins Ukraine Gas Firm
Source: Burisma Holdings (company press release)Hunter Biden joins the team of Burisma Holdings
Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director.
R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings, Mr. Alan Apter, noted: “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.”
R. Hunter Biden is a counsel to Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, a national law firm based in New York, USA, which served in cases including “Bush vs. Gore”, and “U.S. vs. Microsoft”. He is one of the co-founders and a managing partner of the investment advisory company Rosemont Seneca Partners, as well as chairman of the board of Rosemont Seneca Advisors. He is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Masters Program in the School of Foreign Service. Mr. Biden has experience in public service and foreign policy. He is a director for the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, The Center for National Policy, and the Chairman’s Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute. Having served as a Senior Vice President at MBNA bank, former U.S. President Bill Clinton appointed him an Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy Coordination under Secretary of Commerce William Daley. Mr. Biden served as Honorary Co-Chair of the 2008 Obama-Biden Inaugural Committee.
SNIP
Read more: http://burisma.com/hunter-biden-joins-the-team-of-burisma-holdings/
The Burisma press page also links to this NYT article from April:
Biden Offers Strong Support to Ukraine and Issues a Sharp Rebuke to Russia
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/world/europe/biden-ukraine.html?_r=2
Now imagine if the elected government of Ukraine had been overthrown and the interim prime minister was not only the former central banker but openly "partners" with a Russian oligarch, the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and a couple of FSB fronts (as former central banker Yatsenyuk is partners with the State Department, NATO and a Ukrainian oligarch). And imagine this character had no problem having neo-Nazis in his cabinet at the power positions, and imposed a crushing austerity program on the people dictated by the EU and the IMF, and deputized Nazis to go crush protests in an ethnically different part of his country.
And imagine if soon after Putin's nephew got a new executive position with the country's largest gas producer.
Oh the outrage on this board!
But this is okay, because, democraticrevolution, Americagood, Putinhitlerbad, newcoldwarnecessary, pussyriotsexy, done.
Hunter Biden joins the team of Burisma Holdings
Source: Burisma Holdings (company press release)
Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director.
R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings, Mr. Alan Apter, noted: “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.”
R. Hunter Biden is a counsel to Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, a national law firm based in New York, USA, which served in cases including “Bush vs. Gore”, and “U.S. vs. Microsoft”. He is one of the co-founders and a managing partner of the investment advisory company Rosemont Seneca Partners, as well as chairman of the board of Rosemont Seneca Advisors. He is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Masters Program in the School of Foreign Service. Mr. Biden has experience in public service and foreign policy. He is a director for the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, The Center for National Policy, and the Chairman’s Advisory Board for the National Democratic Institute. Having served as a Senior Vice President at MBNA bank, former U.S. President Bill Clinton appointed him an Executive Director of E-Commerce Policy Coordination under Secretary of Commerce William Daley. Mr. Biden served as Honorary Co-Chair of the 2008 Obama-Biden Inaugural Committee.
SNIP
Read more: http://burisma.com/hunter-biden-joins-the-team-of-burisma-holdings/
Burisma press page links to this NYT article from April:
Biden Offers Strong Support to Ukraine and Issues a Sharp Rebuke to Russia
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/world/europe/biden-ukraine.html?_r=2
Well thanks for telling us what fascists think.
Fascists do try to be international, but they keep running into other fascists. It's not much of a shock that the fascists of one country hate those of another. That's how it works.
You're deflecting!
There are fascists in the Kiev regime, which came to power by overthrowing the elected government in a coup d'etat that included fascist shock troops killing people on the street. Fascists are burning buildings full of people in the Eastern Ukraine.
It doesn't matter whether the Greek fascists of Golden Dawn likes that or dislike that. Deal with the actual subject. Don't deflect. Thanks.
Partners of the Ukrainian coup d'etat prime minister...
Check this out, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the prime minister of the current government in Kiev, who was Victoria Nuland's choice for the job even before the prior government was forced out of power, has a foundation, Open Ukraine.
To avoid any misunderstanding about this being his own organization, it's also known as the Arseniy Yatsenyuk Foundation.
And who were the partners in this foundation even before the coup d'etat in Kiev - Yatsenyuk's political sponsors?
Here are some of the logos from the "Partners" page at http://openukraine.org/en/about/partners
The State Department
NATO
National Endowment for Democracy
(neo-CIA founded by Reagan in 1983 with the mission as one might expect of preventing too much democracy)
Swedbank
Horizon Capital
(basically a Wall Street hedge fund looking for "growth opportunities" in Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus)
Victor Pinchuk Foundation
http://pinchukfund.org/en/about_pinchuk/biography/
Pinchuk is a Ukrainian oligarch with ties to many of the best-known American oligarchs, including Gates, Buffett, Soros, and Peterson. Peterson in turn would be the guy bankrolling the austerity and anti-Social Security lobby in the United States. Pinchuk brought the Peterson economics institute to Ukraine. So we see that neoliberal birds of a feather do flock together. Also on Pinchuk's friends list are Clinton and the fugitive war criminal, Tony Blair.
Oh, sorry, he's a "philanthropist."
http://pinchukfund.org/en/about_pinchuk/biography/
Here's Pinchuk's project list:
http://pinchukfund.org/en/projects/
Additionally listed as Yatsenyuk Foundation partners are the Black Sea Trust, in turn a project of the German Marshall Fund (another U.S. government organization, in other words) and Chatham House, the UK's foreign policy academy.
Thus four of the "partners" are directly U.S. governmental organizations, and most of the rest represent U.S. capital or the UK establishment.
A couple of individuals' names are also listed as Yats partners: Hrebenyk Mikhail, Bernadyn Andriy. The latter has the same name as the Osteuropa division leader for the German multinational Bito, but I don't know if it's the same guy.
Otherwise, that's the whole list of the Foundation's partners. And with that kind of firepower and money, who needs to complicate things by adding too many actual Ukrainians?
Now where did anyone get the idea that "Yats" (as Nuland calls him) is some kind of tool of the Western power elite run directly by the State Department?
That's so unfair!
If you appreciate this & want to keep it current on a DU currently awash in New Cold War propaganda, give a kick!
As if there's logic in any of it.
Are you an American? Do you really think the U.S. needs 800+ overseas bases or whatever plus all those carrier groups, satellites, air fleets, drones, and a surveillance empire to defend you against "terrorism" or Russia? Why is on the U.S. to police and influence the situation in every country on earth. It's about imperialism, the military-industrial complex eating your taxes, and geopolitical wankers living out every insane scenario they can devise. In the name of "realism," also, which is hilarious.
Should the U.S. continue aiding the Kiev government?
Do you support the continuation of United States delivery of aid to the present government in Kiev in the form of money, materiel, or consultation on matters of military and political strategy and law enforcement (as with the CIA and FBI presence in Ukraine)?
Nothing of the sort.
"Privately owned" means absolutely nothing with regard to an outlet's biases, accuracy, integrity or quality. Zero. It does say the outlet relies on advertising, sales or ratings, as well as the whim of whatever entity owns it, and so its editorial line will be accordingly vulnerable. Or else, it means some rich motherufkcer willing to lose money in the service of an ideological struggle, like Rupert Murdoch with the NY Post.
Self-evidently there should be publicly owned media, and they are often far superior to privately owned outlets. They are often subject to requirements that they bring a variety of views. They almost always deliver higher quality than their private counterparts.
PBS/NPR are lame and support U.S. policy as well as the cult of militarism. But they are incomparably better and fairer than FOXNEWS, or for that matter NBC (until recently owned by a major military contractor).
Most Germans understand why they prefer ARD for the news, rather than RTL or BILD. There is a reason why the right-wing austerity government in Greece killed the state media ERT, while its brutal policies are promoted constantly by the private channels ANT1 and MEGA. Meanwhile, all of the "privately owned" (oligarch) media in Venezuela have engaged unanimously in a constant and odious propaganda war on the government there. Unanimously. In a country where the majority has voted for that government a dozen times. Once again illustrating that of course there is an inherent political bias in the private ownership of mass media!
Your view is shockingly misinformed!
There is no big conspiracy to taint our minds with fluoride...
It's a petty and normal conspiracy of aluminum and fertilizer producers to avoid paying for their own waste disposal. They have contrived to let communities pay them billions of dollars and dump this waste product, fluoride compound, into their own drinking water. Municipalities have been conned into doing so on the ridiculous pretext that it's good for dental health, even though the WHO data for dental health, comparing developed nations that fluoridate to those that don't, looks like this:
In other words, unregulated capitalist enterprise doing what it normally does, without regard for externalities like pollutants dumped in the drinking water.
Some more from old notes of mine:
Controversy about the fluoridation of water are almost exclusive to English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and Australia. That is because these are almost the only countries in the world where municipalities still commonly practice water fluoridation. Every other country has either never adopted fluoridation, or – in the case of regions in Japan and a series of European nations including the two Germanys and the Soviet Union – practiced fluoridation starting in the 1950s and abolished it again starting in the early 1970s through 1990. Today, no more than about 10 percent of the UK population and no more than half of Canadians receive fluoridated tap water, while majorities do in Ireland, Australia and, most significantly, the United States.
The areas that never fluoridated, or fluoridated and then quit, have not experienced a cumulative rise in rates of tooth decay as a result. On the contrary, in recent decades every developed nation has seen a constant and dramatic decline in rates of tooth decay. The above chart shows tooth decay trends for “unfluoridated” and “fluoridated” nations since the 1960s, and is based on the United Nations World Health Organization country index for “DMFT” – a measure of the rate of decayed, missing, or filled teeth among 12 year-olds.
Real-world data are rarely this definitive. The DMFT index has declined in all developed countries. This international trend has been completely unrelated to whether or not a nation fluoridates its water. Despite gathering this data, the World Health Organization curiously still supports water fluoridation, as does the UN’s biggest financial sponsor, the United States government. The US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have called water fluoridation one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. It is true, as fluoridation advocates hold, that the period of fluoridation has coincided with a dramatic decline in tooth decay; but the above evidence serves to falsify the hypothesis that water fluoridation was a major factor in improved dental health.
Here is how Mike Lofgren structures it:
Insider: There's a Shadow Govt. Running the Country, and It's Not Up for Re-Election
BillMoyers.com [1] / By Mike Lofgren [2]
http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/dc-insider-theres-shadow-govt-running-country-and-its-not-re-election
... SNIP ...
My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can it be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. [2] [12]
SNIP
Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis [13] called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. .... A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the ten thousandth time. Your life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s eleven in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of take-out pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet they simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is [14]classified [14]?” No wonder few people are whistleblowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistleblowing often provokes: unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, it is easy to grow immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.
The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Justice Department. We also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions, and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.
SNIP
As the indemnification vote showed, the Deep State does not consist only of government agencies. What is euphemistically called private enterprise is an integral part of its operations. In a special series in The Washington Post called “Top Secret America [16],” Dana Priest and William K. Arkin described the scope of the privatized Deep State, and the degree to which it has metastasized after the September 11 attacks. There are now 854,000 contract personnel with top secret clearances — a number greater than that of top secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.While they work throughout the country and the world, their heavy concentration in and around the Washington suburbs is unmistakable: since 9/11, 33 facilities for top-secret intelligence have been built or are under construction. Combined, they occupy the floor space of almost three Pentagons — about 17 million square feet. Seventy percent of the intelligence community’s budget goes to paying contracts. And the membrane between government and industry is highly permeable: the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper [17], is a former executive of Booz Allen, one of the government’s largest intelligence contractors. His predecessor as director, Admiral Mike McConnell [18], is the current vice chairman of the same company; Booz Allen is 99 percent dependent on government business. These contractors now set the political and social tone of Washington, just as they are increasingly setting the direction of the country, but they are doing it quietly, their doings unrecorded in the Congressional Record or the Federal Register, and are rarely subject to congressional hearings
Washington is the most important node of the Deep State that has taken over America, but it is not the only one. Invisible threads of money and ambition connect the town to other nodes. One is Wall Street, which supplies the cash that keeps the political machine quiescent and operating as a diversionary marionette theater. Should the politicians forget their lines and threaten the status quo, Wall Street floods the town with cash and lawyers to help the hired hands remember their own best interests. The executives of the financial giants even have de facto criminal immunity. On March 6, 2013, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder stated the following [19]: “I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.” This from the chief law enforcement officer of a justice system that has practically abolished the constitutional right to trial [20] for poorer defendants charged with certain crimes. It is not too much to say that Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice — certainly beyond the dreams of a government salaryman. [3] [21]
This is a very long, detailed and richly observed article with a lot of emotional and sociological insight.
He also gets into Silicon Valley's role, though not Hollywood's, but in his view, "the center of gravity of the Deep State is firmly situated in and around the Beltway. The Deep State’s physical expansion and consolidation around the Beltway would seem to make a mockery of the frequent pronouncements that governance in Washington is dysfunctional and broken. That the secret and unaccountable Deep State floats freely above the gridlock between both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is the paradox of American government in the twenty-first century: drone strikes, data mining, secret prisons and Panopticon-like [29] control [30] on the one hand; and on the other, the ordinary, visible parliamentary institutions of self-government declining to the status of a banana republic amid the gradual collapse of public infrastructure."
One thing missing in Lofgren's excellent telling is consideration of the Spook Internationale. The Deep State, this is also a web of alliances around the world (and the alliances and relationships of the Top Secret America corporate contractors) with GCHQ/MI6, Mossad, ISI, Saudi Mukhabarat, all the vassal agencies in the satellite states like Colombia, the love-hate agencies like Germany. It is also assets held through the offshore archipelago, alliances with money launderers and drug kingpins, BCCI-type banks. It is of course proxy armies as well as controlled enemy fronts (every "al Qaeda" franchise is necessarily suspect). It is through agencies like USAID and the Office of Transition management the networks of informants and NGOs in antagonist states like Ukraine (before the coup), etc. etc. etc.
Such structures can be incredibly stable for decades and then fall apart very suddenly.
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