[Peace-discuss] FW: Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics

[David Johnson]

 <https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/mueller-russia-and-oil-politics/>
Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics


by  <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/3abre/> ROB URIE

 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/mueller-russia-and-oil-politics/

	

 <https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/19/mueller-russia-and-oil-politics/>
Mueller, Russia and Oil Politics

www.counterpunch.org

The Mueller indictment made public on Friday charges 13 Russian nationals
with trolling the American electoral process to 'sow discord' by falsely
representing themselves as American dissident personas. Once the field of
presidential aspirants had been narrowed in 2016, their goal became to
support Donald Trump's candidacy while disparaging Hillary Clinton. There is
no charge that the outcome of the 2016 election was changed by these
actions. More

 

 

Dunder-Mifflin as Troll Farm

The Mueller
<https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/16/text-full-mueller-indictment-on-r
ussian-election-case-415670> indictment made public on Friday charges 13
Russian nationals with trolling the American electoral process to 'sow
discord' by falsely representing themselves as American dissident personas.
Once the field of presidential aspirants had been narrowed in 2016, their
goal became to support Donald Trump's candidacy while disparaging Hillary
Clinton. There is no charge that the outcome of the 2016 election was
changed by these actions.

The form of the alleged conspiracy was a 'troll farm,' an office populated
by various functionaries who worked together from 2014 to today to magnify
already existing social tensions on social media. Those charged were
likewise mainly functionaries- IT workers, managers, etc. Despite
allegations to the contrary in the American press, no links between the
alleged troll farm and the Kremlin and / or Vladimir Putin were put forward.

The 13 people charged are Russian nationals presumably living in Russia. As
of this writing none have been arrested. Unless they plan to voluntarily
return to the U.S., an unlikely move, the charges will never be contested in
a courtroom. This most certainly was understood by Mr. Mueller before the
indictments were handed down. Lest this remain unclear, charges made without
the likelihood of a trial are unlikely to ever be resolved.

In reading through the charges, what is striking is that the Russians aren't
charged with creating social tensions. They are charged with exploiting and
exacerbating them. It is their personas that are deemed to be false, not the
familiar chatter of quasi-anonymous voices on social media. The point is
that the social tensions preceded the chatter. Mr. Mueller's term 'sowing
discord' literally means that discord was planted. The actual sequence is of
discord being exploited.

This distinction is important for a number of reasons. Following the
electoral debacles in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004, the continued use
of electronic voting machines provides a legitimate basis for believing that
the American electoral system is compromised. The national Democrats did
<https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-20
16-215774> conspire to undermine Bernie Sanders in order to secure the
nomination for Hillary Clinton. The racist subtext of the Clintons' 1994
Crime Bill ('Black criminality') is a rational reason for Blacks to vote for
someone else.

These points are necessary because the discord the Russians are alleged to
have sown related to rational political grievances. What is insidious in Mr.
Mueller's charges is conflation of trolling with the substance of political
dissent. The certainty officials have that no votes were changed by the
Russians comes from the fact that the election machinery isn't connected to
the internet. This means that distant trolls can't get to it to change
votes. But this does not assure that entirely home-grown 'meddling' didn't
compromise the integrity of the election.

The indictments are a major political story, but not for the reasons given
in mainstream press coverage. Once Mr. Mueller's indictment is understood to
charge the exploitation of existing social tensions (read it and decide for
yourself), the FBI, which Mr. Mueller directed from 2001 - 2013, is
precisely the wrong entity to be rendering judgment. The FBI has been
America's political police since its founding in 1908. Early on former FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover led legally dubious
<https://www.npr.org/2012/02/14/146862081/the-history-of-the-fbis-secret-ene
mies-list> mass arrests of American dissidents. He practically invented the
slander of conflating legitimate dissent with foreign agency. This is the
institutional backdrop from which Mr. Mueller proceeds.

In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s the FBI's targets included the civil rights
movement, the antiwar movement, the American Indian Movement (AIM), the
Black Panther Party and any other political organization Mr. Hoover deemed a
threat. The secret (hidden) FBI program
<https://www.democracynow.org/topics/cointelpro> COINTELPRO was intended to
subvert political outcomes outside of allegations of criminal wrongdoing and
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb1O_uln1p0> with no regard for the lives
of its targets. Throughout its history the FBI has sided with the powerful
against the powerless to maintain an unjust social order.

Robert Mueller became FBI Director only days before the attacks of September
11, 2001. One of his first acts as Director was to arrest 1,000 persons
without any evidence of criminal wrongdoing. None of those arrested were
ever charged in association with the attacks. The frame in which the FBI
acted- to maintain political stability threatened by 'external' forces, was
ultimately chosen by the George W. Bush administration to justify its
aggressive war against Iraq.

It is the FBI's legacy of conflating dissent with being an agent of a
foreign power that Mr. Mueller's indictment most insidiously perpetuates.
Russians are 'sowing discord,' and they are using Americans to do so, goes
the allegation. Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders are listed in the
indictment as roadblocks to the unfettered ascension of Hillary Clinton to
the presidency. Russians are sowing discord, therefore discord is both
suspect in itself and evidence of being a foreign agent.

The posture of simple reporting at work in the indictment- that it isn't the
FBI's fault that the Russians (allegedly) inserted themselves into the
electoral process, runs against the history of the FBI's political role, the
tilt used to craft criminal charges and the facts put forward versus those
put to the side. Given the political agendas of the other agencies that the
FBI joined through the charges, they are most certainly but a small piece of
a larger story.

In the aftermath of the indictments it's easy to forget that the
<https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet> Pentagon created
the internet, that the NSA
<https://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/01/newly-revealed-snowden-docs-ex
pose-near-global-reach-nsa> has its tentacles in all of its major
chokepoints, that the CIA has been
<https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-cia-seriously/>
heavily involved in funding and 'using' social media toward its own ends and
that the FBI is only reputable in the present because of Americans'
near-heroic ignorance of history. The claim that the Russian operation was
sophisticated because it had corporate form and function is countered by the
fact that it was, by the various agencies' own claims, ineffectual in
changing the outcome of the election.

I Have a List

While Robert Mueller was busy charging never-to-be-tried Russians with past
crimes, Dan Coats, the Director of National Intelligence,
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/us/politics/russia-sees-midterm-election
s-as-chance-to-sow-fresh-discord-intelligence-chiefs-warn.html> declared
that future Russian meddling has already cast a shadow over the integrity of
the 2018 election. Why the Pentagon that created the internet, the NSA that
has its tentacles in all of its major chokepoints, the CIA that has been
heavily involved in funding and 'using' social media toward its own ends and
the FBI that just landed such a glorious victory of good over evil would be
quivering puddles when it comes to precluding said meddling is a question
that needs to be asked.

The political frame being put forward is that only these agencies know if
particular elections and candidates have been tainted by meddling, therefore
we need to trust them to tell us which candidates were legitimately elected
and which weren't. As generous as this offer seems, wouldn't the creation of
free and fair elections be a more direct route to achieving this end? Put
differently, who among those making the offer, whether personally or as
functionaries of their respective agencies, has a demonstrated history of
supporting democratic institutions?

The 2016 election was apparently a test case for posing these agencies as
the meddling police. By getting the bourgeois electocracy- liberal
Democrats, to agree that the loathsome Trump is illegitimate, future
candidates will be vetted by the CIA, NSA and FBI with impunity. It's
apparently only the pre-'discord, ' the social angst that the decade of the
Great Recession left as its residual, that shifts this generous offer from
the deterministic to the realm of the probable. The social conditions that
led to the Great Recession and its aftermath are entirely home grown.

More broadly, how do the government agencies and people that spent the
better part of the last century undermining democracy at home and abroad
intend to stop 'Russian meddling?' If the FBI couldn't disentangle home
grown 'discord' from that allegedly exploited and exacerbated by the
Russians, isn't the likely intention to edit out all discord? And if fake
news is a problem in need of addressing, wouldn't the
<https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2014/07/01/how-the-iraq-war-still-haunts-
new-york-times/199946> New York Times and the
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/aug/13/pressandpublishing.usa>
Washington Post have been shut down years ago?

The Great Satin (sic)

While Russia is the villain of the day, week and year due to alleged
election 'meddling,' the process of demonization that Russia has undergone
has shown little variation from (alleged) villain to villain. It is thanks
to cable news and the 'newspaper of record' that the true villainy of
Vladimir Putin, Muammar Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Nicolas Maduro and the
political leadership of Iran has been revealed. In the face of such
monsters, questions of motivation are moot. Why wouldn't Mr. Putin 'sow
discord?'

The question as yet unasked, and therefore unanswered is: is there something
besides base villainy that brought these national leaders, and the nations
they lead, into the crosshairs of America's fair and wise leadership?  This
question might forever go unanswered were it not for the secret list from
which their names were apparently drawn. No, not
<http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/10/14/documents-that-changed-the-world-
joseph-mccarthys-list-1950/> that secret list. This one is publicly
available- hiding in plain sight, as it were. It is the list of proven oil
reserves by country (below). This is no doubt unduly reductive- evil is as
evil does, but read on.

The question of how such a list could divide so evenly between heroes and
villains I leave to the philosophers. On second thought, no I won't. The
heroes are allies of a small cadre of America's political and economic elite
who have made themselves fabulously rich through the alliances. The villains
have oil, gas, pipelines and other resources that this elite wants.
Reductive, yes. But this simple list certainly appears to explain American
foreign policy over the last half-century quite well.

Image removed by sender.

Source: gulfbusiness.com

It's almost as if America's love for humanity, as demonstrated through
humanitarian interventions, is determined by imperial competition for
natural resources- in this case oil and gas. Amongst these countries, only
one (Canada) is 'democratic' in the American sense of being run by a small
cadre of plutocrats who use the state to further their own interests. Two-
Iraq and Libya, were recently reduced to rubble (for the sake of humanity)
by the U.S. Nigeria is being 'brought' under the control of AFRICOM. What
remains are various and sundry petro-states plus Venezuela and Russia.

Following the untimely death of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, the horrible
tyrant kept in office via
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/03/why-us-dcemonises-ven
ezuelas-democracy> free and fair elections, who used Venezuela's
petro-dollars to feed, clothe and educate his people and was in the process
of creating a regional Left alliance to counter American abuse of power, the
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/21/usa.venezuela> CIA joined
with local plutocrats to overthrow his successor, Nicolas Maduro. The goal:
to 'liberate' Venezuela's oil revenues in their own pockets. At the moment
Mr. Maduro is down the list of villains, not nearly the stature of a 'new
Hitler' like Vladimir Putin. But where he ends up will depend on how
successfully the CIA (with Robert Mueller's help) can drum up a war against
nuclear armed Russia.

What separates Russia from the other heroes and villains on the list is its
history as a competing empire as well as the manner in which Russian oil and
gas is distributed. Geography placed it closer to the population centers of
Europe than to Southeastern China where Chinese economic development has
been concentrated. This makes Europe a 'natural' market for Russian oil and
gas.

The former Soviet state of Ukraine did stand between, or rather under,
Russian pipelines and Europe until Hillary Clinton had her lieutenants
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOVpSt2HXSc> engineer a coup there in 2014.
In contrast to the 'new Hitler' of Mr. Putin (or was that Trump?)  Mrs.
Clinton and her comrades demonstrated a preference for the old Hitler in the
form of Ukrainian fascists who were the ideological descendants of
'authentic' WWII Nazis. But rest assured, not all of the U.S.'s allies in
this affair
<http://thehill.com/opinion/international/359609-the-reality-of-neo-nazis-in
-the-ukraine-is-far-from-kremlin-propaganda> were ideological Nazis.

Image removed by sender.

Chart: Demonization of Russia centers on competition for oil and gas
revenues. Pipelines to deliver oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe
run through North Africa (Libya) and Syria and / or Turkey. These pipelines
are substantially controlled by Western interests with imperial / colonial
ties to the U.S., Britain and 'developed' Europe. Russian oil and gas did
run through Ukraine, which is now negotiating to join NATO, or otherwise
hits a NATO wall before entering Europe.

In contrast to the alternative hypotheses
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/books/review/marci-shore-the-ukrainian-n
ight.html> given in the American press, NATO, the geopolitical extension of
the U.S. military in Europe,
<https://www.nato.int/docu/review/2014/NATO-Energy-security-running-on-empty
/Ukraine-energy-independence-gas-dependence-on-Russia/EN/index.htm> admits
that the  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOVpSt2HXSc> U.S. engineered coup
in Ukraine was 'about' oil geopolitics with Russia. The American storyline
that Crimea was seized by Russia ignores that the Russian navy has had a
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevastopol> Black Sea port in Crimea for
decades. How amenable, precisely, might Director of National Intelligence
Dan Coats and his friends be if Russia seized a major U.S. naval port given
their generous offer to take over the U.S. electoral system because of a few
Russian trolls?

Although Russia is toward the bottom of the top ten countries in terms of
oil reserves, it faces a problem of distribution that the others don't.
Imperial ties and recent military incursions have left the distribution of
oil and gas from the Middle East to Europe largely under Western control.
Syria, Turkey and North Africa are necessary to moving this oil and gas
through pipelines to Europe. That Syria, Libya and Turkey are now, or
recently have been, militarily contested adds credence to the contention
that the 'international community's' heroes and villains are largely
determined by whose hands their oil and gas resources are currently in.

Democratic Party loyalists who see Putin, Maduro et al as the problemfirst
need to answer for the candidate they put forward in 2016. Hillary Clinton
led the carnage in Libya that murdered
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/26/libya-war-saving-live
s-catastrophic-failure> 30,000 - 50,000 innocents for Western oil and gas
interests. Russia didn't force the U.S. into its calamitous invasion of
Iraq. Russia didn't take Americans' jobs, houses and pensions in the Great
Recession. Russia didn't reward Wall Street for causing it. Democrats need
to take responsibility for their failed candidates and their failed Party.

Part of the point in relating oil reserves to American foreign entanglements
is that the countries and leaders involved are incidental. Vladimir Putin
certainly seems smarter than the American leadership. But this has no
bearing on whether or not his leadership of Russia is broadly socially
beneficial. The only possible resolution of climate crisis requires both
Russia and the U.S. to greatly reduce their use of fossil fuels. Reports
have it that Mr. Putin has no interest in doing so. And once the marketing
chatter is set to the side, neither do the Americans.

By placing themselves as arbiters of the electoral process, the Director of
National Intelligence and the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI can effectively
control it. Is it accidental that the candidate of liberal Democrats in the
2016 election was the insiders'- the intelligence agencies' and military
contractors,' candidate as well? Implied is that these agencies and
contractors are now 'liberal.' Good luck with that program if you value
peace and prosperity.

There are lots of ways to create free and fair elections if that is the
goal. Use
<https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/hand-marked-paper-ballots-and-virgi
nias-2017-elections.html> paper ballots that are counted in public,
automatically register all eligible voters, make election days national
holidays and eliminate 'private' funding of electoral campaigns. But why
make elections free and fair when fanciful nonsense about 'meddling' will
convince the liberal class to deliver power to grey corpses in the CIA, NSA
and FBI for the benefit of a tiny cabal of stupendously rich plutocrats. Who
says America isn't already great?

 

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