The US has been quite busy this century trying to undo itself as a world power. This was slow going in the beginning—after all, mighty empires don't tend to fail overnight—but after a decade of assiduous effort the pace has started picking up speed. Like most collapses, the fiascos the US has been creating proceed slowly at first, then all at once.
Take the 2008 “war” in former Soviet Georgia. The Pentagon spent years trying to form Georgia into an anti-Russian, US-dominated puppet. Then, during the Olympic games in (Beijing), the US-educated president of Georgia decided to please his masters by initiating artillery bombardment of civilians in a disputed enclave in Georgia inhabited by Russian citizens. In response, the Russians rolled into Georgia, mopped it up, annexed the disputed territory (plus another one) and left. Western media dutifully whitewashed Georgian war crimes and did their best to paint Russia as the aggressor. But his masters were not pleased, and its US-educated president was left to twist in the wind as a political corpse.
A similar fiasco started unfolding in Ukraine in the spring of 2014. You see, the US foreign policy and military establishments are quite compulsive in their unceasing efforts to undermine Russia. The 1%ers who own the US government also have a personal vendetta against Putin. They can't forgive him for what he did to Russia's oligarchs who did so much to undermine Russia under Yeltsin: he de-fanged and de-clawed them, banning them from politics and depriving them of political influence. During the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the democratically elected president of Ukraine was overthrown in a coup supported by a false flag operation in which mercenary snipers killed scores of civilians and policemen. In his place the US installed a hand-picked junta that included some neo-Nazi elements. This fiasco is still unfolding; I will return to it in a moment.
Another fiasco that is still brewing is the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is likely to be the end result of the longest US military occupation ever, which cost two trillion dollars, and resulted in a few thousand dead and tens of thousands wounded. The US blundered into Afghanistan looking for Osama bin Laden, who, it later turned out, was quietly living next to an army base in Pakistan. Oops, wrong country! Speaking of Pakistan, as a bonus point, the US has managed to destabilize this nuclear-armed nation, as the recent attack on the airport in Karachi has shown. Two fiascos for the price of one!
Complete story at - ClubOrlov: American Foreign Policy Fiascos
Take the 2008 “war” in former Soviet Georgia. The Pentagon spent years trying to form Georgia into an anti-Russian, US-dominated puppet. Then, during the Olympic games in (Beijing), the US-educated president of Georgia decided to please his masters by initiating artillery bombardment of civilians in a disputed enclave in Georgia inhabited by Russian citizens. In response, the Russians rolled into Georgia, mopped it up, annexed the disputed territory (plus another one) and left. Western media dutifully whitewashed Georgian war crimes and did their best to paint Russia as the aggressor. But his masters were not pleased, and its US-educated president was left to twist in the wind as a political corpse.
A similar fiasco started unfolding in Ukraine in the spring of 2014. You see, the US foreign policy and military establishments are quite compulsive in their unceasing efforts to undermine Russia. The 1%ers who own the US government also have a personal vendetta against Putin. They can't forgive him for what he did to Russia's oligarchs who did so much to undermine Russia under Yeltsin: he de-fanged and de-clawed them, banning them from politics and depriving them of political influence. During the Winter Olympics in Sochi, the democratically elected president of Ukraine was overthrown in a coup supported by a false flag operation in which mercenary snipers killed scores of civilians and policemen. In his place the US installed a hand-picked junta that included some neo-Nazi elements. This fiasco is still unfolding; I will return to it in a moment.
Another fiasco that is still brewing is the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. This is likely to be the end result of the longest US military occupation ever, which cost two trillion dollars, and resulted in a few thousand dead and tens of thousands wounded. The US blundered into Afghanistan looking for Osama bin Laden, who, it later turned out, was quietly living next to an army base in Pakistan. Oops, wrong country! Speaking of Pakistan, as a bonus point, the US has managed to destabilize this nuclear-armed nation, as the recent attack on the airport in Karachi has shown. Two fiascos for the price of one!
Complete story at - ClubOrlov: American Foreign Policy Fiascos
WARNING: ALL CITIZENS IN EUROPE MUST SEE THIS: Our politicians are trying to sell us through TISA. http://rt.com/usa/167088-wikileaks-tisa-secret-trade/ "Touting the deal earlier this year, the United States Chamber of Commerce said a successful TISA agreement would benefit America’s services industry and its 96 million, or 84 percent, of the nation’s private sector workers. “As its chief goals, the TISA should expand access to foreign markets for US service industries and ensure they receive national and most-favored nation treatment,” the chamber said of the deal in February. “It should also lift foreign governments’ sectoral limits on investment in services," “eliminate regulatory inconsistencies that at times loom as trade barriers” and “prohibit restrictions on legitimate cross‐border information flows and bar local infrastructure mandates relating to data storage.”
ReplyDeleteWikiLeaks warns that this largely important trade deal has been hardly discussed in public, however, notwithstanding evidence showing that the policy makers involved want to establish rules that would pertain to services used by billions worldwide.
“The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers,” WikiLeaks said in a statement. “The leaked draft also shows that the US is particularly keen on boosting cross-border data flow, which would allow uninhibited exchange of personal and financial data.”
Additionally, the current draft also includes language inferring that, upon the finishing of negotiations, the document will be kept classified for five full years.
In Australia, journalists at The Age reported that experts say the proposed changes included within the WikiLeaks document “could undermine Australia's capacity to independently respond to and weather any future global financial crisis.”
Dr. Patricia Ranald, a research associate at the University of Sydney and convener of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network, told the paper that the documents suggest the US wants to “tie the hands” of other governments, including allied ones, by way of sheer deregulation.
“Amendments from the US are seeking to end publicly provided services like public pension funds, which are referred to as 'monopolies' and to limit public regulation of all financial services,” she said. ''They want to freeze financial regulation at existing levels, which would mean that governments could not respond to new developments like another global financial crisis.''
Earlier this week, US Trade Representative Michael Froman said the TISA deal was already well on its way to being put together.
"The basic framework of the agreement is in place, initial market access offers have been exchanged, and sector-specific work in areas like telecommunications andfinancialservices is in full swing,” Froman said, according to Reuters."