Quote (ofthevoid @ Dec 6 2015 11:50am)
Lmao "self determination". When the CIA is crawling in the Ukraine drumming up support for a coup bpro western puppetsthat's not self determination. I'm sure you'll once again mock and say that since you didn't read this on cnn it must not be true.
How about you open up a history book on us interventions and foreign policy in the last 60 years and enlighten yourself of all the "self determination" we've encouraged around the world funding dictators and overthrowing democratically elected leaders because they aren't friendly to our agendas.
Also nato will do no such thing. Europe is too intertwined with Russia economically. There will come a point when many Central European countries will move towards Russia and away from US hegemony.
So you're saying that CIA organizers can go into a country, and with no popular support create an insurgency that eventually won an election (the regime had to commit fraud in) that has pushed another entrenched foreign power out?
You really overestimate the influence a few Americans can have on a region. I know we Americans are exceptional, but we're not that exceptional.
And they aren't going to go to Russia because Russia is running out of Petrodollars. We know that because Putin is having oligarchs in his kleptocracy arrested for stealing. The party there is over.
Quote
Probably the most serious international crisis since the end of the Cold War, and the White House targets individuals. Why this response? Because at last, after fourteen years of dealing with President Vladimir Putin as a legitimate head of state, the U.S. government has finally acknowledged publicly what successive administrations have known privately — that he has built a system based on massive predation on a level not seen in Russia since the tsars. Transparency International estimates the annual cost of bribery to Russia at $300 billion, roughly equal to the entire gross domestic product of Denmark, or thirty-seven times higher than the $8 billion Russia expended in 2007 on “national priority projects” in health, education, and agriculture. Capital flight, which officially has totaled approximately $335 billion since 2005, or about 5 percent of GDP, reaching over $50 billion in the first quarter of 2014 alone, has swollen Western bank coffers but made Russia the most unequal of all developed and emerging economies (BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, China), in which 110 billionaires control 35 percent of the country’s wealth.
And these billionaires, far from being titans of industry motoring the modernization of the Russian economy, have secured and increased their wealth by relying on and bolstering the centralized power of the state. The wealth of the oligarchs and political elites who came to power with Putin in 2000 has been more stable than in any other G7 country; they have made millions, though some have also lost as much. Political leaders close to Putin have become multimillionaires, and the oligarchs around them, according to Forbes Russia, have become billionaires. They are able to maintain that power and wealth as long as they don’t challenge Putin politically. Under this system, the state absorbs the risk, provides state funds for investment, and gives those close to the Kremlin massive monetary rewards. With the return under Putin to state capitalism, the state nationalizes the risk but continues to privatize the rewards to those closest to the president in return for their loyalty.
Pretty much describes the US before The New Deal. The crash is coming. The US and Europe will be taking in Russian economic refugees before Putin is dead. Eastern Europeans won't reverse course and go back to the USSR, they fought too hard to be free of their yoke.
This post was edited by Skinned on Dec 6 2015 11:08am