Wall Street and Washington

Collision course: Juveniles in charge

By Mike Krauss

Bucks County Courier Times

I suppose it still goes on. Adolescent school boys stealing furtive glances in the locker room to see who has the bigger package. Most boys grow out of that sort of thing. Some never do. In the U.S. it seems they go on to Wall Street and Washington to act out their narcissistic fantasies in American banking and foreign policy.

At a truly fantastic cost, Americans have learned the danger of permitting these utterly self-absorbed, swollen vanities to be in charge of our economic well being. Now, in Ukraine, we are getting a lesson in the danger of allowing them to run our foreign policy.

They have the nation on a collision course with Russia. Russia is not Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the European allies we dominate or the Third World nations we bully. Russia is an oil rich, nuclear power.

To understand the danger, let’s start with who “they” are.

They are the so-called “neo-cons” who have dominated American foreign policy since at least the Clinton administration. They believe the United States is so exceptional and favored of fate (if not God, for whom they have slight regard) that it is our right, duty and destiny to dominate the economies, governments and peoples of the world.

They believe that the U.S. may make the rules and admit to no authority that places limits on their actions. They have kept America at war for more than a decade and visited chaos and horrendous loss of life on entire nations. They flout law and morality.

Back to the Ukraine.

Forget the news. It is all propaganda. The administration is not going eyeball to eyeball with Russia to defend freedom and democracy. This confrontation is the orchestrated outcome of the neo-cons’ obsession with power.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, proof positive to the neo-cons of America’s deserved global supremacy, they were spoiling for any opportunity to display their mastery of the world.

Enter Wall Street. While the neo-cons were busy populating 150 nations with by last count almost 1,000 U.S. military bases, Wall Street moved in to preach the joys of modern capitalism.

From the deregulation of the Reagan administration to the all out surrender of Clinton, Wall Street has been on the rise. Fraud became a business model and narcissism a virtue, and the looting of America was underway.

Along with that of the U.K., Ireland, Iceland, Spain, most notably Greece and any place our military could get a choke hold.

The newly independent nations of the former Soviet Union were too good an opportunity to pass up, and leaders were lobbied and bribed to join the U.S. military and banking fronts, NATO and the European Union.

Hungary bought in and its people are now enduring unprecedented hardship. This did not go unnoticed in Ukraine, and when its government tried to offer up the nation to the Wall Street and Washington hustle, the deal was resisted. So the U.S. organized a coup, and now calls its paid agents in that nation the legitimate government.

And the new, “democratic” Ukrainian government immediately cut a deal with the global banksters for an “aide” package.

It’s a loan, an expensive loan, and the terms are the same as they always are with freedom loving Wall Street: austerity, cuts in pensions, drastic reductions in any spending that helps people and a sell-off of public assets at fire sale prices.

Russia has taken sides with that part of the Ukraine that wants no part of the deal and with which it has historic and important ties, flexing some modest (by American standards) military muscle. And the U.S. Secretary of State lectures Russia about not achieving its aims at the end of a gun.

Mr. Secretary, “Can you say Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, torture, secret prisons or execution by drones?”

This is not only embarrassing, it is dangerous.

Congress will not discipline the destructive and self absorbed juveniles on Wall Street and in Washington. The American people had better.