Brazil is on a Roll that the World loves to Love....

Brazil is on a Roll that the World loves to Love....
By Pepe Escobar

SAO PAULO - Brazil is a country the world loves to love. Brazil is a (joyful) riddle wrapped in a (chaotic) enigma, with the added complexity that the riddle and the enigma are ritualistically juggling with football, dancing a samba, ogling a sensual mulata, watching a telenovela and sipping a lethal caipirinha - all at the same time.

The distinctive cultural trace of Brazil is anthropophagy - from culture to technology, the legacy of a former, lazy European monarchy in a tropical country where the aborigines, after banqueting over the odd whitey, were merrily exterminated while Europeans and black slaves copulated freely, with no Catholic guilt involved (there's no sin below the Equator). If this sounds like the plot of a carnival parade, that's because it is.

French general and statesman Charles de Gaulle once quipped that Brazil "is not a serious country". Multi-ethnic, multicultural Brazilians, addicted to tolerance but most of the time drenched in complacency, preferred to believe - and joked about - the eternal promise of "the country of the future" (as Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig coined it over 70 years ago).

Now Brazil is on a roll - and profiting from global goodwill has become a crucial element of its re-turbocharged soft power. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that Brazilian swing. The country is the "B" in Goldman Sachs-coined BRIC - the new, emerging global powers; less inscrutable and misunderstood than China, less authoritarian than Russia, less shambolic than India (and with no religious problems). And let's face it; much more fun. A new, two-fold national narrative has taken over; Brazil will become "the fifth power" - that is, the fifth-largest global economy (bye-bye Britain and France). And the New American Dream is made in Brazil.

Surfing USA, remixed
No wonder Anglo-American elites of the North tend to fry their brains confronted with so much tropical ebullience. At the Group of 20 (G-20) in London, United States President Barack Obama could not contain himself. "I love this guy," he said of Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, "He's the most popular politician on Earth." Time magazine recently named Lula as "the most influential person in the world". The Economist, never a fan of hyperbole, is convinced Brazil will become the fifth power by 2025.

But was the London Independent hyperbolic when it blared, "The world's most powerful woman will start coming into her own next weekend?" On Sunday, Dilma Rousseff, 63, Lula's former chief of staff, may indeed become the next Brazilian president, even without a run-off on October 31. She may become more powerful than German Chancellor Angela Merkel or US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton - but Brazilians would quip, what about celebrities Madonna and Angelina Jolie?

The Financial Times, for its part, preferred to buy lunch last Friday in Sao Paulo for former president (1995-2002) Fernando Henrique Cardoso, colloquially known as FHC. It may have been a matter of the wrong president at the wrong (overrated) restaurant. Never one to shy away from self-promotion, FHC the peacock, multiple honorary PhD sociologist grumbled, "I did the reforms. Lula surfed the wave."

FHC's key reform was to crush hyperinflation by launching the "real" - the new Brazilian currency - plan in the mid-1990s; but it's telling how he still refuses to give Lula credit for responsible fiscal management and for fighting exclusion (but not corruption), and lifting about 30 million Brazilians out of poverty.

Welcome to Brazilian idiosyncrasy; a new poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project reveals that 79% of Brazilians see political corruption as a "major problem", even while 75% approve of Lula's government, and no less than 80% take Lula personally to the skies.

But even enjoying this stratospheric 80% approval rate Obama can only dream about, Lula is not a god; in eight years in office, he couldn't push a crucial tax reform through an inept, corruption-corroded congress. And without it, the New American Dream - essentially concerning a newly empowered lower-middle class consuming homes, cars, televisions and computers like there's no tomorrow - can't rally take off. As much as the current Brazilian boom - essentially fueled by the non-stop sale of commodities to China - cannot be sustainable forever.

Lula - issued from a very poor family in the poor northeast, and a former metalworker - rattled the nerves of the old-style Brazilian sub-imperialist comprador elite to an extent that is hard to fathom abroad. Historian Jose Honorio Rodrigues has pointed out how these elites have always been "alienated, anti-progressive, anti-nation and anti-contemporary". And they "have never reconciled with the people". The recent, vicious Brazilian corporate media anti-Lula drive can be explained as a war against poor people that are finally emancipating themselves and following a path whose trailblazer was Lula himself. Who said class struggle was dead? One just has to visit Brazil - still the most unequal society in supremely unequal Latin America.

Stella by starlight
Lula once again seems to surf on the right wave of history as the takes a formidable risk by picking as his successor an austere and until recently obscure middle-class apparatchik who has never faced the ballot box. The daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant, Dilma "Iron Lady" Rousseff, or colloquially Dilma, as a kid dreamed of becoming a ballerina, a firefighter or a trapeze artist. But then the Brazilian generals smashed democracy in 1964 and installed their own tropical brand of the war on terror - to defend what they called "national security".

It's fascinating to observe today that Lula essentially did what the Joao Goulart government was trying to do before the military coup in 1964; to empower urban and rural workers. The comprador elites only cared about exports and an upper middle class mired in conspicuous consumption - the auto industry was the axis of the Brazilian economy at the time. The military dictatorship favored corporate - national and international - capitalism; those who profited immensely included Brazilian media groups, controlled by eight families.

Dilma fought against the dictatorship development "model" by joining the clandestine Palmares Armed Revolutionary Vanguard. Her codename was "Stella". Stella, like musician Jim Morrison of the Doors did, wanted to change the world, and change it now. These vanguards, in the 1960s and 1970s, used to kidnap foreign diplomats for ransom and shoot foreign - some American - torture experts training the dictatorship's death squads (hello General David Petraeus; does that ring a bell?) Dilma was tortured by the secret police in Sao Paulo's then Abu Ghraib, given a 25-month sentence for "subversion", and only recovered her freedom three years later. She was ready to try to change the system from within.

How Brazil beat the crisis
Developmentalism will be the name of the game in a Dilma government. It's gonna be a bumpy ride - especially because Brazil's infrastructure is in shambles and education levels are still on the slightly better side of appalling. It's unclear whether Dilma will follow to the letter the mantra among luminaries of her Workers' Party (PT) - that Brazil can keep growing without foreign investment in oil and agriculture, for instance.

Dilma holds on to a key guru - her former economics teacher Luciano Coutinho, now head of the humongous National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES). He may be Brazil's next finance minister. With Sao Paulo functioning as Brazil's Wall Street, no wonder the city's big bankers and financial markets, not to mention rentiers, are not amused.

The key criticism is that the Brazilian Treasury has been showering BNDES with cash, thus ballooning public debt. But this process also explains why and how Brazil won against the 2008 Wall Street-provoked global financial crisis.

When China announced its massive, nearly US$600 billion stimulus package in late 2008, the economists at BNDES knew they would have to, literally, follow the money. There were no lines of credit to anybody, Brazil included. So to fight an inevitable recession approaching, a $60 billion loan from the Treasury to BNDES was designed. This was the absolute opposite of the capital market-crazy FHC years. Coutinho recently insisted to journalist Consuelo Dieguez that countries with strong public banks, such as Brazil, China, India and South Korea, were the ones that really managed to beat the crisis.

Brazil may be allowed to hold a slight grudge against the US that explains why the country did not modernize much earlier.

The steel giant CSN - still in business - was built in 1941 with full American support; the US badly needed Brazilian steel for World War II. The Brazilian government was led to believe that after the war, Washington would keep investing in the country's modernization; Franklin Roosevelt, or FDR, had even organized a committee to study a development plan for Brazil, including massive financial help. But FDR died in April 1945. Harry Truman preferred to rebuild the losers in the war, Germany and Japan. The problem is, the war automatically fostered protectionism. From the 1940s ahead, Brazil was an economy almost as closed as current fellow BRICs Russia and China at the time.

Yet it took only a decade for Brazil to develop a serious industrial base; starting in the early 1960s, Brazil's economy jumped from 50th in the world to eighth. Gross national product at the time was growing at 7% a year. That was the so-called "Brazilian miracle". The problem is, the military only favored businessmen close to the regime with massive BNDES loans. After the 1973 oil shock, reality set in. With no oil and no cash to pay interest on foreign debt, Brazil tanked.

Flash forward to the 1990s. In an irony noted by many a Brazilian economist, the BNDES was reborn from the ashes to run the privatization drive; instead of developing state companies, it was ordered to dismantle them. And yet once again, those who profited handsomely were very close to the government, that is, flashy FHC and his coterie.

Now BNDES is betting on commodities companies to become Brazil's national champions; cellulose, food, meatpacking, petrochemicals, oil, mining. No sign of high-technology companies. A non-governmental organization study claims that mining, steelmaking, ethanol, cellulose, oil, gas, hydroelectric power and agrobusiness received almost half of the nearly $280 billion BNDES funds during the eight years of Lula. JBS, for instance, became the world's biggest meat producer.

Lula policy entails, for instance, borrowing money at a 10,75% interest rate to buy oil giant Petrobras shares. These Treasury loans do not appear on the budget, increasing gross debt but not the net debt. Brazilian gross debt has already reached a staggering 63% of gross domestic product (GDP). No wonder hordes of economists are horrified; there's a hurricane of money to lend, but few good ideas, and no sign of an industrial policy strategy. And why is that? Essentially because the country lacks a solid, well planned project for long-term development. Dilma will be smart enough to notice that China buying loads of commodities cannot drive Brazil's industrial policy.

The name of the game in the complex China-Brazil relationship is "pockets of prosperity". China is now Brazil's top trading partner, ahead of the US for the first time in 2009. China consumed almost 14% of Brazil's exports in 2009, and Brazil consumed almost 13% of Chinese exports. If you're a Brazilian soy exporter, you're a certified multi-millionaire. If you belong to the once-thriving Brazilian shoe industry, you're about to go bankrupt.

Relying on China is not exactly a recipe for sustainable growth. The obvious way out for Brazil is to sell not only commodities but added-value goods; to follow the Samsung way. And here's the supreme catch; Brazil can't do it without urgently updating the decrepit infrastructure in ports, airports and highways (a 2007 study by the Transport Confederation found that 74% of Brazilian

roads were in "terrible or bad" condition); it needs to modernize the notoriously Byzantine tax code; and it must smash the nerve-wracking bureaucracy that slows down businesses in Brazil, the so-called "Brazil cost" (the country is 129th out of 183 in terms of ease of doing business, according to a 2009 World Bank report).

Dilma has vowed to invest more than $550 billion between 2011 and 2014 to improve Brazil's agricultural export drive and to prepare for the 2014 football World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. But not much has been discussed about the tax code reform and the bureaucratic machine. The tax burden is at 34.4%, much higher than fellow BRICs and even developed countries such as Japan (17.6%) and the US (26.9%), according to a recent study by the Brookings Institution.

Last Friday, when Lula opened the Sao Paulo stock exchange, the Bovespa index jumped in market value to become the world's second-biggest because of Petrobras selling a whopping $68 billion worth of shares in the biggest share issue in corporate history. Excited investors from Brazil and abroad had asked for double that amount.

The capitalization of Petrobras - now the second-biggest oil company in the world just behind Exxon - took the state participation to 48% and in fact graphically reverted the FHC years, when control of Brazil's most strategic company was broken up and pulverized. Now come the customary market doubts over efficiency and productivity at Petrobras. The company is launching a monster $224 billion investment program for 2010 to 2014. For those like the PT staunchly defending Brazilian sovereignty, this Petrobras on steroids will be essential in the exploitation of pre-salt oil and its probable 50 billion barrels lying at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Another Brazilian giant is miner Vale, which the Boston Consulting Group says has created more value over the past decade than any other large firm in the world. Once again, thank China; with a market capitalization of $147 billion, Vale is now the world's second-largest miner behind BHP Billiton.

The new Kuwait
Inevitably, the Brazilian boom would generate its share of megabillionnaires. Such as Jorge Paulo Lemann, Brazil's second-richest man worth $11.5 billion, who engineered the $52 billion takeover of Anheuser-Busch Cos., founded Brazil's largest investment bank and recently conducted the $3.3 billion takeover of Burger King, the biggest restaurant acquisition of the past 10 years.

But the top dog is undoubtedly EBX Group owner Eike Batista. Excited investors are placing a value of about $5 a barrel on Batista's subsidiary OGX's estimated seven billion barrels of shallow water oil reserves. No wonder China's Sinopec Group and CNOOC are about to buy into OGX assets. Just as a comparison, if someone invested $100 in OGX in September 2009, now that would be worth $180, compared with a meager $80 in Petrobras and $113 in the Bovespa stock index. OGX, a start-up, has a market capitalization of about $38 billion and is not generating any revenue - yet.

Batista predicted in an already notorious interview on Charlie Rose that Brazil would be producing 5 to 6 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) by 2020, with OGX itself betting on 730,000 bpd by 2015 and 1.4 million bpd by 2019. Batista could have a net worth of $100 billion by 2020; not accidentally his dream is to become the world's top multibillionaire.

He's also fond of repeating the mantra that "we are today the United States of the 1950s". So foreign investment is more than welcome; "Come! It's the time to make your bets on a country with 200 million consumers and the perfect demographics for the next 10 years. This oil story is a 30-year growth story." And what's good for him is good for Brazil. Inevitably, Batista also predicted that Brazil should become the "fifth power" by 2015-2020, behind Germany, Japan, China and the US.

No wonder American economists are raving. Last week, at a seminar on global governance in Brasilia, American economist James Galbraith stressed, "Social inequality in Brazil is being reduced in the last few years because the country spends less money to help the financial sector and more money to help Brazil." And he took no time to once again smash neo-liberal dogma; "There can be sustainable social and economic growth side-by-side with a functional democratic process."

Brazil entertains high hopes of entering Standard Chartered's recently coined "7% club" - that is, countries with annual GDP growth of 7% or more for an extended period. Based on the 10 years up to 2008, club members are China (9.7% average), followed by India, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Uganda and Mozambique. Several countries are not far behind the BRICs and could hit the top four before 2030. In this case, Russia might "fall" - or even Brazil. Thus, the future of BRIC may be to become BRICI (with Indonesia), BRICK (with South Korea) or even BASIC (Russia replaced by South Africa, or Afrique du Sud).

University of Missouri's Michael Hudson, who's also recently been to Brazil, insists the main task of the BRICs is to build an alternative for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. And Brazil must create "its own development strategy" - which, as we have seen, is still non-existent. Hudson ominously predicts that Washington will do everything in its power to oppose this independence - referring to what happened to Iran in the 1950s when it wanted to control its own oil, and to Afghanistan when a secular government took over in the late 1970s.

A new social contract?
Amid so much ballyhoo, it's always healthy to find dissenting voices. Marxist historian Paulo Alves de Lima stresses how Brazil is now living the construction of a new national mythology:

It's the formulation of a project for the monopolistic capitalism created by the military dictatorship. A new ideology for the future has been born; universalization of the middle class, the end of poverty with the exploitation of pre-salt reserves, stable democracy, strength of the industrial-military complex ... They are promising paradise while Obama must declare to the world that American poverty is increasing. Top universities are embracing the myth and the concept of 'superior society' - neither capitalist nor socialist, and even less defined as subordinate capitalism. Our future is to march to this new paradise.

Undoubtedly, shades of FDR are everywhere. Mainstream media are obsessed with the notion that Brazil is now a middle-class society. It's true that tens of millions now can afford their own house. Their self-esteem has ballooned; and most people live "an admittedly decent material life". But wait a minute; that's American economist Paul Krugman describing the US in the 1950s and 1960s. Is there at least a psychological parallel - like in an overwhelming feeling of optimism, the "future is in your hands" style?

These new individualistic Brazilians indeed resemble the Americans of the 1950s and 1960s. Essentially, their priorities are family, stability and professional success, no matter their social class and the region from which they come. With poverty in Brazil falling 41% from 2003 to 2008, technically almost half of the Brazilian population is now "new middle class". But this is not the traditional American middle class. Families with a maximum per capita income of $2,500 monthly, qualified as the "C" class, make up 40% of Brazil's overall income. The "B" and "C" classes, together, make up for almost 70%. For a country always defined by inequality (third place in the world until recently, only behind Bolivia and Haiti, according to the United Nations Development Program, and now 11th), that's a lot.

In developing countries, the so-called "global middle class" groups around 400 million people; and 2 billion others may join them before 2030. Social mobility in Brazil is only beginning. But millions do indeed feel that Brazil today feels like the US in the 1960s in terms of jobs on offer, rising income, and unlimited opportunities. Yet essentially this is still a very poor middle class - reflecting the extreme inequality that still prevails.

Dilma anyway inherits a unique historical conjuncture generated by Lula; for the first time inequality, injustice and social exclusion in Brazil actually decreased. It's imperative to know in relation to what; that happened in relation to the overwhelming inequality of the model privileged by two decades of military dictatorship. Leftist sociologist Emir Sader insists the process is only beginning, and still has to break the monopolies of financial capital, powerful landowners and the power of monopolistic media.
He could be referring to a struggle now going on all over South America. With a fearful Europe increasingly turning to the right and extreme-right and a dejected New Great Depression US at the mercy of wacko populists of the Tea Party variety, it is South America - and parts of Asia and Africa - that now seem to be on the right side of history. The American television series Mad Men celebrates the (now dying) American dream. Maybe now the time has come for the Mad Men from the tropics.

RUSSIA is part and parcel of the Axis of Evils CIA-MOSSAD

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-true-causes-underlying-moscow-metro-bombings

Vladimir Putin...

http://www.dailyindia.com/show/405032.php

http://www.erichufschmid.net/TFC/Harold_Rosenthal.html

http://www.countercurrents.org/chamberlin031010.htm

IS RUSSIA controlled by the JEWS.....?

On 6 September 2010, Russia and Israel signed an agreement on military cooperation.

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/12/12/wikileaks-conjures-litvinenkos-ghost/

When we were in Greek Cyprus we noted the presence of a number of Russian millionaires with the most expensive cars you can imagine.

When we were in Italy we also sighted millionaire Russians.

Is Russia a Mafia state and is it close friends with Israel?

It is not just the UK security services which have strong links to Israel (THE CLASSIC SEX SCANDAL), it is also the Russian security services.

The KGB and Mossad used to share their secrets.

Marc Rich is Jewish.

According to Newsmax (Marc Rich Helped KGB Create Hidden Government,), 31 March 2001:

"Marc Rich, the most-wanted fugitive pardoned by former President Clinton, was a key figure in the Communist Party and the KGB's creation of an underground government that survived the break-up of the Soviet Union and still rules Russia today behind the scenes."

Medvedev has Jewish origins?

What are we to make of Russian prime minister Putin and Russian president Medvedev?

Medvedev's "maternal grandfather's first name was Veniamin - similar to the Hebrew Binyamin (Benjamin) - while his family name, Shaposhnikov, is sometimes a Jewish name." (Rumors that Putin's successor is Jewish.)

"Medvedev will be wonderful for the Jews," just as Putin was, declared Israeli-Russian businessman Lev Leviev, who heads the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia. (Rumors that Putin's successor is Jewish.)

Reportedly, Stalin was Jewish and had Jewish mistresses. Reportedly, his top spy was Victor Rothschild.

In November 2009, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev told a visiting delegation from the European Jewish Congress that the Iranian threat is very real, as are the threats posed by North Korea and Pakistan, and should be treated seriously. (Medvedev to European Jewish Congress: Iran threat very real ...)

According to a western diplomat: "Russia's main problem ... is that an unholy nexus of politics, big business and organised crime still dominates the ruling class." (Putin legacy - Telegraph )

Mogilevich is Jewish

Reportedly, Putin Dared To Call The Bluff Of The Global Jewish Mafia.

In 2008, "according to Russian media reports, Mogilevich, a Ukrainian business tycoon and Mafia godfather, was arrested in a Moscow shopping center. (Die Welt, 26 Jan 2008, p. 11.)...

"Semion Mogilevich, mass murderer and global swindler, has officially been on the 'wanted' list for decades, but he enjoyed the protection of the most powerful government ministries in the world.

"This was especially true where the BND: Federal German Intelligence Agency was concerned...

"According to the ZDF German Television magazine 'Kennzeichnen D' (1 Sep 1999), Semion Mogilevich, the presumed godfather of the largest Russian crime syndicate, who has been named who in connection with billions swindled by the Yeltsin Clan, enjoys protection at the highest levels in all Europe.."

Mogilevich was arrested in Moscow on January 24, 2008, for suspected tax evasion.[25] [26]

He was released on July 24, 2009.

The Russian interior ministry stated that the charges against him "are not of a particularly grave nature."[27][28]

Beria was Jewish. "Beria was noted for having his bodyguards kidnap young schoolgirls so that he could rape them in his Lubyanka office, which doubled as a torture chamber."

General Leonid Ivashov is a former joint chief of staff of the Russian army.

On 28 September 2010, at voltairenet.org/en, Ivashov suggests that Medvedev has opted for the US-Israeli camp.

("In the Interests of Israel": Why Russia will not sell the S-300 Air Defense System to Iran)

According to Ivashov:

1. On September 22 2010, it was announced that Russia will not sell the S-300 air defense system to Iran.

2. This defence system is a purely defensive system.

3. The refusal to supply the S-300 complexes to Iran clearly hurts Russia's political and economic interests.

4. Tehran proposed a number of times to turn the Middle East into a nuclear-free zone.

5. Igor Yurgens, chief of a well-connected Russian thinktank, spoke on 28 July 2010 about the possibility of integrating Russia into NATO.

He reported that in the nearest future Russia would ­be importing at least 30% of the weapons and equipment for its army from Israel and NATO countries.

6. General V. Dvorkin paid a visit to Israel a short time ago. He urged US senators to OK launching an attack against Iran.

7. On 6 September 2010, the defense ministers of Russia and Israel A. Serdyukov and Ehud Barak signed a first-ever agreement on military cooperation between the two countries.

This includes sharing intelligence and could mean that Russia spies on Turkey and passes information onto Israel.

8. Russia seems to be turning a blind eye to Israel's role in the attack on its troops in South Ossetia.

Israel assisted in organizing and launching the August 2008 unprovoked Georgian aggression against South Ossetia and the deadly raid against the Russian peacekeepers deployed in the republic.

9. Russia has a problem with its Moslem population in the Caucasus. (This is being stirred up by the CIA and Mossad - )

10. There is a fear that Russia will join the "military escapades of the Anglo-Saxons and of the Israeli Zionist leadership in the name of the shadowy financial oligarchy’s global dominance."

Yuri Andropov, former leader of the USSR, was Jewish.

Winston Churchill wrote that: "in the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is astonishing.

"And the prominent, if not indeed, the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses...

"The fact that in many cases Jewish interests and Jewish places of worship are excepted by the Bolsheviks from their universal hostility has tended more and more to associate the Jewish race in Russia with villainies which are now being perpetrated..."

Researcher Wayne McGuire of Harvard University writes: "50% of the communist terrorist vanguard in the south and west of Russia was comprised of Jews." (http://www.russians.org/communist.html)

The Siberian novelist Valentin Rasputin wrote in 1990: "I think today the Jews here in Russia should feel responsible for the sin of having carried out the revolution and for the shape it took.

"They should feel responsible for the terror - for the terror that existed during the revolution and especially after the revolution ... their guilt is great.

"They perpetrated the relentless campaign against the peasant class whose land was brutally expropriated by the state and who themselves were ruthlessly murdered."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's biographer wrote: "By the age of ten he had the cross ripped from his neck by jeering Pioneers and for over a year was held up to ridicule...

"Solzhenitsyn was, as a boy, exposed to students whose parents had an officially superior status.

"Most of the members of the Young Pioneers and Komsomol movements, at least in Rostov, were Jewish children..." (Michael Scammell, Solzhenitsyn: A Biography, p. 64).

According to the RNS wire service (reprinted in "The Christian News," Jan. 8, 1996, p. 2), "Some 200,000 (Christian) clergy, many crucified, scalped and otherwise tortured, were killed during the approximately 60 years of communist rule in the former Soviet Union, a Russian commission reported Monday (Nov. 27, 1995)...

"40,000 churches (were) destroyed in the period from 1922 to 1980..."

Russia's concentration camps and slave labor system were "staffed in its upper echelons by Jewish Communists."

Sixteen million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from Silesia, Moravia and the Volga at the end of the Second World War. Two million perished. 800,000 mostly Muslim Chechens were deported to Kazakhstan; a quarter of a million died enroute. 12% of the Baltic population was either deported to Siberia or executed. http://www.russians.org/communist.html

In the Bolshevik era, 52 percent of the membership of the Soviet communist party was Jewish, though Jews comprised only 1.8 percent of the total population (Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin, p. 81)

Source: http://www.russians.org/communist.html

Reportedly, Tito was the only non-Jewish dictator behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1940s. However, the Yugoslavian communist party sent massive arms shipments to Jewish fighters in Palestine in the 1940s.

The following is a list of some top Jewish Communists:

V.I. Lenin, Trotsky, Grigory Apfelbaum (Zinoviev): executive, Soviet Secret Police.

Solomon Lozovsky: deputy Soviet foreign minister. Litvinov: Soviet foreign minister. Yuri Andropov: director, Soviet KGB, later supreme dictator of the Soviet Union.

Jacob Sverdlov: first president of the Soviet Union.

Jacob Yurovsky: commander, Soviet Secret Police.

Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich: chief mass murderer for Stalin, ordered the deaths of millions and the wholesale destruction of Christian monuments and churches, including the great Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

Mikhail Kaganovich: deputy commissar of heavy industry, supervisor of slave labor, brother of Lazar.

Rosa Kaganovich: Stalin's mistress; sister of Lazar.

Paulina Zhemchuzina: member of the Central Committee and wife of Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov.

Olga Bronstein: officer, Soviet Cheka Secret Police, sister of Trotsky, wife of Kamenev.

Lavrenti Beria: in 1938 he was put in charge of the dreaded NKVD. Beria was responsible for the infamous Katyn massacre of captive Polish soldiers and intellectuals. Beria was also in charge of the Gulag prison system that sent millions to oblivion. Beria was noted for having his bodyguards kidnap young schoolgirls so that he could rape them in his Lubyanka office, which doubled as a torture chamber.

Matvei Berman and Naftaly Frenkel: founders, the Gulag death camp system.

Lev Inzhir, commissar for Soviet death camp transit and administration.

Boris Berman: executive officer of the Soviet Secret Police and brother of Matvei.

K.V. Pauker: chief of operations, Soviet NKVD Secret Police.

Firin, Rappoport, Kogan, Zhuk: commissars of death camps and slave labor, supervised the mass deaths of laborers during the construction of the White Sea - Baltic Canal.

Genrikh Yagoda: chief of Soviet Secret Police, mass murderer extraordinaire.

M.I. Gay: commander, Soviet Secret Police.

Slutsky and Shpiegelglas: commanders, Soviet Secret Police.

Isaac Babel: officer, Soviet Secret Police.

Leiba Lazarevich Feldbin (Aleksandr Orlov): commander, Soviet Red Army; officer, Soviet Secret Police.

Yona Yakir: general, Soviet Red Army, member of the Central Committee.

Dimitri Shmidt: general, Soviet Red Army.

Yakov ("Yankel") Kreiser: general, Soviet Red Army. Miron Vovsi: general, Soviet Red Army.David Dragonsky: general, Soviet Red Army, Hero of the Soviet Union. Grigori Shtern: general, Soviet Red Army. Mikhail Chazkelevich: general, Soviet Red Army. Shimon Kirvoshein: general, Soviet Red Army. Arseni Raskin: deputy-commander, Soviet Red Army. Haim Fomin, commander of Brest-Litovsk, Soviet Red Army. At least one hundred Soviet generals were Jewish (cf. Canadian Jewish News, April 19, 1989).

Generals who were not themselves Jewish often had Jewish wives. Among these were Marshal Voroshilov, Marshal Bulganin, Marshal Peresypkin and General Pavel Sudoplatov (Sudoplatov assassinated hundreds of Christian leaders including Ukranian Catholic Archbishop Teodor Romzha). This Jewish wife "insurance policy" extended to Politburo members such as Andrei Andreyev and Leonid Brezhnev.

Sergei Eisenstein: director of communist propaganda films which depicted Christian peasants (kulaks) as hideous, money-grabbing parasites. The kulaks were subsequently massacred.

KOMZET: commission for the settlement of Jewish Communists on land seized from murdered Christians in Ukraine; funded by Jewish-American financier Julius Rosenwald.

Ilya Ehrenburg, Minister of Soviet Propaganda and disseminator of anti-German hate material dating from the 1930s. Ehrenburg instigated the Soviet Red Army rape and murder of German civilians. Referring to German women, Ehrenburg gloated to the advancing Red Army troops, "that blonde hag is in for a bad time." In a leaflet addressed to Soviet troops, Ehrenburg wrote: "...the Germans are not human beings...nothing gives us so much joy as German corpses." (Anatol Goldberg, Ilya Ehrenburg, p. 197). Goldberg concedes that Ehrenburg, "...had always disliked the Germans...now that there was a war on he turned his old prejudice into an asset." (Ibid., p. 193).

Nikolai Bukharin: Lenin's chief theorist. Samuel Agursky: commissar. Karl Radek: member, Central Committee. Mikhail Gruzenberg (Borodin) commissar. A.A. Yoffe: commissar. David Ryazanov: advisor to Lenin. Lev Grigorievich Levin: physician, poisoner of Stalin's enemies. Lev Rosenfeld (Kamenev): member of the Central Committee.
Ivan Maisky: Soviet Ambassador to Britain. Itzik Solomonovich Feffer: commissar, Soviet Secret Police. Abraham Sutskever: Soviet terrorist-partisan. Mark Osipovich Reizen: Soviet propagandist, winner of three Stalin Prizes. Lev Leopold Trepper: Soviet espionage officer.
Bela Kun (Kohen): supreme dictator of Hungary in 1919. Kun was later Stalin's chief terrorist in the Crimea. Kun's eventual successor was Matyas Rakosi, Jewish Communist mass murderer of Christians in Hungary. According to the Jewish Telegraph Agency of May 14, 1997, Jews "...played key roles in ushering Communist rule into Hungary. In fact, during the brutal oppression of the early 1950s, the regime's top five leaders were Jews. "

Zakharovich Mekhlis: top executioner for Stalin. Henrykas Zimanas: leader of Lithuanian communist terrorists, butcher of Christians.

Moshe Pijade (sometimes spelled Piade): commander, Yugoslav Communist People's Army. Tito's top butcher of hundreds of thousands of Croatian Christians. Pijade later served as president of the Yugoslav Communist Parliament. At least eighteen generals in the Yugoslav Communist People's Army were Jewish. The Yugoslavian communist party sent massive arms shipments to Jewish fighters in Palestine in the 1940s.

In post-war Poland that nation was completely dominated by Jewish communists: the torturer Jacek Rozanski, head of the Secret Police; the Politboro commander Jacob Berman
and commissars Minc, Specht (Olszewski) and Spychalski. These men murdered or deported to Kolyma and the other Arctic death camps, tens of thousands of Catholic Poles.

According to Jewish researcher John Sack, "In 1945 many Poles felt (and not without reason) that Jews ran the Office of State Security...the chief of the Office was Jacob Berman, a Jew, and all or almost all the department heads were Jews." Sack reports that 75% of the officers of the Communist Secret Police in Silesia were Jews. He noted that many Jews in the Communist terror apparatus in Poland changed their names to Polish ones like General Romkowski, Colonel Rozanski, Capt. Studencki and Lt. Jurkowski.

In Poland, "...a disproportionate number of Communists were Jews. In 1930, at its peak, 35% of the members of the party were Jewish. In Communist youth organizations, Jewish membership was even higher, while Communists of Jewish origin occupied most of the seats on the central committee. Communism appealed to some Jews because it opposed anti-Semitism more vigorously than any other Polish party...Jewish Communists reached their apogee in the years immediately after World War Two, when the party leadership was totally in the hands of the prewar Communist leadership that abhorred anti-Semitism." (Sheldon Kirshner, The Canadian Jewish News, Nov. 5, 1992, p. 16).

Solomon Morel : commandant of a post-war Communist concentration camp for Germans in Poland. Stalin deliberately put Jews in charge of such camps. Morel tortured and murdered thousands of Germans, sometimes with his bare hands (cf. "The Wrath of Solomon," Village Voice, March 30, 1993 and John Sack, An Eye for an Eye). Morel is comfortably esconsed in Tel Aviv.

Lev Davidovich Landau: Stalinist physicist, co-father of the Soviet atomic bomb. Klaus Fuchs: helped steal atomic bomb secrets for Stalin. Ruth Werner: colonel, Red Army GRU intelligence, assisted Fuchs. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: stole American atomic bomb secrets for Stalin. Morris Cohen (Peter Kroger): assisted the Rosenbergs. Markus Wolf: chief of German Communist Stasi Secret Police.

Nahum Goldmann: founder, World Jewish Congress, communist propagandist. Rabbi Moses Rosen: agent, Romanian communist party. Victor Rothschild: allegedly top British espionage agent for Stalin.

Mark Zborowski: "...considered by historians of Soviet terror operations to have been the most fearsome...(Soviet) spy of all time" (Stephen Schwartz, Forward, Jan. 26, 1996). Zborowski, a medical researcher, murdered a dissident with a poisoned orange at the Soviet-run hospital in Paris. Zborowski was implicated in several other assassinations in 1936 and 1937. In the 1940s worked for both the American Jewish Committee and the KGB. In the 1960s Zborowski worked as a medical researcher at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. He trained numerous psychiatrists and medical specialists in the Bay Area. He died in 1990 (cf. "The Strange Case of Doctor Zborowski and Monsieur Etienne" by Philippe Videlier, in Le Monde Diplomatique, Dec. 1992).

http://www.russians.org/communist.html

As for Putin and Russia etc. I've been saying for a while now that I'd view the delivery of those S-300's to Iran as an acid test of whether Putin was bullshit or not. Frankly, the fact that they always seemed to exist as future potentialities had me wondering. Whenever anyone mentioned them my attitude was 'I'll believe it when I see it'. And blow me down, it's been announced that the whole thing is off and the missiles ain't coming after all.....

Yeah well, surprise surprise. And Putin fails the acid test.....

How Israel sold US Intelligence secrets for years to the SOVIETS and beyond....

Our friend Richard SALE , author of Clinton’s Secret Wars...

The recurring pressure from Israel to repatriate convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is clearly an expression of common sense if Israel wants to recruit any other agents in place. The KGB was always conscientious in extracting its snared spies by one means or another.
If anything smacks of impudence it’s the current Israeli pressure when contrasted with the stormy ocean of pious Israeli government denials when the case first broke.
My own view is that Pollard should never be released.
I was the reporter who broke the story of how the Israeli government was selling the pilfered Pollard material to the Eastern Bloc in return for increased emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union.
I don’t recall the exact date of my story but I believe it was 1987. My sources were senior U.S. serving counterintelligence (CI3) officials. According to them, the Israel-Soviet deal on emigration was made on Cyprus in 1981 and was the brilliantly cunning idea of top Israeli defense official Ariel Sharon. (CI3 officials also told me at that time that Mossad was “full of Soviet moles.”)
The recruitment of Pollard was not an aberration – he became an operative of Israel as early as 1981 when he was working for the U.S. Navy’s Field Operations Intelligence Office. Israel was targeting certain oil fields in southern Russia and Pollard’s task was to gather information on the targeting.
In any case, although Sharon appears to be the initial villain, high level Israeli officials including Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir and others knew of Pollard’s existence. Shamir, for example, was very active in peddling the Pollard data to the Soviets.
At the time of his arrest, the Justice Department alleged that Pollard had provided Israel with 1,800 documents or 100,000 pages. The damage Pollard inflicted on U.S. security was enormous. Senior DOD officials told me that Pollard stole from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility
(FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, the daily report, a top-secret document filed every morning at 0800 Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time) that contained NSA data on events in the Middle East and North Africa during the previous 24 hours. NSA and Navy Intelligence shared the site.
The U.S. Navy’s obsessive focus was on Soviet ballistic missile submarines cruising the Mediterranean whose weapons were aimed at the United States; ships which had to be quickly destroyed in the event of war.
Pollard gave the Israelis the Rota reports for a year, also providing them with the National SIGINT Requirements List, a day-to-day compendium, listed by priority, of NSA collection units around the world that would have included things such as alerts to U.S. bases in a region before an insertion by U.S. Special Forces or a forthcoming bombing mission.
Pollard also plundered the Defense Intelligence Agency's Community On-Line Intelligence System, which was one of the government's first computerized information-retrieval-network systems, called DIAL-COINS, that contained all the intelligence reports filed by Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine attaches in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
Pollard also stole a huge 10-volume manual called Radio Signals Notations or RAISIN, lauded as the bible of signals intelligence that lists how the United States collects signals around the world. This outlined the sites, frequencies, and significant features of Israeli communication spied on by the United States including the U-2 “Senior Stretch” flights from Cyprus, the RC-135 electronic warfare flights, the joint CIA/NSA listening post in the U.S. Embassy in Israel, along with all the known communications links used by the Soviet Union. All of these were compromised by Pollard.
The Pollard thefts had sinister consequences. U.S. agents in the Eastern Bloc or the Soviet Union were rolled up and America’s ability to collect technical intelligence on Soviet designs was shut down or crippled, leaving us blind.
At the time I broke my stories, I did not know former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, now deceased. However, friends eventually put us together and I talked with him informally over 30 times about what Sy Hersh, myself and others had written about Pollard. Weinberger could not calmly discuss Pollard but hardened into furious rage each time.
Sy Hersh and I became friends over the story. He had a book coming out about Israel and after I talked about the moles in Mossad, he called me at UPI and began by saying, “Thanks for screwing up my book,” chiding me for ruining one of the book’s exclusives. The book had plenty more of them, and Sy remains for me a gigantic figure in journalism for his integrity and toughness.
To conclude, Pollard should sit where he is until we can, with grace, send his body to Israel for burial.
----------------------------------
I was on the JCS damage assessment board for this matter. Richard Sale is altogether correct in his account of how greatly Pollard and the Israelis hurt us..... Ehud Barak was Director of General Staff intelligence during the Pollard operation. While Pollard stabbed the United States in the back, Barak was smiling and smiling in his best "hale fellow well met" manner in dealing with DIA.....

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars....

I was quite taken aback by the various comments that “Pollard's defense claims Weinberger made a statement before his death that The Pollard Affair was a relatively minor matter....”

I talked with Weinberger, who was up at his residence in Maine, over a period of years until just before his death. I won’t quote him, but his reaction to Pollard’s treason was consistently one of implacable outrage. Let me add that anyone who would believe the declaration of a defense attorney about anything appears to be someone who suffers from the disease of mental gullibility. If a defense attorney told me the time I would immediately look at my watch.

Former senior DOD and CIA officials told me that Weinberger gave a secret statement to the court, before Pollard’s sentencing, that detailed the trading of stolen US data to the Soviet Union and the extent of the damage that trading had caused.

The former senior CIA officials told me of the KGB-Sharon deal that took place on Cyprus in 1981 The KGB and the Israelis held regular meetings there. Weinberger never confirmed this, but we spoke on condition that he would correct what was false or mistaken in my writing. He never corrected this. It has to be understood that the trading of the Pollard information had a dual purpose. The first was to get more Jews out of the Soviet Union, but the second was to recruit Jews working for the Soviet Union on sensitive missile and/or nuclear issues.

But what the soviets got in return was severely damaging to US security. The Soviets were ravenous to find out anything about US ballistic missile submarines, to them the most sinister threat, and Pollard gave the Soviets a great deal of data. Soon, like the aftermath of John Walker’s treason, Soviet attack subs began to turn up at critical rendezvous points for US ballistic subs on patrol which then were forced to hastily abort. This clearly impaired US war fighting capability, at least for a time. (As a point of fact, I was the first US reporter to break this story as well.)

However, Pollard’s most damaging gift to the Soviets was that of the US. war plan against the Soviet Union. including firing locations, sequences, and coordinates.

It should also be remembered that Mossad has no station in Moscow, and that 99.9 percent of its information came from what one Mossad agent called, “positive interrogation” – interviewing Jews emigrating from the Soviet Union and analyzing their information. In addition, there is a super-secret division of Mossad, called Al which in Hebrew means “above” or “on top.” Al is so secret that most Mossad employees did not know of its existence, and the few that did had no access to its computerized files. Al operatives use fake U.S. passports and if they are caught in the U.S. they are jailed as spies. They have no diplomatic immunity.

Al operates stations all over the world, but one of Al’s functions was to take data from Jews emigrating from the Soviet Union and repackage it to make it more attractive to the Soviets by inserting things like radar information from the Danes or reports of troop movements in West Germany and other NATO chit chat to provide a fuller, more enticing picture. Al agents most certainly played a part in repackaging the Pollard thefts to make them more attractive to the Russians.

When the Pollard data began to arrive in the Eastern Bloc, US installations that spy on Israel like the NSA listening post near Harrogate in England or the unmanned listening post on Cyprus could detect an immediate damage to efforts to recruit new agents, a reluctance on the part of prospective U.S. agents to join any outfit so thoroughly penetrated by a foreign power. One thinks of LeCarre’s tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy and the agonies of double agents when they hear that another has been uncovered.

Six feet long, six feet wide, and ten feet tall - that is the space the Pollard stolen documents occupies to this day. The story that Pollard stole all this because he was some sort of super Israeli patriot is the rankest horse dung. Weinberger insisted over and over that Pollard had tried to spy for South Africa and that his first love in life was not Israel but money. Weinberger was well aware of Pollard attempting to use the proceeds of his treason to buy expensive jewelry for his wife. He thought Pollard morally disgusting.

To conclude, when I used the phrase “with grace” in regard to returning Pollard’s body to Israel, I thought I was dripping with almost vulgar irony.....

On Russian immigration to Israel.... In addition to a significant change in cultural outlook it is also sure that there are a significant number of Russian agents within the Israeli government and military industries.....

Remember the case of the fake Russian spies including the sexy Anna Champan?

Well, turns out that they were real spies after all, very very real spies indeed. So what was the deal with all the nonsense the FBI fed us about their arrest? The Russian newspaper Kommersant actually found out what really happened in this rather amazing story.

First, all the so-called "evidence" that they guys were spies? It was all nonsense. The FBI had no proof at all. The FBI had something far better and more precious, something they chose to hide as best they could. The FBI had an absolutely unique agent inside the super-secret department of the Russian Intelligence Service which deals with "illegals": the "S" Directorate of the SVR. Kommersant found out the real name, rank and position of this traitor: Colonel Shcherbakov, head of the US Direction of the "S" Directorate of the SVR. In terms of intelligence, this is a nuclear bomb. This means that the person who betrayed these illegals was basically the top man for all illegals in the USA. I would say that a betrayal by a person in such a position is worse than Robert Hanssen, Ana Belen Montes, John Walker and Aldrich Ames combined, not so much in terms of compromised secrets, but in terms of the US being able to penetrate the "Holy of Holies" of the SVR.

Let me immediately add here that there are no details of how Shcherbakov became an US mole. My personal opinion is that, as is the case with the vast majority of high-level spies, he was not recruited but that he was a so-called "walk-in" - a person who deliberately approaches a foreign intelligence service and offers his/her services. Still, even if Shcherbakov was a walk-in, the fact that the FBI could maintain a contact with him for about 10 years is an absolutely monumental failure for the SVR.

To make things even worse, it now appears that the SVR also managed not to notice that Shcherbakov's daughter was studying in the USA and that his other son suddenly left the country right before Medvedev's visit to the USA.

And while everybody was focused on the sexy Anna Chapman, it was another spy, much less noticed, which had a stellar career which was compromised by Shcherbakov's betrayal: "Juan Lazaro", whose real name was Mikhail Anatolevich Vasenkov (see photo), who had spend his entire career undetected. Born in 1945, he was infiltrated into the West sometime in 1961 and he was given the right to retire with the rank of General, but he turned down the offer and continued to collect valuable information (in particular photographic). After his arrest, he was tortured by the FBI who broke several of his ribs and one leg, yet he did not say a single word under interrogation. The mere fact that the FBI could shadow these 11 spies for a decade without ever finding out any proof of their activities is in itself a testimony to their skills.

This is why Shcherbakov's betrayal hurts the SVR so much.

According to Kommersant, this total debacle in the SVR has triggered an enormous rage amongst the SVR cadre and the rest of the government. One SVR official openly told Kommersant that a killer team has been send out to execute Shcherbakov and that "heads and epaulets" will be "torn off". Rumors also abound that the SVR will be re-subordinated to the FSB thereby re-creating a real "KGB-successor" agency. A massive investigation is now under way and many officials will loose their jobs or be investigated for criminal actions.

Now that this story has broken into the open the FBI has no more reasons to feed the public all sorts of lame fairy tales about invisible ink, Anna Chapman calling daddy in Moscow and the rest of the nonsense we were told. Still, we will not be told too much: according to Kommersant, this entire affair is so huge that both sides chose to tone it down to a minimum to avoid tensions between Russia and the USA.

What is certain is that a major crisis is now affecting at least two of the key elements of the Russian state: the Ministry of Defense and the SVR. And its not like the military intelligence service can gloat over the SVR's current misery. They had their own super-traitor, GRU Major-General Dimitry Poliakov (another walk-in) who worked for the FBI from 1960 until his retirement in 1980 (he was finally caught in 1986 and executed in 1988). The GRU, by the way, is also in a crisis due to various pressures to downsize it or even re-subordinate it.

The Russian government is in a mess, and there are no signs at all that Medvedev has any ideas as to how to fix it.....

UPDATE1: President Medvedev has essentially confirmed the information published by Kommersant by stating that: "As far as I am concerned, what was published in Kommersant was not news. I found out about it on the day it happened, with all its attributes, but there has to be an examination of this. Life goes on. The relevant lessons from it will be studied," Medvedev said at a G20 summit press conference. Medvedev refused to comment on the situation within the SVR but said a thorough investigation into the episode had been launched. "We would not want to comment on our further decisions. This is a question for those bodies concerned with this matter"

UPDATE2: According to Argumenty i Fakty, SVR officials denied that they ever had a "traitor Shcherbakov" in their ranks..... Not only that, but the SVR sources AiF spoke to denied literally every single aspect of the story published by Kommersant. They probably were not told that their President thought otherwise.....

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/1112/Kremlin-official-issues-death-threat-in-Russian-spy-scandal.-Is-the-KGB-coming-back

.....

Off course the KGB and today's FSB, SVR, GRU are heavily infiltrated as it was during the 70’s with the Jackson-Vanik amendment that created the modern “Russian” mafia, which is actually predominantly Jewish international organized crime networks that controlled Russia, before and after the fall of the USSR to the present....

Mark Rich Helped KGB Create a Hidden Government....,

http://web.archive.org/web/20010413111907/http://newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2001/3/31/94616

Mass complicity and corruption in regards to assistance of Chechen terrorist groups is also well known.....[ see the Israeli Jihad Connection...]

Russian TV has shown a statement of Foreign Minister Lavrov who declared that Russia opposes any type of military intervention in the Libyan conflict. The Eltsin years are over and I don't think that Russia will back down from this. So no UNSC resolution authorizing any US/NATO military intervention will be passed.

Sadly, it turns out that I was wrong, very wrong.... Yesterday evening the Russian representative at the UNSC, Vitalii Churkin made some excellent comments about the proposed resolution only to then proceed to abstain thereby letting the resolution pass!

It is absolutely mind boggling that Russia would revert to exactly the kind of spineless surrenders which used to characterize its foreign policy in the Eltsin years. Does the Kremlin really want another Bosnia only this time in the Maghreb?

The first worrying sign was Russia's betrayal of Iran at the UNSC followed by a reneging on the commitment to deliver S-300 air defense systems to Iran. The betrayal of Libya is arguably even worse, both in moral terms and in the severity of the consequences resulting from it:

a) The US and NATO have now a de-facto free reign to do whatever the hell they want not only over Libya, but also in Libya. The UNSC resolution speaks of "all necessary measures" to protect civilians. We know what that means - anything the Pentagon wants it to mean.

b) Given that the US and NATO have now an open-ended and unrestricted authority to do whatever they want, it is clear that whatever regime replaces Gaddafi will be vetted and approved by the USraelian Empire.

c) Just as in Bosnia, the Empire is now supporting the party which is loosing the conflict. No, not out of a deep sense of compassion, but because it is easy to make this party into a proxy for the Empire. In other words, what this resolution does is make the anti-Gaddafi forces fully dependent on the Empire.

d) This resolution will make very little difference on the ground, at least in its no-fly zone aspect. If the Empire is serious about regime change in Libya - and it is - it will have to wave the "all necessary measures" part to intervene militarily. Russia will then condemn and complain.

It is hard to imagine a more hypocritical stance than Russia's. It would have been more honest to openly support the resolution. Needless to say, Russia's credibility as an ally will suffer even further from this cowardly abstention.

You might ask 'well, what about China?" To this I will answer that at least China does not lecture the US Empire like Russia does, neither does China pretend to be in any way an 'alternative global power'. China's stance has always been the same: oppose intervention on principle, keep a low profile on international issues, and deal with economic issues. That is, I think, far more honest and dignified than Russia's disgraceful grandstanding.

The resolution itself is phenomenally hypocritical. The Kaddafi regime is blamed for using military force against its own people while Bahrain has been invaded by a an international gang of Wahabi stormtroopers who immediately proceeded to engage in an orgy of atrocities against the Bahraini people. But, of course, Bahrain is an Imperial colony so a bloodbath there does not matter to the UN. I won't even mention the slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people by the "Jewish state of Israel". Only Libyan victims matter to the UNSC.

What is particularly appalling is that in the bad old days, the USSR and Libya had very close ties. Yes, the Soviet regime was in many ways loathsome, and so was Kaddafi's Jamahiriya - but in spite of that many Russians and Libyans forged close ties and real friendships. Now that the Soviet regime is gone and Kaddafi is on his way out, I would have hoped that Russia would do the right thing and care for the Libyan people. Instead - Russia simply handed them over the Empire....instead of fully helping/arming the rebels....

To say that I am utterly disgusted would be an understatement.

UPDATE: According to RT, "Russia warns of "full-scale military action" following Security Council vote on Libya". Oh yeah?! Then why the hell did you not veto this resolution Mr. Churkin?! How utterly disgusting....

Why the US doesn't talk to Iran...

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6394.shtml

Why the US doesn't talk to Iran...

A look at Jewish Control....

GORDON DUFF: “RULE OF LIE,” AMERICA’S “WINGNUT” PRESS

Here's a video on Christian zionism that make up just a small part of this explosive article.

Christian Zionism: The Tragedy & The Turning, Part 1

http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2010/09/international-flaw-with-new-iran.html

By Ismael Hossein-zadeh and Karla Hansen

The unrelenting diplomatic and geopolitical standoff between Iran and the United States is often blamed on the Iranian government for its "confrontational" foreign policies, or its "unwillingness" to enter into dialogue with the United States. Little known, however, is that during the past decade or so, Iran has offered a number of times to negotiate with the US without ever getting a positive response. http://www.jcpa.org/text/iranian_behavior.pdf

The best-known effort at dialogue, which came to be known as Iran's "grand bargain" proposal, was made in May 2003. The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-US understanding, covering all issues of mutual concern, was transmitted to the US State Department through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran. Not only
did the State Department not respond to Iran's negotiating offer, but, as reporter Gareth Porter pointed out, it "rebuked the Swiss ambassador for having passed on the offer".

Since then, Iran has made a number of other efforts at negotiation, the latest of which was made by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad ahead of last week's trip to the United States to attend the annual meeting of the United Nations
General Assembly. Regrettably, once again the US ignored Ahmadinejad's overture of meeting with President Barack Obama during his UN visit.

The question is why? Why have successive US administrations been reluctant to enter into a conflict-resolution dialogue with Iran, which could clearly be in the national interests of the United States?

The answer, in a nutshell, is that US foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is driven not so much by broad national interests as they are by narrow but powerful special interests - interests that seem to prefer war and militarism to peace and international understanding. These are the nefarious interests that are vested in military industries and related "security" businesses, notoriously known as the military-industrial complex. These beneficiaries of war dividends would not be able to justify their lion's share of our tax dollars without "external enemies" or "threats to our national interests."

Taking a large share of the national treasury was not a difficult act to perform during the Cold War era because the pretext for continued increases in military spending - the "communist threat" - seemed to lie conveniently at hand. Justification of increased military spending in the post-Cold War period, however, has prompted the military-security interests to be more creative in inventing (or manufacturing, if necessary) "new sources of danger to US interests".

When the collapse of the Soviet system and the subsequent discussions of "peace dividends" in the United States threatened the interests of the military-industrial conglomerates, their representatives invented "new threats to US interests" and successfully substituted them for the "threat of communism" of the Cold War. These "new, post-Cold War sources of threat" are said to stem from the so-called "rogue states", "global terrorism" and "Islamic fundamentalism." Demonization of Iran and/or Ahmadinejad can be better understood in this context.

Now, it may be argued that if beneficiaries of war-dividends need external enemies to justify their unfair share of national treasury, why Iran? Why of all places is Iran targeted as such an enemy? Isn't there something wrong with the Iranian government and/or Ahmadinejad's policies in challenging the world's superpower knowing that this would be a case of David challenging Goliath, that it would cause diplomatic pressure, military threats and economic sanctions on Iran?

These are the kind of questions that the "Greens" and other critics of Ahmadinejad's government ask, rhetorical questions that tend to blame Iran for the economic sanctions and military threats against that country - in effect, blaming the victim for the crimes of the perpetrator. Labeling Ahmadinejad's policies as "rash", "adventurous" and "confrontational," Mir Hossein Mousavi and other leaders of the "Greens" frequently blame those polices for external military and economic pressures on Iran.

Accordingly, they seek "understanding" and "accommodation" with the US and its allies, presumably including Israel, to achieve political and economic stability. While, prima facie, this sounds like a reasonable argument, it suffers from a number of shortcomings.

To begin with, it is a disingenuous and obfuscationist argument. Military threats and economic sanctions against Iran did not start with Ahmadinejad's presidency; they have been imposed on Iran for more than 30 years, essentially as punishment for its 1979 revolution that ended the imperial US influence over its economic, political and military affairs. It is true that the sanctions have been steadily escalated, significantly intensified in recent months. But that is not because Ahmadinejad occasionally lashes out at imperialist/Zionist policies in the region; it is rather because Iran has refused to give in to the imperialistic dictates of the US and its allies.

Second, it is naive to think that US imperialism would be swayed by gentle or polite language to lift economic sanctions or remove military threats against Iran. During his two terms in office (eight years), former president Mohammad Khatami frequently spoke of a "dialogue of civilizations", counterposing it to the US neo-conservatives' "clash of civilizations". This was effectively begging the Unites States for dialogue and diplomatic rapprochement, but the pleas fell on deaf ears. Why?

Because US policy toward Iran (or any other country, for that matter) is based on an imperialistic agenda that consists of a series of demands or expectations, not on diplomatic decorum, or the type of language its leaders use. These include Iran's giving up its lawful and legitimate right to civilian nuclear technology, opening up its public domain and/or state-owned industries to debt-leveraging and privatization schemes of the predatory finance capital of the West, as well as its compliance with US-Israeli geopolitical designs in the Middle East.

It is not unreasonable to argue that once Iran allowed US input, or meddling, into such issues of national sovereignty, it would find itself on a slippery slope, the bottom of which would be giving up its independence. The US would not be satisfied until Iran became another "ally" in the Middle East, more or less like Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the like.

It is ironic that Green leaders such as Mousavi, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Khatami blame Ahmadinejad for the hostile imperialist policies toward Iran. For, as mentioned above, US imperialism showed its most venomous hostility toward Iran during the presidency of Khatami while he was vigorously pursuing a path of friendship with the US.

While Khatami was promoting his "dialogue of civilizations" and taking conciliatory steps to befriend the US, including cooperation in the overthrow of the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan, the US labeled Iran as a member of the "axis of evil", along with Iraq and North Korea. This demonization was then used as a propaganda tool to intensify economic sanctions and justify calls for "regime change" in Iran.

In the face of Khatami's conciliatory gestures toward the US, many Iranians were so outraged by its unfair and provocative attitude toward Iran that they began to question the wisdom of Khatami's policy of trying to appease the US. It is now widely believed that the frustration of many Iranians with Khatami's (one-sided) policy of dialogue with the US played a major role in the defeat of his reformist allies in both the 2003 parliamentary elections and the 2005 presidential election.

By the same token, it also played a major role in the rise of Ahmadinejad to Iran's presidency, as he forcefully criticized the reformists' attitude toward US imperialism as naive, arguing that negotiation with the US must be based on mutual respect, not at the expense of Iran's sovereignty. (See Iran's Greens deserted Asia Times Online, June 16, 2010.)

In its drive to provoke, destabilize and (ultimately) change the Iranian government to its liking, the US finds a steadfast ally in Israel. There is an unspoken, de facto alliance between the US military-industrial complex and militant Zionist forces - an alliance that might be called the military-industrial-security-Zionist alliance.

More than anything else, the alliance is based on a convergence of interests on militarism and war in the Middle East, especially against Iran; as Iran is the only country in the region that systematically and unflinchingly exposes both the imperialist schemes of Western powers and expansionist designs of radical Zionism.

Just as the powerful beneficiaries of war dividends view international peace and stability as inimical to their business interests, so too the hardline Zionist proponents of "greater Israel" perceive peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors as perilous to their goal of gaining control over the "Promised Land".

The reason for this fear of peace is that, according to a number of United Nations resolutions, peace would mean Israel's return to its pre-1967 borders, that is, withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But because proponents of "greater Israel" are unwilling to withdraw from these territories, they are fearful of peace and genuine dialogue with their Arab neighbors - hence, their continued disregard for UN resolutions and their systematic efforts at sabotaging peace negotiations.

So, the answer to the question "why is Iran targeted?" boils down to this: because Iran has broken the mold, so to speak, of a pattern of imperialist domination in the Middle East (and beyond). Iran's only "sin" (from the viewpoint of imperialist powers) is that it tries to be an independent, sovereign nation. All other alleged "offenses", such as pursuit of nuclear weapons or support for terrorism, have proven by now to be harebrained excuses that are designed to punish Iran for trying to exercise its national rights as a sovereign country.

Under the influence of hawkish neo-conservative pressure groups (representing the interests of the military-industrial-Zionist forces) the US has cornered itself into a position in which it is afraid of talking to Iran because if it does, all of its long-standing accusations against that country would be automatically exposed.

It is worth noting that while the powerful special interests that are vested in the military-security capital benefit from (and therefore tend to advocate) war and military adventures in the Middle East, the broader, but less-cohesive, interests that are vested in civilian, or non-military, capital tend to incur losses in global markets as a result of such military adventures.

Militaristic American foreign policy is viewed by international consumers as a significant negative. Representatives of the broad-based civilian industries are aware of the negative economic consequences of the militarization of US foreign policy. And that's why leading non-military business/trade associations such as The National Foreign Trade Council and USA*Engage (a coalition of nearly 800 small and large businesses, agriculture groups and trade associations working to seek alternatives to the proliferation of aggressive US foreign policy actions) have expressed disappointment at the recently expanded US sanctions against Iran on the grounds that such sanctions would significantly undermine US national interests.

Yet US foreign policy decisions, especially in the Middle East, seem to be driven not so much by broad national interests as they are by narrow (but powerful) special interests, not so much by "peace dividends" as they are by "war dividends". These powerful special interests, represented largely by the military-security and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee forces, tend to perceive international peace and stability, especially in the Middle East, as detrimental to their interests.