Four More Years

HOORAY! I'm so excited for my super cool progressive hero Barack Obama to start his second term!

Barack is a civil rights hero because he let gay Americans kill brown people on the other side of the world too. He personally supports gay marriage (now), but believes the states should ultimately decide. A champion of states’ rights, the president has clearly learned the lessons of the Civil War and the civil rights movement!

He's a champion of the little guy - ordinary, hardworking Americans like Jaime Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein. But he's no liberal purist, either: Barack is more than happy to make little old ladies eat cat food if that's what the bankers demand!

But he's tough, too! He orders other people to push buttons that kill terrorists thousands of miles away! I know they're terrorists because the U.S. government says so, and because any military-age male killed in a strike zone is presumed to be a militant. The administration said so! Barack is standing up to Iran and its nuclear program, the same way George W. Bush stood up to Iraq and its nuclear program!

Barack Obama shows that America is never afraid to stand up for what's right! That's why he tortures whistleblowers and protects torturers.

And now, here's to four more glorious years. Congratulations, America! You’ve earned it.
 

This World is Going to Hell...How to Stop It

That hoary old cliché, “the world is going to hell in a handbasket”, seems truer every day. Wake up this morning and you can read about the ongoing worst environmental disaster in human history, a gushing torrent of crude oil destroying not only one of the world’s most diverse wildlife preserves, but the economy and way of life for millions of Gulf state residents. You can read about Sergeant James Patrick Macneil, 28, the latest Canadian soldier to die in our pointless imperial war in Afghanistan. Closer to home, we see that the federal government is getting its money’s worth out of the $1 billion it squandered on security for the G20 summit in Toronto. Pepper spray, LRAD sonic weaponry, plastic bullets, and now, we get word that they will indeed be breaking out the water cannons. Yes, free speech is alive and well in the Great White North, as you can tell by the ominous police presence that surrounds any hint of spontaneity or protest. But it’s not just here that speaking out about injustice can get you tossed in a jail cell. The Supreme Court of the United States just voted 6-3 to severely restrict First Amendment rights by declaring that verbal support for non-violent, lawful activity is equivalent to giving material aid to terrorists. Jimmy Carter better be careful the next time he monitors elections in Lebanon. Finally, I just looked up at the TV to see that Canada has placed additional sanctions on Iran, the pariah state that absorbs all the collective wrath of the wealthiest nations on earth on behalf of oil companies and the military-industrial complex. I’ve said what I wanted to say about the ongoing propaganda campaign to depict this weak nation - which has fully complied with its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike other countries which refused to even sign it - as some kind of sinister threat to world peace. Unfortunately, the Money Boyz control the flow of information and they are fixated on regime change in Iran. Which, of course, has nothing to do with oil.


It’s bad enough to read all this bad news. But what’s far, far worse is watching the media trot out, day after day, the same people who are responsible for these disasters and injustices, who profit from them, who keep them going, to defend the actions of the elite, block any positive changes, and shower blame on the victims of their criminal policies. Of course, it’s hard to beat the American media elite for sheer tone deafness. Jabba the Hutt lashed out at the poor again on his radio show the other day, literally ridiculing children who go hungry and depend on school lunches to obtain sufficient nutrients. Fat man Rush, who likely hasn’t seen his toes since his last Vietnam deferment, suggested they could just look in the fridge for ding-dongs, and if not, there's always the dumpster. There is literally no difference, save a couple centuries, between his despicable "advice" and Marie Antoninette suggesting that the solution for starving French peasants is to “let them eat cake.”

Then there is the ever-more extreme backwaters of the American far right, which gets nuttier by the day to the corporate media’s delight. Sharron Angle brought out an old Republican standby – denigrating the poor and unemployed as “deadbeats” determined to stay on welfare. The meme was echoed by Fox News talking heads, who rubbed salt in the wounds of the 1.2 million Americans whose unemployment benefits just ran out by declaring that they spend most of the money on junk food, beer, cable TV and comic books anyway. Also, Tea Party favourite Dr. Rand Paul insisted that the unemployed are just afraid to get their hands dirty and need to start doing lousy jobs, but that didn’t stop him from defending high pay for medical practitioners. Doctors, he declared, “deserve to earn a comfortable living.” As Digby declared, isn’t it funny how those advocating “tough love” austerity policies are never in danger of being affected either way?

I despair for humanity. The only real solution for the problems that plague the world today, from foreign wars to ecological disaster to extreme inequality, is socialism, the democratic control of society’s resources and the means of production on behalf of the working class. But such a proposal is unthinkable to the corporate overlords that control our society and the information that reaches the masses. They actively fight it through their politicians and their media, but there’s only so much they can do to control an enraged population faced with long-term unemployment and governments they correctly feel do not represent them. More dangerous is when they take that legitimate rage and deploy it against powerless targets like unions, the poor and minorities, through the help of bought-and-paid for demagogues like Glenn Beck or whoever his Canadian equivalent will be on the just-announced Sun TV News Channel. And the scariest part is that it seems to work.

No matter how bad things get, the broad masses appear equally unable to imagine alternatives to the status quo, despite their much-hyped exasperation with it. Elections across the world have repeatedly returned to power the same bourgeois political parties, all with the same deranged, nonsensical neo-Hooverist prescriptions for the global economy: austerity, cutting spending, and reining in the deficit, because what matters is continued profits for banks, not the devastation which prolonged unemployment continues to wreak on working people. And yet the people just keep voting them back in. Britain elects Conservative David Cameron. Germany throws in its lot with Angela Merkel and the free market-worshipping Free Democratic Party. No matter how much bad press Stephen Harper gets, Canadians remain enslaved to the Conservative-Liberal big business duopoly while the NDP runs from any thoughts of socialism. American primary voters backed corporate whores like Blue Dog “Democrat” Blanche Lincoln (D-AK), the senator from Wal-Mart, simply because Obama endorsed her. They also rejected progressive voices like Marcy Winograd in California. It seems there’s only one direction for working-class politics in America to go – further and further right.

Part of the problem is that there is no strong, organized working class movement in any of these countries that can find representation in government. Traditional social-democratic parties are a joke, having been completely enslaved to neoliberal dogma years ago. All will embrace the austerity policies that make the working class pay for the banksters’ crimes (see: France’s Socialist Party, the British Labour Party). The decades-long demonization of Marxist ideas during the Cold War has ensured that the most powerful theoretical tool for understanding the current economic crisis goes ignored by the masses that would most benefit from that knowledge.


The Canadian citizen who wishes to take a Marxist approach to the political struggle has a range of choices, none of them all that appealing. The Communist Party of Canada is the second-oldest political party in the country after the Liberals, yet its historical associations with Stalinism have left it on the political fringe. The party membership has aged to the point where it cannot represent an active, youthful political movement. As good as the People’s Voice newspaper is, its writers retain a 1930s view of the working class and revel in archaic terminology. Whatever the party’s policies, its unwillingness to confront the legacy of Stalinism or adopt the internationalist approach of Leon Trotsky means it will remain glued to the Soviet past. To take a coldly realistic view of the situation, it is highly unlikely that any party with the word “Communist” in its name will be able to avoid the totalitarian connotations of historical Communist parties led by Stalin and Mao, with their gross crimes against humanity. That fact also condemns the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), which ran out of steam around the time it fixated on Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha as its anti-revisionist model.

The Socialist Equality Party (Canada), which I’ve written about before, seems to have by far the best platform of any leftist party. Its policies are Trotskyist in nature and internationalist in scope, which in my mind points the way forward for the proletariat: the unity of workers across borders against their exploiters in the parasitic corporate-financial class. Unfortunately, my early enthusiasm for the SEP has waned somewhat after discovering how little infrastructure the party has in Canada – in my experience, basically none. The SEP’s Canadian office does not even have a phone number or e-mail address, and there’s little realistic hope for a party with such a laughable lack of organization. Short of spreading the word through social media and registering the SEP as an official political party, it remains very much a movement in theory only.

That leaves the New Democratic Party. I was made aware via Facebook that there is in fact an NDP Socialist Caucus. I completely agree with the Caucus’ policies and their general direction, i.e. the only way the NDP can survive as a relevant party is by moving to the left. Canada already has a centre-left bourgeois party: the Liberals. The NDP need to reclaim the ideological high ground by drawing on their roots with Tommy Douglas and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which declared its intention to work until capitalism was eradicated. While the NDP leadership is considerably to the right of its rank and file, its existence as a major political party with representatives in Parliament gives it a clout that no other Canadian party to the left of the Liberals can boast. For now, with the SEP little more than a publishing organization, there seems to be little alternative to pushing for the adoption of socialist principles within the NDP. Ontario party leader Andrea Horwath has indicated her openness to this approach, suggesting an NDP where members need not “check their socialism at the door.”

The political element is an important part of the class struggle, but any real progress is years away and will not affect the underlying dynamic of Canadian politics today, nor the subservience of our politicians to the interests of transnational capital. For the moment, the only course of action is mass organization, demonstrating on the streets in defiance of our government’s corporatist polices. I call for this tactic regularly, but too often it remains purely abstract and theoretical, with no real-world lynchpin.

Well, the opportunity arrives this weekend as the G20 congregates in Toronto. The Harper government’s monstrous waste of $1 billion for security, not to mention the overall tone of media reports promoting new weapons the police seem keen to use, indicate that the state is fully prepared to use violence as a means of crushing dissent. That fact in itself is not surprising, but the media’s approach suggests they will pin any blame on protesters. The use of police provocateurs to justify a crackdown is not out of the question. The decisive factor is, will the citizenry allow itself to be intimidated? Or will it make its presence and concerns known to a nationwide, nay, worldwide audience? Will it refuse to submit to the bludgeoning force of the modern police state?

I’ll be in Toronto this weekend to answer in the affirmative. So should you. Make your voice heard!

Squeezing Iran

More news on the continued demonization of Iran emerged yesterday, as the UN Security Council voted to impose yet another round of sanctions against Tehran for its alleged “refusal to bring its nuclear program into compliance with international inspection”, as The Globe and Mail put it. The Globe reported on the sanctions with all the asterisk-plagued “objectivity” you would expect from the voice of Bay Street, even as Washington (interesting, that) bureau writer Paul Koring was unable to mask the massive hypocrisy viz a viz the United States and Israel:

“There is no double standard at play here,” Mr. Obama said, although he did not directly address critics who argue Washington turns a blind eye to Israeli’s clandestine nuclear arsenal while attempting to prevent Tehran from building one.

Clearly, no double standard at all. But wait...there’s more!

The sanctions will likely worsen the already grim state of Iranian-American relations and could be the death knell of Mr. Obama’s as yet unrequited offer to extend the hand of friendship to the regime in Tehran. Mr. Obama nevertheless voiced hope that relations with Tehran could still improve.

“These sanctions do not close the door on diplomacy,” he said. “We would like nothing more than to reach the day when the Iranian government fulfills its international obligations – a day when these sanctions are lifted, previous sanctions are lifted, and the Iranian people can finally fulfill the greatness of the Iranian nation."

In other words, regime change. So let me get this straight: the same president who spent his first 18 months in office fellating AIPAC by maintaining the American elite’s single-minded focus on escalating tensions with Iran, relentlessly criticizing that country at every conceivable opportunity, insisting that “all options” are still “on the table”, and finally, refusing an arrangement brokered by Turkey and Brazil that would have shipped Iran’s enriched uranium abroad for reprocessing – in essence, an agreement made in good faith with Iran that would have solved the nuclear dispute and satisfied declared American demands – and we’re supposed to believe that Obama extended a hand of friendship to Tehran? An offer which remains “unrequited”?

The stench of political cynicism here is unbearable. It’s clear that the United States never had any real interest in negotiations with Iran. Don’t be fooled by Obama’s gentler rhetorical approach compared to Bush/Cheney, his occasional references to the greatness of the Iran people, etc. Nothing has changed. The goal of Western elites has been and always will be regime change, creating a more pliable Iranian government that will open the country up to foreign investment – if necessary by suppressing its native population in the manner of the Shah prior to the 1979 revolution.

In that manner, Obama never seriously considered Iranian diplomatic overtures, nor has he ceased the relentless manner in which the U.S. aims to bludgeon that country into submission, either through diplomatic sanctions or military force. That capitulation to elite interests has been there from the very start of his presidency, and his so-called offers of negotiation have always been insincere, his compliments always backhanded. In his inauguration speech, Obama declared:

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

No single sentence better illustrates the hypocritical, cynical policy of the United States towards Iran. First, we have denunciations of corruption and the heavy-handed silencing of dissent – as if the American government has not fully tolerated and even propped up such regimes when it serves their own interests, as if dissent from Beltway conventional wisdom is not rigorously silenced (ask Helen Thomas). It’s all there – the faux democratic posturing, the laughable implication that American politicians do not “cling to power through corruption”, and finally, the projecting of American aggression onto that of its targeted enemy nation. Iran has repeatedly extended its diplomatic hand to America over the past decade – witness its 2003 overture to the U.S. after the invasion of Iraq, which would have satisfied American demands, but which the Bush administration arrogantly slapped away. Likewise, this year's deal with Turkey and Brazil would have satisfied the supposed demands of the “international community” regarding Iran’s nuclear program. But that agreement was never seriously entertained by the U.S. government, which has one goal and one goal only: regime change.

It is the United States, not Iran, which refuses to unclench its fist. The latest round of UN sanctions are merely the latest evidence of its characteristic imperial aggression.

War is Peace

My first reaction upon discovering that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize was stunned disbelief - until I remembered that this is the same award that went to war criminal Henry Kissinger in 1973. The notion that a sitting president of the current United States, the world's most aggressive rogue state, could be awarded a prize for promoting world peace is laughable. It's a slap in the face to the families of slaughtered civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and Gaza, and I'm sure it will reassure the Iranians that Obama, who still pushes the notion that "all options are on the table" regarding the American right to bomb their country, is more than just a fresh coat of paint on an old imperialist aggressor.

Obama's win makes a mockery of the Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee awarded it to Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." If pretty words are all that is required to win the world's most prestigious award for promoting peace, then any tin-pot dictator who proclaims himself to have peaceful intentions while engaging in a war of aggression is equally eligible. Paul Craig Roberts masterfully highlighted the difference between what the president says and what he actually does:

Obama, the committee gushed, has created “a new climate in international politics.”

Tell that to the 2 million displaced Pakistanis and the unknown numbers of dead ones that Obama has racked up in his few months in office. Tell that to the Afghans where civilian deaths continue to mount as Obama’s “war of necessity” drones on indeterminably.

No Bush policy has changed. Iraq is still occupied. The Guantanamo torture prison is still functioning. Rendition and assassinations are still occurring. Spying on Americans without warrants is still the order of the day. Civil liberties are continuing to be violated in the name of Oceania’s “war on terror.”

[...]

The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama’s rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made “War is Peace” the reality.

Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed during Israel’s inhuman military attack on the defenseless civilian population in the Gaza Ghetto.

The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement and to continue the momentum for a military attack on Iran.

[...]

“War is Peace” is now the position of the formerly antiwar organization, Code Pink. Code Pink has decided that women’s rights are worth a war in Afghanistan.

When justifications for war become almost endless--oil, hegemony, women’s rights, democracy, revenge for 9/11, denying bases to al Qaeda and protecting against terrorists--war becomes the path to peace.

The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink.

Glenn Greenwald takes a slightly more ambivalent view, pointing out that Obama inherited much of these problems and, in any event, presides over a war-making state that accounts for 70% of worldwide arms sales. It's difficult to get past that kind of institutional inertia, and Obama should be commended for his efforts to adopt a more multilateral approach to foreign policy. But true efforts for peace require more than mere words, and thus far that's pretty much all Obama has had to offer.

Nothing of substance has changed in U.S. foreign policy. We have seen a cosmetic change in the country's approach to dealing with Iran, one that has already produced more dividends in one day than eight years of neoconservative threats. But the overall American tone remains one of aggressive bullying, where Obama embraces the Washington consensus of a supposed Iranian "threat" that has little basis in reality. It's an open question at this moment whether the U.S. or Israel will engage in military strikes on Iran; I'm guessing not, since any such action will cause the Middle East to explode and widen the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq into a horrific regional conflagration, but I could be wrong. Hopefully not.

It's true that Obama has only been in office for nine months and can't be expected to solve all of the myriad problems bequeathed to him by the criminal Bush administration. But the bottom line is that little has changed. Once you get past the rhetorical flourishes in his speeches, where Obama has demonstrated a consistent knack for saying one thing while doing the exact opposite, it's clear that he will prove no impediment whatsoever to Wall Street and the Pentagon devouring what's left of the American economy, nor to the continued waging of perpetual war. Again, credit must go to Greenwald for cutting to the heart of the matter:

That was from a May airstrike in which over 100 Afghan civilians were killed by American jets -- one of many similar incidents this year, including one only a week ago that killed 9 Afghan civilians. How can someone responsible for that, and who has only escalated that war, possibly be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in the very same year that he did that? Does that picture above look like the work of a Nobel Peace laureate?

Let me be clear: any man who escalates one war, refuses to end another, orders drone attacks on a supposedly allied country, constantly threatens war with yet another nation, and says absolutely nothing while his country's proxy commits war crimes against defenseless civilians in a virtual open-air prison, slaughtering hundreds of children and unleashing white phosphorus on the population, is not a man of peace. He is a warmonger, plain and simple, once you get past the slick gauze of corporate PR. To see such an individual awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is an insult to peace-loving peoples everywhere, and merely confirms the enduring wisdom of George Orwell.

Actual "Expert" vs. Pundits

The Western political-media establishment is busy ginning up baseless fear again over Iran's nuclear program, so pay absolutely no attention to this little gem of independent thought from Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency:

I am dismayed by the allegations of some Member States, which have been fed to the media, that information has been withheld from the Board. These allegations are politically motivated and totally baseless. Such attempts to influence the work of the Secretariat and undermine its independence and objectivity are in violation of Article VII.F. of the IAEA Statute and should cease forthwith.

Doesn't he know Iran is eeeeeeevil?

Thankfully, here's Glenn Greenwald on MSNBC, characteristically cutting through the pundit-generated bullshit like a hot knife through butter. But I was shocked to discover none other than Arianna Huffington stoking fear about Iran. For shame, Huff.

The G20 Travesty

The recent economic summit of the G20 nations in Pittsburgh was everything I expected - that is, a glossy stage show in which the chief political representatives of world banking interests offered vague statements praising the so-called economic recovery (for the bankers, that is) while pressing forward on plans to make working people pay for the crimes of international finance, all while peaceful protesters outside faced now-routine police brutality bolstered by the most technologically-advanced methods of crowd dispersal/oppression. Tear gas, pepper spray, batons, rubber bullets and sonic cannons (also known as Long Range Acoustic Devices) were all deployed as the international elite attempted to neutralize any popular criticism of its reactionary policies.

According to the G20, economic recovery will require governments to reduce spending and squeeze workers by lowering their living standard, a solution which does not exactly square with their professed goals of creating jobs and reducing poverty. Perhaps the weakness of their actual economic plans was what prompted leaders of the Western nations to distract the media's attention by engaging in this heartwarming act of political theatre:

In what has all the hallmarks of an orchestrated political provocation, the United States, Britain and France, with the support of Germany, denounced a supposedly secret Iranian nuclear plant, threatened stepped-up economic sanctions and possible military action unless the facility was immediately open to inspection.

In a joint announcement Friday morning at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared together before television cameras to issue the warning. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had left Pittsburgh to return home, issued her own statement of support for the threats against Iran.

Obama declared, “The Iranian government must now demonstrate through deeds its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international law.” He gave Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad six days to respond—by the time of an October 1 meeting in Geneva. His approach echoed that of George W. Bush seven years ago in citing an alleged nuclear weapons program as the basis for going to war against Iraq.

Talk about déjà vu all over again. Is the memory of the public really so short that the buildup to war against Iraq in 2003 - supported by the same bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction and the same hypocritical lectures about international law from the world's most powerful rogue state - has already been forgotten as we see the exact same propaganda applied to Iran? That's a rhetorical question, of course; public opinion has almost always been irrelevant when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. But it is depressing to see the foreign policy elite do everything in its power to beat the drums of war, especially at a conference supposedly designed to address the economic crisis. Then again, we shouldn't be surprised; unscrupulous politicians have always used war as a distraction from and "solution" to economic problems.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon characteristically followed the lead of the United States, condemning Iran for its "continued refusal" to listen to resolutions by the UN Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. Unless, of course, you consider the fact that the existence of Iran's supposedly top-secret nuclear facilities was actually disclosed to the IAEA by...Iran, in a letter written September 21 that acknowledged the construction of a new pilot-fuel enrichment plant. But whatever.

The relentless demonization of Iran by the wealthy Western elite is merely another indication of how little power the people of those nations actually have over their governments' foreign policies. We should revere the heroes who showed up in Pittsburgh to protest the continued dominance of the neoliberal agenda over a world that ideology has clearly failed, especially given the ever-more repressive measures undertaken by the new American police state. Riot squads entered university dormitories to threaten students with arrest and expulsion, many requests for peaceful demonstrations were unceremoniously denied, and the use of pepper spray, rubber bullets, gas and LRAD against the crowd was justified by the supposed threat from anarchists, though it has been shown in the past that plainclothed police provocateurs often infiltrated anarchist groups in order to justify the brutal crackdown on protesters.

Also noteworthy is the coverage of the G20 protests in the largest mainstream news organizations, which is to say there was barely any, certainly nothing approaching the wall-to-wall coverage of factually-challenged teabaggers at town hall meetings. We mainly saw sanitized coverage and carefully-prepared statements from the G20 leaders themselves, though CNN ran a nice little fluff piece on the riot police point of view.

Of course, no discussion of this G20 would be complete without a quote from the first Community Organizer-In-Chief. For any deluded liberal who still believes Obama has anything in common with them at all, the following howler should provide a much-needed slap in the face:

PITTSBURGH (AP) — President Barack Obama says the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh was relatively tranquil and protesters should realize that world leaders are trying to shape a global economy that helps poor people.

Obama told reporters Friday that previous world summits drew far more protesters than the several thousand who clashed with police this week in Pittsburgh.

The president said many of the protesters oppose capitalism and free markets in general. He said they are free to express their views but he disagrees with them.

Obama said the G-20 leaders agreed to economic policies that should create world markets that help workers and poor people have more stable and prosperous lives.

After all, if there's anyone who knows about helping workers and poor people have more stable and prosperous lives, it's Wall Street's most prominent puppet.

A Small Dose of Common Sense

Gosh, this sounds reasonable:

Israel promised Russia it would not launch an attack on Iran, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in an interview aired on Sunday in which he described such an assault as "the worst thing that can be imagined."

Israel has hinted it could forcibly deny Iran the means to make an atomic bomb if it refuses to suspend uranium enrichment and has criticized Russia for agreeing to supply to Tehran S-300 anti-aircraft weapons that could complicate an attack.

In an interview with CNN recorded on Tuesday, Medvedev denied Moscow was backing Iran but said it had the right to supply defensive weapons and said sanctions against Tehran should only be used as a last resort.

An attack would lead to "a humanitarian disaster, a vast number of refugees, Iran's wish to take revenge and not only upon Israel, to be honest, but upon other countries as well," Medvedev said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

"But my Israeli colleagues told me that they were not planning to act in this way and I trust them."

Call me crazy, but I'm not sure I can place as much trust as Medvedev does in the word of the Israeli government, especially since Joe Biden appeared to indicate in July that the U.S. government would do nothing to stop an Israeli first strike against Iran. Of course, we're talking about Joe "Ready to Gaffe" Biden here. But although the Obama administration distanced itself from those remarks - with the President personally saying the U.S. had "absolutely not" given Israel permission to attack - you have to wonder, given the Beltway establishment's unrelenting push for war with Iran and Obama's own penchant for saying one thing while doing another.

Throughout all of this, I can't help but appreciate the role Russia continues to play as a bulwark against U.S.-Israeli aggression in the Middle East and elsewhere. Although I'm no great fan of Vladimir Putin and the corrupt, authoritarian-leaning government he heads, I understand his popularity among Russians who might desire a more traditional strongman after the economic chaos of the 1990s, the grotesque failures of free market "reforms" masterminded by Larry Summers, and the international embarrassment embodied in booze-addled political opportunist Boris Yeltsin. Following the Cold War, the boost to American exceptionalism provided by the demise of the Soviet Union and the rise of a "unipolar" global order found its most odious expression in the cowboy diplomacy of the Bush administration. Although the neoconservatives have been largely discredited by foreign policy disasters like Iraq, their noxious worldview continues to thoroughly infect mainstream political discourse in the United States, with the result that Beltway conventional wisdom is often predicated on their warmongering interpretations of daily events - which of course then finds its way into that ultimate vehicle for establishment-approved political thought, the Obama administration.

As a result, whenever the American media-industrial complex attempts to push a factually false, but politically convenient meme - such as the idea that the 2008 South Ossetia conflict was unprovoked and entirely attributable to Russian aggression, rather than a response to Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili's ill-advised offensive into the breakaway province - it's nice to have Russian opinion providing a counterbalance. Yes, it's just another great power protecting its own geostrategic interests, but with the percentage of blatant lies clogging up American political discourse getting thicker all the time, Russian interests will often lead that country's spokespersons wading into the realm of fact. It's a refreshing alternative, but it also underlines the extent to which, in the propaganda-soaked post-9/11 media wasteland, the United States plutocracy has largely made a mockery of the idea that its public relations channels (or "news networks", as the euphemism would have it) resemble anything like a free press. As in any other authoritarian state, the American media serves the interests of powerful elites. It's just a question of which state's bullshit you choose to believe.