Brezhnev and Obama, Comrades in Disintegration |
The New Emperor of the East |
In
1964 the economy of the Soviet Union had all but stopped growing for
more than two years. Grand
official corruption and penetrating economic madness was evident for all
of those in power to see.
The proxy wars with the United States in Vietnam and beyond were not
going well, especially now that the Johnson Administration was
escalating force levels aggressively.
The Soviet Union had experienced a traumatizing retreat from the
Cuban missiles crisis in 1962.
The Soviets looked in 1964 to be
losing the global cold war with the United States, all just a few years
after Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev had famously predicted on US soil
the soviet communist monolith would bury the United States economically
sometime soon. The boast
looked unhinged in 1964.
The Soviet Politboro decided a big
change in leadership was needed.
If the soviet economic machine could be returned to the steady
growth that sudden industrialization wrought during Stalin’s reign all
would be well again. A focus
on communist fundamentals was needed tossing away the shoe-pounding
foreign diplomacy of Nikita Krushchev, along with his trip to
Disneyland. |
|
Brezhnev was therefore an ideal
compromise candidate for a back-trenching approach to the future.
He was handed power in the Soviet Union in 1964 in an orderly way
with no known protests from any corner.
The powers that be still ruled supreme, now just without
Krushchev.
Brezhnev was thought by his Politiboro
backers to be a transitional figure, like Stalin was thought of before
him. Brezhnev beat those
expectations in a unique way for the Soviet Union.
He simply outlived his potential opponents.
This new Soviet wrinkle would prove quite telling in the events
that unfolded for the next thirty years. |
In the fall of 2008 the United States
economy had turned in a short year from a seeming never-ending growth
machine into an historic nosedive along Main Street and a 40% crash in
the value of stocks and many bonds.
In response, President George Bush,
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Congress led a bailout
parade for the rich of numbing proportion.
The giveaway left the gangster class that largely induced the
crash still fully in power on Wall Street and largely unaffected by
their own mistakes and much worse.
Though both Republicans and Democrats
were fully responsible for the desperate perpetuation of the American
financial oligarchy, the public was likely to punish Bush’s party, the
Republicans, for the collapse and bailouts in the coming federal
election.
With Bush not on the ballot in 2008, a
new President was coming to the White House.
The Republicans chose as a candidate
that year an unreformed cold warrior who never claimed to know much
about economic policy, but always voted for Wall Street anyway.
He actually led the bailout parade.
Yet, John McCain was a man who had a
wild streak about him that threatened plutocrats.
McCain quaintly believed he was in high office ultimately to
serve the public good. Only
his blinders kept his loyalty in place in the most important ways.
The presidential primaries for the
Democratic nomination in 2008 were fought among a group of candidates
especially unqualified for national office.
The scandal-ridden, known disaster mismanager, wholly uninspiring
Hillary Clinton was elevated to frontrunner status in this weak field.
Yes, disaster arrived again for Hillary Clinton’s leadership.
All of the money in Bill Clinton’s world could not change that
enduring equation and make Hillary the President.
At first it seemed the two telegenic
Democratic candidates for the nomination would just about divide the
thrill centered voters whom are many in the Democratic Party.
Both offered stiff leftist proposals for saving the poor and
beyond.
One of those candidates had spent a
full term as a United States Senator and had run as John Kerry’s VP
candidate in 2004. John
Edwards also had financial staying power for the race, but had few
special interest deep pockets to rely on, yet anyway.
Brand new US Senator Barack Obama was
the wild card in the race.
Surprisingly, his complete absence of experience justifying a seat in
national office was not harming the candidate much at all in the polls
or in his greetings in Washington, D.C.
The man who took pedestrian school grades all of to the way to
the Harvard Law Review could not be criticized as unqualified by
Democrats. Such a sentiment
for such a man would violate the religion of most American leftists. |
||
|
||
The Obama wall to wall presence on
Iowa television outspent Hillary with John Edwards only a comparative
blip on the tube. The caucus
result was a virtual three-way tie, Obama 32%, Edwards 29%, Clinton 28%.
Considering Obama’s unique status in bringing new voters to a
caucus it was an especially tight win for the heavyweight spender.
One would judge though from the
leftish media coverage that a tremendous upset had been accomplished,
causing an historic event in Iowa.
It was a theme that would endure through to the end of the
campaign and beyond. The
mainstream press had become mystically enthralled with Obama not long
after Obama’s schmoozing on Wall Street in 2007.
John Edwards, the actual
over-performer in the Iowa caucus, was cast as a loser who could not win
in New Hampshire. Edwards’
donations went almost blank right through till his loss in South
Carolina where he received 0% of the black Democrat vote.
That pushed him out of the race.
He eventually endorsed Obama at about the time Edwards’
illegitimate love child was born.
Hillary stubbed Obama’s toe in New
Hampshire with her crying for the cameras routine, but tears alone were
not enough. Obama’s steady
big money had Bill and Hillary Clinton, the King and Queen of the 1%
that personally liberated Wall Street fraud, be forced to pitch into
Hillary’s campaign $5m of their own money.
Bill Clinton learned nonetheless it is
impossible to beat a US Senator in Democratic primaries when that
candidate garners 90% plus of the black vote.
Bill also learned anew how poorly suited for leadership Hillary
truly is. It was a lesson
Obama would learn fully once in office.
After wrapping up the Democratic
nomination Obama’s unnatural force shield burst into Leviathan mode.
The plutocrats now had their
olive-branch to offer the masses, a true man of the people.
The US media had their marching orders.
No one would get away with trivializing this man so loved by the
people, certainly not by employing journalism.
No one would get in the way of the 2007 deal with Obama to
continue the reign of Ben Bernanke and Larry Summers and Bob Rubin and
all of their cronies too.
All of this was thought at the time already graven into history.
Turned out it was.
There would be no chances taken with John McCain suddenly coming
out of his stupor while serving as President.
God save the new Emperor! |
||
The East Feasts on its Own |
||
Just because the Soviet economy had stalled in the early 1960s did not
mean the well-to-do in the empire had to join in the privation the
soviet citizens began to suffer.
The ascension to power of Kruchshev in 1958 meant the end of
Stalinist terror, at least at the higher levels of government.
A terrible insecurity was lifted from the ruling class while the
spoils of power were now widely shared within the Soviet elite, national
and local.
Krushchev and Brezhnev were to prove
to be the patron saints of official corruption in the USSR on the
grandest of scales.
Though the Soviet Union owned every
inch of real estate, somehow party members occupied mansions and went to
dachas in the country on vacation.
The USSR military brass lived very high as well, with many goods
and services provided under the table by the Party.
Mid-level Party members had large Swiss bank accounts.
For the soviet citizen a bribe was
required to for a surgery or most other medical services.
Taking a trip to see a family member more than a few miles away
may require a bribe for the necessary license to travel domestically.
A bribe demand could be expected for most government services
(the non-black market).
There were few paths to what passed
for success in life in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev that did not
involve a central fealty to the communist party in some essential way.
The price of soviet life became for everyone a false pretense to
support the communist system as being egalitarian and loved.
In one his first initiatives
repressing civil liberties, in 1965 Brezhnev’s court arrested and jailed
two well known authors charging them with writings harmful to the Soviet
State and with the use of a pseudonym in writing, the
Sinyavsky–Daniel trial.
The two wrote works of fiction.
They were given hard-labor prison sentences of five years and
seven years, sentences which both authors were made to serve out.
Soviets traveling abroad knew
defection or even critical words would endanger their families back
home. It was a serious crime
in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union to spread information that may contradict the
image of a perfect socialist juggernaut the USSR always claimed to be.
Many thousands of Soviet dissidents
were subjected to involuntary psychiatric exams and confined treatment
for alleged mental disorders. Official
diagnoses included political madness for human rights advocates and
psychotic delusion syndrome for religious dissenters.
Those openly wishing to migrate from the Soviet Union routinely
were led away to a mental hospital. Soviet
psychiatrists often cited the texts of Marx and Lenin as the
characteristics of a healthy mind that the dissenters had somehow lost.
As part of his bargain to rule,
Brezhnev was an economic reformer early on, implementing the loosening
of central planning and the provision of profit incentives for both
industry and workers.
Brezhnev’s point man for the reforms was the author of the reforms,
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin,
who wanted to imitate the effective aspects of Western economies, even
the decentralization of power from Moscow to the provinces.
The economic
data for the era of the Kosygin reforms show the plan to have been a
great success with Soviet worker incomes growing steadily from 1965 to
1975.
Yet, it was
his economic reforms that proved to be the end of Kosygin as a major
player in the USSR. Pressure
mounted relentlessly from communist party bureaucrats over the reforms
because of the shifting of decent consumer products from theft and graft
to the benefit of Soviet workers.
Kosygin was vilified as the man who turned away from communism
while seeking to enrich a few friends, a quite maddening claim given the
source of the complaint.
Once thought
to be the main rival to Brezhnev as Party leader, by the time all of his
reforms had been ended in 1978 Kosygin held few of the offices and
prerogatives and influence he had carried in the USSR for more than
twenty years. |
||
The huge
Soviet investment in the Vietnam War proved entirely wasted when the
divided nation became reunited under Ho Chi Mihn in 1974 winning the war
against the United States and South Vietnam.
Thereafter it was like the Soviet Union no longer existed for
Vietnam. The dominoes never
came close to falling in Southeast Asia for the USSR.
Brezhnev’s
propping up of Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the forays into other Latin
American nations was another large initiative yielding precious few
returns to offset the huge costs.
Brezhnev’s
last war, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan begun in 1979, proved to be
a complete disaster for the USSR.
The Soviet army was effectively routed from the country by 1989,
seven years after Brezhnev’s death.
CIA supported Afghan insurgents, like Osama Bin Laden’s Al Quaeda
supported with US arms, proved far too much for the disappearing
communist superpower.
Possibly the
most telling policy initiative Brezhnev approved was the new approach to
the economy after Kosygin’s departure from power.
Brezhnev’s
Politboro thought, if the answer is not in empowering the workers and
factory managers, the solution must then be in a top-down program this
is quite serious this time in achieving results, the communist way.
The Soviet
Union’s full employment policy, begun as a Stalinist fantasy, was pushed
into high gear by Brezhnev after he purged away his Western ways with
the economy for good.
One thing
the USSR never lacked was jobs.
Indeed, it was the legal obligation of the Soviet State to
provide a job for every adult person able to work.
Everyone was legally required to work. Mothers with young
children were given some slack, but not much room under the letter of
Soviet law. The retirement
age of 65 was ten years beyond Soviet male life-expectancy at the time.
Brezhnev
decided the reason national production goes down is because not enough
people are working to create goods and services.
It was now past time to make sure soviet citizens also met their
obligation to society, to the state, to work if they possibly can.
Somehow millions and millions of people were not working for no
reason Brezhnev could not ordered changed.
So he did.
Millions of
soviet citizens in the 1980s were ordered to take a state job, seriously
this time. Plenty would be
made available. It was the
patriotic duty of everyone to work (or else).
What had
already become a stagnant workplace in Soviet factories and farms became
a laughing stock. Workers
assigned new jobs had no work to do that was not already being done by
other workers. Every part of
the economy was affected, six coat checkers in a hotel lobby instead of
one or two, work shifts spent entirely sitting in a room waiting for
your turn to work, young mothers with several children ordered to work
often at caring for the children of the other mothers forced to work,
hordes of new government office workers searching for new ways to engage
citizens in legal tangles only a bribe seems able to remedy.
Though the
official exchange rate for the Russian ruble was pegged to the value of
the US dollar at a ratio of about 5 to 1, the black market rate in the
USSR for a single dollar rose to as much as 200 rubles if rubles could
buy dollars at all. Barter
steadily became the principle practice in the black market.
The effect
of the hard-wired full employment policy was a plummet in the
productivity of even the good workers and the loss of a job’s good name
altogether. It seems the
slack worker model infected just about everyone eventually, especially
with each pay package worth less and less in the real economy, the black
market economy. All “state
workers” concerned themselves with was leaving quickly so they can get
to their black market jobs that were paying their bills free of
taxation.
A perfect
phrase in Russian dark humor was coined to describe the Brezhnev era
relationship of the socialist worker to the Soviet State: “We pretend to
work and they pretend to pay us”. |
An American Dream Turns Away |
During his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama
promised to bring the nation together into renewed economic growth using
high-powered Keynesian intervention like never before.
There was also to be a federal boost to a green energy future.
Obama promised a new American foreign policy with an open hand
to all nations, a foreign policy that would reverse all of the Bush
tyrannies following the attacks of 9/11.
Obama’s approval ratings reached to
the 70s around the time of his first Inaugural Address.
The American political divide was already collapsing in the face
of the astonishing new Obama leadership much of the nation chimed.
Then came something entirely new for
Obama: trying to improve the lives of Americans through legislation and
executive authority, especially with his powers as commander-in-chief.
In his first years in office, Obama
had three major legislative initiatives enacted by the large Democratic
majorities he held in both houses of Congress.
By June, 2009 there was the trillion-dollar, pork-barrel, rush
the money out the door “stimulus program” using money printed from thin
air. Later, there was
also the new national health insurance plan, Obamacare.
Even Obama’s Wall Street regulation plan, Dodd-Frank, was entered
onto the federal law books in his first term.
Obamacare perpetuates the private
health-insurance and pharmaceutical industries as a close crony captive
of federal regulation bribed to the max even more, while diabolically
making the survival of private health insurance not even possible over
the long term. Obamacare
tries to imitate a free market with a top-down federal approach to what
your fair ration of health care is going to be.
Obamacare’s numbers are so unconnected
to the real world Obama himself was forced weeks ago to delay
implementation of key parts of the program for fear of proving too soon
the system as designed is simply nowhere near fundable as planned.
The people who are to subsidize
the new system, the young and the healthy, are simply not inclined to
sign up. It seems Obamacare, if
implemented as planned for this year, would prove to be the largest levy
of fines in the history of the world:
The Obamacare generous increases in
health-care coverage are in place raising insurance premiums by record
amounts, pushing the time-bomb into place.
The main goal for delaying the
Obamacare employer mandate appears to be to strangle the private
health-care system even faster than Obamacare allows for by forcing many
millions onto the “state health-care exchanges” as employers feel forced
to drop the offering of health-care insurance to their workers
altogether. It is the “The
Only Option” born of the “Public Option” idea, something like Medicaid
for all.
Obamacare’s
booming cost projections make the failed stimulus program look the
bargain of the two. |
It is in the arena of financial
regulation that Obama legislation has proved the most inconsequential as
a remedy for an ill. The
Dodd-Frank law was never intended to do anything but enhance the
monopoly position of the Too Big to Fail Banks, the bill’s authors for
the most part. So many
hidden subsidies and loopholes for the TBTF lie within the hundreds of
pages of Dodd-Frank it would take a road-grader to make a level playing
field for the thousands of smaller banks in the United States.
Obama’s presentation of Dodd-Frank as a consumer protection bill
and the law’s true intended effect on Wall Street is the perfect example
of the dichotomy between Obama rhetoric and Obama policy in office.
Under Dodd-Frank, the TBTF became far
larger than ever with leverage still cranked past the ceiling.
The biggest threat to financial stability, derivative gambling in
the shadow credit market by Wall Street, remains unregulated as so long
ago endorsed by Alan Greenspan.
The Fed is addicted to interest rate swap arrangements in that
shadow market as one of the best way to keep interest rates for the TBTF
and the Treasury unnaturally low.
European banking is addicted to dollar swap offerings by the Fed
and its protégés.
Obama federal budgets spent Fed
supplied counterfeit so recklessly the federal debt nearly doubled in
less than five years to $17Trillion, over $50,000 owed now for every
man, woman and child in the nation.
Even applying Obama’s rigged federal
numbers for inflation, GDP and employment, the 1% under Obama has
received 90% of the gains made in the economic recovery Obama claims is
underway. Not surprisingly,
the Wall Street barons fed trillions of counterfeit by the Fed and
Congress have become even more fabulously wealthy than they were before
the 2008 collapse. The TBTF
have fully morphed beyond under Obama into the “Too Big to Prosecute
Too”, no one jailed for the massive fraud that led to the 2008 financial
bust.
Trillions of Fed QE forever has
further empowered Obama and enriched Wall Street while moving the
federal government into a prime place on the chain of title for upward
of 90% of American homes with a mortgage.
The near $4 Trillion the Fed paid for its official balance sheet
is unlikely to be returned upon sale for even one-half of that sum, if
ever properly valued.
Yet, it is in foreign policy that
Obama has most dishonestly crushed the liberty of Americans and their
hopes for a better future.
Serious consequences would be imposed
by a seriously leftist President for the quite recent use of torture
amid other human rights violations committed by the Cheney gang and
beyond.
A
leftist President committed to civil liberties would have exposed and
largely ended NSA spying on Americans and other nations.
The misnamed Patriot Act would be replaced with new civil
liberties legislation by a Democrat Congress and the new, so-liberal
President. The privacy of
non-Americans naturally would be respected as well, especially our
allies overseas.
Certainly, a fresh Democrat President
would never embark on the largest scale assassination campaign in
foreign lands ever committed by a sovereign state not at war with
another state.
A leftist President would have worked
seriously toward ending the war on drugs at home and around the world.
Obama tripled down on US troops in
Afghanistan to win his “good war” through a massive campaign of
assassination and propaganda.
Later having lost the Afghanistan war clearly, Obama is moving
the troops to Kuwait and other Persian Gulf locales looking toward new
US wars in Iran and Syria.
Obama covered over and failed to
prosecute anyone for the torture and spying that had run amok before him
breaking his solemn obligation to do so as President.
Guantanamo Bay prison opened by George Bush remains in operation
under Obama almost five years after he took office, now featuring the
forced-feeding of hunger strikers.
Obama’s jail guards strip American
hero Bradley Manning of his clothes while locking him away for months in
a small cell, but Obama’s types could never strip Manning of his honor
and his dignity, something beyond his torturers.
It has been people like Manning and Snowden and Greenwald that
have always had the courage to try to slay a growing tyrant.
Pentagon spending surged under Obama
along with the rest of the federal budget.
A now permanent army of “private contractors”, once known as
mercenaries, now feed at the Pentagon budget with the usual rules of war
only sketchily applying to their missions.
|
Obama has directed the sudden death by
drone attack of over 4,000 people living in other nations, including
hundreds of children and at least a handful of Americans.
Obama’s drone assassination totals now dwarf those of George
Bush. Never before has such
a brazen, brutal disregard for the sovereignty of other nations and for
international law been placed on open display by a powerful nation.
America’s present taste for assassination knows few bounds.
In his first days in office, Obama
bugged most of the diplomatic delegations attending a G-20 summit in
London. He certainly was listening in on those phone calls.
Obama expanded the secrecy and
scope of NSA spying on all peoples across the world as now becoming
widely known due to the whistleblowing of Edward Snowden.
Obama secretly spies on every conversation on the planet
encouraging other nations to use and join in on the surveillance of
their citizens.
Obama has collected a massive database
on all Americans he personally owns that he can freely consult at any
time. It sure helps in
dealing effectively with political rivals of any sort with few legal
niceties applying.
Instead of proposing new civil
liberties protections as one would expect from a leftist President,
Obama ‘strengthened” the Patriot Act and obtained from Congress the
power to hold anyone prisoner without charges or access to the outside
world, a law the old USSR would blush over.
Obama’s main contribution to drug
policy is to place the drug cartels’ money men among the TBTF banks as
almost fully beyond the reach of the drug laws.
Obama’s main worries with ending drug prohibition as the rest of
the world slowly does so are two: the loss of US prison jobs and the
loss of the international money-laundering tax-free profits for the
TBTF.
Obama betrayed his own professed
liberal creed on all of these points.
He instead feverishly served the US entrenched powers in all of
these important ways. Obama
proved far closer to George Bush and Dick Cheney in his policies than he
would have been when compared to a theoretical George McGovern
presidency.
Yet somehow, the media and public
shield for Obama largely endures, even after his temporary jilting by
the plutocrats for wooden, tax-dodging Mitt Romney in last year’s
election. Obama’s political
base, sadly including most liberal intellectuals, retains the blinders
when it comes to the President and his actual policies, spoken and
unspoken. The agony in leftist
pundits’ words defending the Obama tyrannies that are being revealed
week by week is painful to see.
Aside
from rhetorical maneuvering by Obama to please public opinion, the top
of the 1% remain quite safe in their 2007 purchase of the Obama
administration. It has
proven a very successful investment.
It is an alliance that has become the biggest part of Obama’s
world, just like Bill Clinton’s world.
Obama still proposes very little serious legislation that is not
pre-approved by his global masters. |
The Brezhnev Legacy: The Era of Stagnation |
When Brezhnev died in office in 1982
it is believed that most soviet citizens truly mourned his passing.
His anointed successor, KGB boss Yuri Andropov, assumed power
seamlessly, just as Brezhnev had in 1964.
Brezhnev was interned in Red Square as
a grand Hero of the Soviet Union with a tremendous military display.
Nothing in public pronouncements or in Kremlin logs show Brezhnev
engaged in the vanities of Stalin or Lenin in connection with his bodily
remains, dust to dust for Brezhnev.
Twice however Brezhnev’s coffin failed
him at his funeral events.
While being lowered by hoist to Lie-in-State the coffin bottom failed
and dropped Brezhnev’s body through the bottom.
Later, the now metal-clad, overweight coffin was dropped
mistakenly by undertakers into the grave chamber with a resounding bang.
It seemed soviet engineering and craftsmanship was still hitting
new lows.
Yet, in 1982, the Soviet Union
remained in legend one of only two world superpowers.
The Soviet Union had been an empire for more than a generation
that stretched from Siberia to Berlin and engaged the West throughout
the globe. Though soviet
workers were now forced to rely on an underground economy to earn a
living, the soviet standard-of-living for the masses was not much
different yet than it had been in 1964.
Brezhnev times had made the prosperity of the communist party
insiders quite grand for a long time though.
Brezhnev’s successor, Yuri Andropov,
advertised as a fresh breath of air, died only one year after assuming
communist party leadership.
His successor, Constantin Chernenko, became the fourth straight Soviet
leader across forty years to take power by acclamation of the Politboro,
all with no known political assassinations involved.
Gorbachev was the bitter pill the
Soviet gerontocracy was unwilling to take when Brezhnev and Andropov
died. By 1984 though, even
the communist insiders were quickly losing their standard of living.
The “soviet workers” by 1984 had all but given up the pretense
that the official economy should produce anything.
Gorbachev came to power with the full
discretion to change things granted to him by the Politboro.
Everyone one else at the pinnacle of Soviet power was clueless in
how to combat an official economy that was becoming a ghost faster and
faster. A sign of the
desperate times for the communist party, Gorbachev’s mandate even
extended to loosening the reign on political dissent and encouraging the
regeneration of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Gorbachev’s “perestroika” was a cure
for the economy that looked a lot like the changes made by Kosygin
thirty years earlier.
“Glasnost” was the new policy of openness that increasingly let the
truth out concerning the true state of the economy and of soviet life in
general.
Yet, all of the “New Thinking” by
Gorbachev proved to do much more to undermine the crumbling soviet
edifice than to correct its course.
The soviet enlightenment became just how bad things had really
become. The communist party
was to blame, not the answer.
By 1986 Gorbachev and the soviet
newspapers were characterizing Brezhnev’s reign as communist leader the
“Era of Stagnation”
Brezhnev’s immediate family was investigated and convicted of
wide-ranging official corruption.
. Brezhnev’s daughter and son-in-law were given lengthy prison
sentences. All public places
bearing Brezhnev’s name were ordered reverted to their former name,
including Brezhnev’s village of birth.
A poll of Russian citizens found that
10% thought of the Stalin era to be a positive period of time while only
7% thought of the Brezhnev era as positive time for the nation.
The name of Brezhnev became such a scourge over time members of
his family abandoned the name as a curse. |
Four years before Brezhnev’s death
Karol Wojtyła was elected the
first non-Italian Catholic Pope in centuries, John Paul II. It was the
start of a revolution in Poland.
It would be five years after Gorbachev took power that the
Solidarity Union movement led by Lech Walesa usurped complete power in
Poland in 1989.
Within that
same year, 1989, five other communist satellite governments would fall
in street revolutions, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and
even hardcore East Germany.
Unlike under
Brezhnev in 1968, Gorbachev’s Red Army did very little to quell the
revolution against communist government in Eastern Europe.
Legions of soviet tanks stood off in the woods while communist
governments melted into nothing in a largely bloodless way. “People
Power” prevailed everywhere as the Iron Curtain magically collapsed
without a figurative shot being fired.
The
revolutions in Eastern Europe disrupted key economic ties in place for
decades causing further chaos in the USSR economy.
It ended the Warsaw Pact leading Soviet Generals to the panic
button in planning war with the West.
Somehow, the
long sodden Soviet Duma, Stalin’s parliament, sprung to life in the USSR
for the first time with figures like Boris Yeltsin, a renegade past
Politboro member, leading a suddenly allowed national opposition
movement to the communist party.
As external
and internal chaos seemed to be enveloping the communist party in the
summer of 1991, the soviet old guard in the Politboro made a last stand
for its hold on power.
It was the first true appearance of the harshest face of soviet
communism since the time of Stalin.
The attempted coup would prove to be the final disaster for the
USSR.
When
Gorbachev was arrested at his vacation home in the Crimea he refused to
voluntarily hand over power.
News of the coup leaked immediately leading to open national protests
like the soviet citizens had never engaged in with Yeltsin giving a
speech atop a tank. Most
importantly, when the KGB head ordered the Red Army to shoot most
soldiers by far refused. The
coup was over in three days.
The people demanded “New Thinking”.
The now softened “Soviet Iron Fist” had turned limp, sedated by
thirty years of wide corruption.
The
hard-line coup’s main effect was to end Gorbachev’s hopes to refashion
the Soviet Union into a league of independent countries.
By the end of 1991 eleven of the twelve nations of the Soviet
Union declared independence and achieved it without a shot being fired.
The Kremlin
became the capital of the Russian Federation.
Yeltsin’s shadow government of sorts merged with the soviet
central government.
Gorbachev was deposed from power without an election or an overthrow of
government occurring.
By 1992
Brezhnev stood with Stalin and Ivan the Terrible in the public’s view as
the three greatest tyrants in Russian history.
Though
little is known by the public of the private lives and personal habits
of any soviet leader, there is a part of Brezhnev’s personal priorities
that was self-evident.
As time went
on Brezhnev was awarded medal after medal.
Most of his official images showed a chest-full of medals.
It was quite a coincidence for one person and must have been
quite a surprise for Brezhnev each time, hardly a military man.
|
|
By the time
of his death Brezhnev sported more than fifty official medals from the
Order of Lenin to the Medal of Victory awarded to him by Poland.
In 1978 Brezhnev was awarded the Order of Victory medal even
though the award was limited to valiant military commanders.
In 1989 Gorbachev’s USSR revoked the award of that medal to
Brezhnev. |
Obama Faces the Mounting Tide |
In 2013, in the midst of his second
term as President, Barack Obama’s legacy is far from written, including
the final years.
Obama’s legacy may well turn on his
likely coming choice made in the same kind of existential moment that
Gorbachev’s USSR faced in Poland and beyond in 1989.
Likely in that same future moment will turn the final
favorability rating of the average American concerning their once widely
loved, so liberal President, along with being the final verdict of
history for Obama’s reign.
The man who must be the luckiest
President ever when it came to the quality of his electoral rivals for
political office, turns out may become the unluckiest US President by
far when it comes to the timing of his ascent to power.
It seems the wild-eyed policy
inventions of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have tipped the Ronald
Reagan to Barack Obama long vice for larcenous central banking over the
cliff, leaving the US and EU economy in the auto-implode mode, ala
Brezhnev’s USSR. The
clock seems clearly in its final hour.
The Great Depression combined with the Dust Bowl may seem child’s
play in 21st Century continents rocked by violence, breakup,
treachery and demagoguery.
The certainty of financial breakup and
plunging standards of living for the West was sealed with the
China/Russia eastern alliance planning to supplant entirely the prime
role of the US dollar in international trade that has lasted for two
generations. The course for
the coming dominance of the East in the world economy was set at just
about the same time Barack Obama was taking power in the US with his
power-elite Wall Street plan in his pocket.
The two plans remain on a collision course, the gold-backed East
against the fiat, insolvent West.
One
day soon the switch will be turned by the East to end the deficits of
the US dollar forever handing a ticket to the third world for the USA
with chaos all around. Gold
and other hard currency will then return world trade to a state of
sanity again. That is
assuming the forces of darkness do not manage to incite war on a grand
scale in order to remain in power.
This is the terrible course the United
States has been on long, long before Obama was elected.
With the 2008 economic crash underway Obama did though have the
circumstances and popularity to effect a reversal in the nation’s course
in favor of a more level playing field for all, as he promised to do.
He went the opposite direction instead.
Obama never made an effort at
something as pro middle-class as the Kosygin reforms in the 1960s USSR
later replicated by Gorbachev.
Now Obama faces the chance of the sort
of reputation demolition Brezhnev underwent following his death.
Though Obama has been on more
television talk shows than any President by far, little is known by the
public of Obama’s personal proclivities, what truly drives him.
Yet, one Obama trait shines out clearly.
As a mere junior US candidate for
national office, Barack Obama asked of Germany to arrange his 2008
campaign speech in Berlin to be in front of the historic Brandenburg
Gate, the place of statesmen like few others in the world.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel firmly declined the absurd
notion.
Nothing stopped Obama though from
creating his own “Obama Seal” during the 2008 nomination fight.
The Obama Seal had characteristics of the Presidential Seal and
of the Obama campaign logo.
The pledge that goes along with the Obama Seal has not been disclosed. |
|
Obama’s finest moment in this hubristic connection came though with his
Democratic Party Convention speech accepting the party’s nomination for
President. He was propped in
front of elegantly carved stone walls that had a close resemblance to
the Emperor’s Coliseum in Ancient Rome. |
Two Men So Different: So Similar in Effect |
Could the two men be more different in so many ways?
The other man gained power as an
outsider through a continent-wide landslide election preceded by dozens
of state primaries and caucuses.
His ascension to power promised big changes in favor of the
average American. The
anti-elitist had been elected.
One man was a lifelong functionary of
totalitarian government. The
other was a well-credentialed professor of the constitution in the
world’s oldest republic.
One man was totally anti-cool: the
other the coolest ever by far.
One man grumbled into a microphone.
The other became the master of the teleprompter.
One man arranged for a military medal
by corrupting the very purpose of the medal.
The other man won the Nobel Prize for Peace with grand promises
alone, mostly later betrayed.
One man promised to double-down on a
forced economy, but allowed for a time bottom-up solutions that
benefited the workers. The
other man promised to bring people power to the nation and then pursued
the interests of the 1% like seldom seen before, reappointing Ben
Bernanke, nearly doubling the debt and decimating the middle class
further.
One man ordered the unemployed to
work. The other paid the
unemployed to remain voters only.
One man kept a communist party
monopoly in all real estate.
The other “guaranteed” to pay banks the mortgages on the homes of nearly
all Americans.
One man turned the state health-care
system into a political tool of repression.
The other seduced and suffocated the private health-care system
to the point of escalating chaos.
One man ruled in seeming eternal
harmony with his political rivals and allies.
All new stories were positive. |
Yet, the similarities between the two
leaders are more telling.
Both men made a hidden bargain for
power that stayed largely in place throughout their time in office.
Both men avenged political dissent
outside a narrow box with prison sentences and media vilification.
Both men secretly spied into the lives
of every citizen while openly claiming the privilege to do so.
Both men hid their mass failures
behind a façade of normality among television talking heads hired and
scripted by the elite class.
Both men had the hubris to believe
Afghanistan can be conquered and ruled for the benefit of a foreign
empire. Both men betrayed
their foreign allies. Both
men had no hesitation in spreading death and war widely across the globe
inventing new methods of their own.
Both men had the folly to believe
their command control of a national economy was truly the way to wide
economic growth. Both men
ruled while the nation’s economy burned underneath a mountain of
official lies.
Both men far preferred buying off
dissent within the elite.
Both men were prepared to ruin people whose dissent went too far.
Both generally wished the best for the average worker while
oblivious to the reasons for their plight.
Both men displayed a regal air
reminiscent of monarchy.
Both men were patrons of a growing nobility of self-servers.
In a phrase, neither man accepted the
rule of law, firmly pushing instead the continued rule of men.
Neither man believed in greater liberty in any real way while
cracking down steadily on human rights.
Brezhnev’s reputation met a proper
fate in infamy that is highly unlikely to ever change.
Obama’s legacy is embattled all around. |
When the Moment Arrives Anew |
If Obama is to avoid lasting
indignities similar to Brezhnev’s the chance may well come at the key
moment of social disruption brought on by the falling of the economy’s
hollow pillars, when the start of a new future starting near scratch is
only opposed by the failing elite of the past owed all of that money.
It is a similar set of choices successfully made for mankind and
his nation by Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet Union imploded from its
eternal wall of lies.
Should the financial collapse strike
like never before with millions of Americans in the streets ala Egypt,
will the constitutional scholar from the bosom of the people with the
taste for blood finally turn away from his Faustian bargain with
Beelzebub when the question becomes initiating
unnecessary world war to somehow save the power elite in the West, when
the question becomes firing on protesters?
Or will the inhuman
face of total power appear in clarity should Obama’s shield finally
disintegrate in the face of economic devastation and real truth-telling,
should they come in sudden force?
Will war abroad and at home prevail in
a Presidential effort to keep the people’s chains in place?
If tried, will it succeed?
Or can a second failed 20th
Century empire gratefully be allowed to crash without a shot being
fired?
For the next few years, which way
history may repeat for the end of the American empire seems to turn
largely on one man, just as it did over twenty years ago for the empire
of the East. Only one man
just now appears able to make most of the difference for the West, the
difference between the start of renewal and the start of war. |
Mr. Merrill is the editor of the
Alaska Freedom News,
formerly the
Hampton Roads Freedom News.
|