Atlas Monitor | 20 July 2015
Americans who criticize and label Putin as an authoritarian dictator driving Russia to ruin need not look as far afield as Russia for such a spectacle. They can find their own in the White House.
In terms of dictatorial tendencies the last 20 US presidents have issued on average 44 executive decrees per year [1]. That is one every eight days; practically once a week. More recently President Obama has started issuing “Presidential Policy Directives” (PPD) a euphemism for government by fiat. In the last 17 months Obama has issued 30 such PPD; 19 of them secret [2].
President Obama has gone after more whistle blowers under the anachronistic Espionage Act of 1917 than all previous presidents before him [3]. The former head of policy in the US Department of Treasury, Paul Craig Roberts, notes the US currently exhibits all the characteristics of a police state [4]. The mass surveillance grid that has evolved over successive US administrations is unprecedented in all of history [5]. However, this police state is not constrained at the domestic level but in fact constitutes what can only be described as a global panopticon [6].
In terms of driving a road to ruin, the value of the American dollar has lost 95% of its value since 1913 [7]. By the end of FY 2015 US government debt is expected to stand at 21.7 trillion [8]. Overall the US is in decline. Its ‘social cohesion sacrificed to greed … engineered by self-interested elites’ [9].
As the Western establishment’s anti-Russian but specifically anti-Putin rhetoric reaches fever pitch, and comparisons to Stalin and even Hitler reveal an egregious ignorance of history, it might be time for a history lesson.
The US owes a debt of gratitude to Russia. It was Russia that extended military support to the US during the American civil war. Tsar Nicholas II dispatched the Russian naval fleets to New York Harbour and San Francisco Bay in 1863 to deter the French and British from intervening on the side of the South [10]. It was the presence of these fleets that helped change the course of American history which led to the eventual abolition of slavery.
And how did the US repay their Russian comrades?
The US started off by funding the Bolshevik Revolution [11]. In perhaps one of the most cynical tactics ever perpetrated; the American Red Cross (ARC), that was deployed to Russia during the 1917 civil war-revolution, was co-opted by Wall St forces. It included more bankers, lawyers and financiers than doctors and nurses. These agents were more interested in negotiating contracts with the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky and later Bolshevik regime rather than taking care of the victims of war and revolution. Chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, William Boyce Thompson, was head of the ARC mission and its principal financier. In reality the ARC was a Wall St syndicate that included JP Morgan, Guaranty Trust, Chase National Bank, National City Bank as well as big tobacco and mining interests [12]. The ARC was ultimately used as a vehicle for political and commercial purposes.
As professor of economics and Hoover Institution research fellow Antony C. Sutton notes
Monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemy of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists … American monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia to the status of a captive technical colony … [it is] the logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century …’ [13]
The Bolshevik revolution is the story of ‘a partnership between international monopoly capitalism and international revolutionary socialism for their mutual benefit’ [14]. One side got their captive political and economic system and the other got their captive market and technical colony. Favourable relations with the Bolshevik regime ensured the export of goods and services including finance and technology (military and civil infrastructure) from the US to the USSR.
Rather than the Russian revolutionaries we’re led to believe, Trotsky and Lenin were in fact on the payroll of the German general staff and shown to be German agents tasked with destabilizing Russia to force it to withdraw from WWI and consequently give Germany a better chance of winning the war. Trotsky was in fact German – real name Bronstein. Canadian, British and American authorities intervened to insure his release from custody in Canada while transiting en route to Russia from New York travelling on an American passport arranged for him by Woodrow Wilson. It was also known that Kerensky was also on the German payroll. German objectives were Russian withdrawal from WWI and control of the Russian post-war market. American interests were in control of the Russian post-war market and hedged their bets by funding both Bolsheviks and anti-Bolshevik forces. American money kicked in once the Russian revolution kicked off [15].
In brief, the issues Americans have with Putin and Russia can be also found in their own house. Successive US administrations have debased the US currency and created unsustainable levels of government debt driving the economy and society to the brink of collapse. Authoritarian dictatorial rule is unique to neither Russia nor Putin and is in fact quite evident in the current Obama regime and previous administrations. The historical record shows that the US owes a debt of gratitude to Russia, yet perfidious Amerika has sought to undermine and take advantage of Russia ever since the revolution.
With friends like this who needs enemies?
Notes
[3] http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1401/02/cg.01.html
[4] http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/01/30/police-state-upon-us-paul-craig-roberts/
[5] Glenn Greenwald, No place to hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. surveillance state, New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2014.
[6] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/05/edward-snowden-one-year-surveillance-debate-begins-future-privacy; http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/opinion/the-price-of-the-panopticon.html?_r=0
[7] http://blogs.wsj.com/wallet/2009/01/28/the-buying-power-of-a-dollar-on-a-downswing/
[8] http://www.usgovernmentdebt.us/
[9] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/19/decline-fall-american-society-unravelled
[10] http://www.c-span.org/video/?315198-1/russias-participation-us-civil-war
[11] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Arlington House: New York, 1974.
[12] Geroge F. Kennan, Russia leaves the war, New York; Atheneum, 1967; John Foster Dulles, American Red Cross, New York: Harper, 1950; Minutes of the War Council of the American National Red Cross, Washington D.C. May 1917; US State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/3644; American Red Cross, Washington D.C. US Department of State, Petrograd embassy, Red Cross File, 1917; US State Dept. Decimal File, 316-11-1265, March 19, 1918; US State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/4168
[13] Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Arlington House: New York, 1974, p. 17.
[14] ibid, p. 19
[15] Michael Furrell, Northern Underground, London: Faber & Faber, 1963; Stefan Possny, Lenin: the compulsive revolutionary, London: Allen & Unwin, 1966; George Karkov, “German foreign office documents on financial support to the Bolsheviks in 1917”, International Affairs, 32(2): 181-189, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1956. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2625787?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
