Posted: Thursday, March 5, 2015 12:15 am
A reader of this column refers to the American people as the American “sheeple,” led this way and that by the sheep dogs of the corporate media, to be regularly fleeced by Wall Street and Washington. Observing the news about Ukraine and Greece, I begin to see my reader’s point.
The story line on Ukraine, repeated endlessly by CNN, the BBC and the other Lassies of Western media, is that it is all about “Russian aggression.”
It is a completely false narrative and the American people are being led by lies, the same way Americans were led into the invasion of Iraq by the lie of weapons of mass destruction.
In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, its many “republics” became independent states, Ukraine among them. The neo-cons that dominate American foreign policy thought this was a wonderful opportunity to ring Russian with NATO military bases and extend the joys of Wall Street banking and corporate domination into those markets.
The Ukrainians elected a government pledged to do just that and join the U.S.-backed European Union. But the deal was not popular. Ukrainians had seen what that meant, played out across Europe: more wealth for the 1 percent and austerity and impoverishment for the rest.
The elected Ukrainian leader backed out of the deal and the U.S. promptly got rid of him in a coup.
Within days after the U.S.-installed puppet took office, the global banking cartel set Ukraine on the path of Greece with a massive debt package and plans were unveiled to “reform” Ukrainian farming, long the bread basket of Western Europe.
This reform meant pushing small farmers off the land they have worked for generations and consolidating Ukrainian farming into the hands of American-style agribusinesses.
The local leaders of the Crimea in the eastern Ukraine, a region with historic ties to Russia, immediately organized a vote, a legitimate expression of democracy, decided overwhelmingly to go back to Russia and turned up on Vladimir Putin’s doorstep; who of course said, “Welcome home.”
Other Ukrainians decided maybe they wanted to go there too, and the fight was on.
That is what happened, documented by numerous independent journalists whose reporting has been systematically excluded from “the most trusted” names in American news, which daily bark their warnings of the big, bad Russian wolf while the U.S. and NATO keep ratcheting up the rhetoric and the stakes, in Russia’s back yard.
Did I mention that Russia is a nuclear power?
U.S. foreign policy is as dangerous as it is phony.
If Ukraine is the bread basket of Europe, Greece is its basket case. There, an incompetent government rife with corruption colluded with crooked banksters to lead the people into a sea of private bank debt and the major Greek banks are near insolvent.
But unlike the U.S., where a central bank, the Fed, can create all the money it wants to bail out the crooked banks that own it, Greece had to borrow, big time, from the crooked banks.
And the crooked banks extorted a price: sell off public assets to the 1 percent we work for, at pennies on the dollar, stop spending money on people — living wages, old age pensions, health care, education — send that money to us, and maybe we will lend you enough more money to pay us the interest on the interest on your debt.
Finally, the Greek people said “You’re killing us, we’ve had enough,” and elected a new government to fight the banks.
Whereupon the central banks let loose a really nasty German shepherd, Chancellor Angela Merkel, to get the Greek sheep back in line to be fleeced — again.
Angela — “angel.” There’s a cosmic joke for you.
The American and Western democracies have been subverted by a global, private bank cartel that has seized control of our money and credit and replaced public money with private money and massive debt to the cartel, which extracts what amounts to tribute from democratically elected governments.
And what of the American people? Are we being herded into line to put another Bush or another Clinton into the White House, another president in the Wall Street dynasty.
Baaa. Baaa. Baaa?
Mike Krauss is a 30-year veteran of the international logistics and distribution industry, a founder of the Public Banking Institute and chair of the Pennsylvania Project. www.publicbankingpa.org. Email: mike@mikekrausscomments.com
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