Matt Taibbi 'Color Revolutions....'

Courtesy of Matt Taibbi's subscription based news reporting... Here is an excerpt..
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with, but since there seems to be only a handful of real investigators in journalism who are
not owned by ..  The Left or The Right .. but want to dig. I am very happy to drop some
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 the deeper story.

The Color Revolutions Come Home

The impeachment process brings the joys of "democracy promotion" stateside.

Nov 30

Subscriber's post

The first round of televised impeachment hearings is over. What was the point?

Support for impeachment nationally was unaffected by hearings. In battleground states, public enthusiasm may even have declined. Conviction of Donald Trump in the Senate remains a fantasy, as not one Republican has budged. Despite months of constant coverage denouncing him as a criminal, Trump’s approval rating has ticked up.

In the end, impeachment may not fulfill any of its ostensible purposes, except one: as a bullhorn of crazy. Its leader, House Intelligence Committee chief Adam Schiff, is a musical comedy version of a show trial inquisitor. Vainglorious, stupid, and certain, full of tears to be shed for party, never using two words when there’s time for a hundred, the California Democrat is using the circus to right a smorgasbord of wrongs.

He seeks to restore fealty to theories of foreign subversion villainously forgotten by the post-Mueller public, denounce as “conspiracy theory” rumors of wrongdoing by the intelligence and enforcement agencies, discredit all disobedient/non-credentialed media, and declare as a matter of law the error of voters who in 2016 set in motion events that led to the undermining of our sacred national security consensus.

If the flavor of the PR campaign against “dictator-like” Trump feels familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it before. At least, I have. I feel like I’ve been watching the same story on an endless loop for almost thirty years. 

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American diplomats push unpopular “reforms”; nationalist movement rises in response; America tries to overthrow the nationalist.  

We call it “democracy promotion,” and I got to watch it up close, over a dozen years in developing countries like Russia, Mongolia, and Uzbekistan.

“DP” begins with starter kits of party-hardy young American consultants breezing into foreign capitals, where they hang out only with each other in a conspiracy of monolingualism. Their first job is assigning White Hats and Black Hats to local politicians, based upon which are and are not friendly to American business interests.

Step two is making sure White Hats remain in power forever, and Black Hats stay out. In almost 100% of cases, this involves pushing policies that inspire local populations to hate us. Even where they never existed, we create rationales for anti-American movements.

Russia and Ukraine, the two central players in the impeachment drama, were prime examples.

In Ukraine in the early nineties, we forked over $371 million in loans through the World Bank back in return for “reforms.” “Reform” was code for austerity, i.e. budget cuts causing mass layoffs, the end of agricultural subsidies, and raised prices for food, heating oil, rent, and a host of other day-to-day costs. We also sponsored high-speed privatization programs with the aid of geniuses from institutions like Harvard. 

These programs massively accelerated corruption in both countries, as White Hats in Moscow and Kiev used the opportunity to “privatize” valuable state assets into the hands of cronies. 

When anti-American sentiment rose in response, our consultants thought it was fake news. The notion that ex-communist peoples might associate them with economic misery or corruption had to be vicious rumor. After all, newspapers were filled with tales of happy foreigners transitioning to a market economy, enjoying the thrills of VCR ownership, Pizza Hut, etc. Russia even had its own IKEA!

In an amazing example of how we chased bad decisions with worse ones, we helped arrange a $10.2 billion I.M.F. loan in 1996 that, in a conspicuous coincidence, almost exactly matched Boris Yeltsin’s Chechen war debt. In other words, to protect our White Hat in Moscow, we essentially financed the invasion of Grozny. 

By the late nineties we’d helped put millions of Slavs out of jobs, turned off their heat, canceled their health care, jacked up rents, created a swinish oligarch class (to create a financial firewall against communism), and helped finance a brutal war on their territory. 

Unsurprisingly, nationalist movements surged, forcing the U.S. to meddle more, to protect the initial meddling. This interminable stupidity cycle is the hallmark of American foreign policy.

   ............................ and he goes on with a lot more that will make you think.  I hope.