May 16, 2022 at 11:09 a.m.
The party of the rich and indifferent
The party of the rich and indifferent
That is to say, it looks like the Biden administration doesn't want the war to end, which serves all kinds of purposes: It provides political cover for an administration that has long ago imploded domestically; it props up and enriches the war machine companies that always need a war going on; and it advances an aggressive effort to achieve regime change in Russia, which the western ruling class desperately wants.
In the space of a month, things have changed for the worse. Just weeks ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was talking about a negotiated settlement and a neutral Ukraine. All that has vanished into thin air, and both sides are settling in for a long war.
Likely this was not something Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted. His aim was for a quick victory. When that did not happen, the time was ripe for negotiation. But the Biden administration and its allies in western Europe have never brought any pressure to bear for such a peace, certainly not publicly and apparently not privately. Their response has been saber-rattling and billions and billions more in aid, not merely to defend Ukraine and compel a peace but to use the war as a pretense for NATO expansion.
Rather than defend Ukraine and firmly demand a cessation of Russian aggression, NATO has itself become more belligerent. Sweden and Finland are talking about NATO membership in the midst of war, and NATO officials are openly calling for NATO to expand its current power boundaries beyond Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific.
Suddenly this all sounds less like an effort to defend a sovereign nation against an unjust invasion - which Russia's invasion of Ukraine most surely was - and more like a global conflict wherein the west is playing the aggressor in the larger war.
Not surprisingly, the U.S. is the biggest financial contributor to this proxy war/global conflict.
The latest political battle came last week when the House overwhelmingly passed a bill giving nearly $40 billion more in military aid to Ukraine, which was actually $7 billion more than the administration asked for.
The vote was 368-57, which shows just how much the establishments of both political parties can put aside ideological differences when it comes to supporting the corporate-military state.
Thankfully, while Democrats are all in for war all the time, there were 57 courageous lawmakers who voted against the bill, all Republicans. And they included our own U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany of Minocqua, for which we offer our thanks and hope our readers do, too.
With his vote, Tiffany - the only Wisconsin congressperson to oppose the legislation - was standing up for America First. It is simply immoral to be spending so much on a foreign war when our national security is not at stake and when so much is needed at home.
Here's how Tiffany put it: "The federal government cannot continue to shell out billions for an overseas conflict when working-class Americans are struggling to find baby formula at their local grocery store and their paychecks are being wiped out by record gas prices and the worst inflation in 40 years. Spending tens of billions in foreign aid month after month while American families struggle to pay their bills is not what I was sent to Congress to do."
Like us, Tiffany has condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and, as he points out, he has been sanctioned by the Kremlin for doing so. Still, Tiffany is right when he says American taxpayers cannot continue to finance an open-ended European conflict, aka, forever war.
"It's time for Congress to put the interests of hardworking Americans first," he said.
We agree. Tiffany's office points out that Congress approved more than $13 billion in Ukrainian assistance in March, that the U.S. is already the largest donor to Ukraine, and that analysts have suggested that continued American assistance risks depleting U.S. munitions stockpiles that could take months or years to replenish.
This might be a good time to ask, then, just what and who are we fighting for, since we can all acknowledge now, as Defense secretary Lloyd Austin effectively did in late April, that we are fighting a proxy war. Though the administration tried to walk it back, Austin was asked about U.S. goals in the war, to which he stated that the war was about helping Ukraine retain its sovereignty.
But then he added a second goal: "We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine." And he added that Russia should be left without the ability to "quickly reproduce" what it lost in Ukraine.
That's very much a different goal that just helping Ukraine defend itself, and it's a much longer and much more expensive war. If Russia started the war - and it did - the U.S. and NATO seem determined to expand and prolong it.
So, again, what are we fighting for?
When Barack Obama was president, the answer was clear: Nothing. The president did not believe we had any strategic interests there worth fighting for, that Ukraine was a core Russian interest but not an American one. He has since been whipped into line by the establishment, but, as president, Obama always believed and said that Ukraine was subject to Russian military domination no matter what the U.S. said or did.
He simply did not believe it was worth fighting for.
OK, so what about democracy? Isn't that worth fighting for?
It is, but that's not what you have in Ukraine. Prior to the war, Zelensky had already begun dismantling a free press, closing three dissenting TV stations, and since then he has nationalized the entire media industry.
Last April, too, Zelensky beat Biden to the punch by opening a government-run Center for Countering Disinformation, ostensibly to protect free speech. Just like Biden is doing, right? This is Ukrainian Interior minister Arsen Avakov's take on free speech: "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of propaganda for an aggressor state."
Hmmmm.
Since the war began, Zelensky, whom world leaders now crown as a Churchillian defender of liberty, has banned 11 political parties considered to be pro-Russian, including the largest opposition party in the country, which had condemned the Russian invasion.
And, of course, there's Zelensky himself, who came to power vowing to weed out Ukrainian corruption. But, as the Pulitzer prize-winning European Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) has reported, Zelensky, who campaigned against what he called a corrupt political class that stashed wealth in offshore accounts, and his partners have established their own network of offshore companies.
The revelations come from documents in the Pandora Papers, millions of files from 14 offshore service providers leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and shared with partners around the world, including OCCRP, the organization reported.
"The documents show that Zelensky and his partners in a television production company, Kvartal 95, set up a network of offshore firms dating back to at least 2012, the year the company began making regular content for TV stations owned by Ihor Kolomoisky, an oligarch dogged by allegations of multi-billion-dollar fraud," OCCRP reports. "The offshores were also used by Zelensky associates to purchase and own three prime properties in the center of London."
And while he gave up his stake in a major company when he was elected, OCCRP reports, he gifted it to his business partner, who coincidentally is now his top aide, and made an arrangement that would allow the offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his wife.
Zelensky's "party" sound much like the Democratic Party in this country, and it says a lot about why we are doing what we are doing.
To be sure, the Russian invasion is an inexcusable violation of a nation's sovereignty, which has earned Putin well-deserved contempt. And none of this is to say that we should not have offered any military aid. But that aid should have been sharply defined and finite, and it should have been accompanied by intense pressure by the president and his administration for the two sides to engage in peace talks.
Most important, the recognition that any aid needed to be strictly limited and shared by NATO - rather than the U.S. providing the bulk of the money - should have been established early on, especially given the immense needs we have in our country, including the need to bring down gas prices and alleviate the baby formula shortage, among other needs.
The biggest supporter of this war, the Democratic Party, is built upon an elite base that cares not one whit about the incredible financial pressures average Americans are under. Now a party of the rich, Democrats who control the policies of their party aren't being hurt by rampant inflation.
They care about two things. They care about their narcissistic cultural identity politics, and they care about the triumph of the globalist corporate-state enterprise.
The latter is driving the expansion of the war; the former is driving their indifference to the pain they are causing.
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