The methods of the palace coup that the WSWS predicted have come so obviously to the fore over the course of the impeachment proceedings that it reminds me of the period immediately prior to the First World War.

The period immediately preceding the war saw the foreign ministries in all countries at odds with other elements in the various governments. In ostensibly “democratic” countries like France, the foreign ministry consciously undermined the Prime Minister Caillaux with a scandal for his attempts to conciliate Germany in the aftermath of the Second Moroccan crisis. At the same time, all of the intrigues amongst the Hohenzollern, Hapsburgs, and Romanovs and their domestics quarrels with their internal, neutered parliaments were projected into the squabble for territory in the Balkans.

In short, the form of the global political crisis today takes a similar form to the global crisis faced by the Imperialist powers prior to WWI. The competition for markets, resources, and geopolitical influence fuels the squabbles between rival cliques in the ruling class. At the same time this exacerbates internal class tensions. War is the ultimate political expression of the projection of these tensions outward. This was the case in the Balkans in the early 1910s; so it is the case in Ukraine in 2019.

The only resolution to this crisis lies, in the words of Rosa Luxembourg, “Socialism or barbarism!” Without the development of an independent, conscious socialist leadership based in the working class, armed with a programme dedicated to taking political power, the 21st century may be humanity’s last.

International working class under the leadership of the party of the world revolution, ICFI, has to overthrow capitalism/imperialism and establish the federation of socialist states on our planet for humanity to be free. Comrade David North's appeal for donations for the wsws is powerful and should be heeded for us to succeed in our fight for international socialism. Thank you comrade Andre Damon.

A coup must be illegal and unconstitutional.

And I’m sure the fascists will respect the “rule of law...”

There is a saying attributed to the banker J.P. Morgan: “A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one and the real one.”

Especially when the "real one" is a crime.

The hearings have lifted the lid on a massive US conspiracy to spend billions of dollars to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014 and foment a civil war that has led to the deaths of thousands of people.

In Washington terminology, “national security” not only means pursuing the worldwide objectives of American imperialism.

But when has this war ever been discussed with the American people?

It means covering-up the real crimes.

...in the congressional hearings this week, government officials declared that any questioning of this aid is virtually treasonous.

And so the lies continue among the "Resistance" (sic). Russia never "invaded" the eastern Ukraine. They sent materiel, and quite a few Russian volunteers understandably entered the fight. If Russia had wanted a real war, they could have taken Kiev in a couple of days.

Imagine Russia overthrowing Mexico's government and installing AQ in the government and admitting them to the Russian federation. This country would have a fit, but that's exactly what we did in Ukraine. After overthrowing the government we have supported and armed the neo Nazis there. The group has ties to Hitler's Nazis that the world once fought and especially Russia. This too would be something that we'd never vote for.
The money spent on the Ukraine coup came out of the food stamps budget. Obama cut it by $5 billion and that's what nuland said it cost us.
The $7 billion surely could have helped the homeless and veterans, but congress just doesn't want to spend the money here.

"I went to the front line approximately 10 times during a hot war… sometimes literally as we heard the impact of artillery, and to see how our assistance dollars were being put to use."

LOL~!~ I'd LOVE to see that report

To the extent of these "investigations and testimony" in Congress does anything more than to spread vicious anti-Russia propaganda will miss the whole point of this spectacle. A soft coup to remove President Trump. Besides the Senate won't vote to remove him on these lousy accusations. So what do these testimonies actually accomplish? Nothing except waste valuable time & money instead of doing something worthwhile. We could end hunger in the USA with the $billions wasted in foreign aid. And more.

Around half of all US "foreign aid" goes to one country - Israel - and almost all the rest is military "aid" intended to buy influence and loyalty in the top brass of countries the US is propping up or intends to stage a coup in. A secondary purpose is that when the US "gives" an aircraft or tank to a country to assist in suppressing its people, that country then has buy all it's spare parts from the US, and those hyper-inflated spare parts soon amount to more than the cost of the original "aid".

Even when the US provides non-military "aid", it usually turns out to be the State Department buying up some toxic product from a company with a warehouse full of unsellable junk and then dumping it on some victim country in Africa or Latin America under the guise of "aid". It is really a case of the US taxpayer bailing out a company with a stockpile of some contaminated food or pharmaceutical they can't legally sell in the US.

Wasted on WAR, you mean.

"Has this war (Ukraine/Russia) ever been discussed with the American people? Was there ever a congressional vote to authorize it? Does anyone believe that if the question, “Do you want to spend billions of dollars to help Ukraine fight a war with Russia,” were posed to the American public, the percentage answering yes would be anything more than minuscule? Of course, that question was never asked."

The nefarious operations of the security state remain clandestine from the public--that's primarily the job of the mainstream media news. If the intelligence agencies were overt about their insidious activities they'd be forced to request public funding via some sort of national plebiscite which would NEVER get passed. This explains why the CIA engages in numerous secret operations such as drug and gun running as well as trafficking in minors (Jeffrey Epstein's sex ring) to secure billions in order to fund fascists/terrorists throughout every continent.

American Special Operations forces are deployed to 70 percent of the world's countries: "They could be found on the outskirts of Sirte, Libya, supporting local militia fighters, and in Mukalla, Yemen, backing troops from the United Arab Emirates. At Saakow, a remote outpost in southern Somalia, they assisted local commandos in killing several members of the terror group al-Shabab. Around the cities of Jarabulus and Al-Rai in northern Syria, they partnered with both Turkish soldiers and Syrian militias, while also embedding with Kurdish YPG fighters and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Across the border in Iraq, still others joined the fight to liberate the city of Mosul. And in Afghanistan, they assisted indigenous forces in various missions, just as they have every year since 2001."

Is any of this ever discussed by the mainstream media news or is any of this ever mentioned during the Democratic Primary debates where not one commentator bothered to ask a question about the recent coup in Bolivia. The resounding answer is no. Remember, in 2017 after two US servicemen were ambushed and killed in the village of Tongo Tongo, Niger everyone in Congress seemed shocked, as if they had no idea that the US military is engaged in activities in West Africa. The mainstream media news seemed equally surprised. Now isn't it peculiar, that 24/7 cable news operations as well as the Congress and the Senate "appear" to be oblivious about most of the US imperialist agenda.

The intelligence agencies operate under the premise of "hallowed be thy name.” In other words, revere, respect, and pay homage to the national security state, but never question or challenge any of their nefarious military activities. This is the mentality which has continued the interminable "War on Terror" and has recently extended the life of the "Patriot Act" by the corrupt political duopoly.

Over the last 25 years, military secrecy has kept the US in unending wars in the Middle East and Africa costing six trillion in tax dollars. And this does not even take into account the funds secured from the opium/heroin drug operations in Afghanistan.

The next time you walk through the streets of a major US city and see hundreds of men, women, and children homeless ask yourself how this is possible in the richest country in the world. Also ask yourself why half the US population is indigent and more than 80 million lack access to decent healthcare. Why--because all taxpayer funds are transferred to the security state. This is NOT to make the public safer, inasmuch as 30,000 Americans die each year from curable diseases, and 70,000 die from drug overdoses. These absconded tax dollars are purely to enhance the power of the intelligence agencies and to continue to fatten the already deep pockets of the arms industry and all the ancillary war profiteers.

https://www.opb.org/news/ar...
https://www.thenation.com/a...

Great post, Charlotte. One thing people don't understand when they support the military interventions everywhere and especially in countries that no one even knows that they are there is that money is basically a sanction on us.

The IMF gives loans with the austerity policies attached, but congress uses our budget deficit as an excuse to cut our social programs and not allow us to have single payer health care. But they have no problem with the fed transferring trillions to the banks even though many have been fined because they have committed fraud. During Obama's tenure the banks received $29 trillion. Think of how that money could have fixed every problem here instead.

Eventually people are going to demand that congress stop representing the upper class and represent us instead. It's going to take big protests to do it, but congress is not afraid of us because they have militarized the police just for that reason.

Great post!

Hear, hear. I wonder how many people actually ask themselves these questions as they step over homeless people lying on the gratings above the subway to keep from freezing to death.

"The next time you walk through the streets of a major US city and see hundreds of men, women, and children homeless ask yourself how this is possible in the richest country in the world."

The type of hideous deprivations about which you complain are *inevitable* in corrupt fascist oligarchical
police state.

Trump's "deal with Russia" is also a con job designed to weaken Russia's alliances with China and Iran.

Absolutely the Democrat's main difference with Trump remains over foreign policy objectives. As I have mentioned yesterday they fear that Trump's contradictory and unstable policies would give Russia a clear advantage over Ukraine.

There are foreign policy differences between Trump & the democrats over Russia. However, perhaps it's the cynic in me but, I wonder how real that difference is to the democrats.
The Democrats hate Trump with a ranker bordering on the pathological. This hated existed well before Trump even won.
That hatred expressed itself through the whole Russia-gate/Mueller investigation. This ludicrous witch hunt, a political attack so lacking in real content only a "never-trumper " or someone intellectually retarded could have believed it, had no real foreign policy issues beyond using Russia as a stick to hit Trump. And now we have the impeachment investigations -- but we are asked to believe that something real lies at its heart (national security) rather than more pathological Trump hatred.
I don't believe any of these political dreck.
This is all symptomatic of a vicious, corrupt elite tearing itself (& it's country) apart for selfish, greedy partisan interests.

Rancor.

Thanks

My sincere hope is that the working would know this truth.

Imitating Trump speaking to Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky, Schiff demanded, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand. Lots of it.”

I thought that quote was Killary and Debbie Wasserman Schultz talking to Christopher Steele.

Impeachment witness Fiona Hill, who has garnered so much praise from the Democrats and the mainstream media, is emblematic of these layers in the state. She studied Russian history at Harvard under the wing of historian Richard Pipes.

Pipes was the leading falsifier of the history of the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks. Pipes viewed the Soviet Union as bent on world conquest, even after Stalin's rise and adoption of socialism in one country. He pushed the false view that the October Revolution was a coup carried out by a small group of people, rather than the popular revolution it in fact was. As elaborated by historian Alexander Rabinowitz, Pipes was hellbent on demonizing Lenin, ignoring Lenin's actual statements in favor of loaded speculation as to his motives. At the instigation of Donald Rumsfeld in the 1970's, Pipes headed up a team of civilian and military experts that completely misconstrued Soviet military capabilities and economic strength, and falsely posited that the Soviet Union did not ascribe to the nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction. Pipes opposed détente. If the Soviet Union did not surrender war was inevitable.

Hill had to absorb to these sorts of views in order to advance in the state American state. She and the other so-called national security experts and diplomats testifying will not hold their posts and justify their existence if they do not ascribe to Putin and Russia as existential enemies, upon whom they project all sorts of dastardly deeds and expansionist aims. As the perspective says, their real function it to justify the destruction of Russia’s ability to frustrate American military operations, which is seen as central to control of the Eurasian landmass, and without which an American victory in the long-term conflict with China is considered impossible.

If their warmongering views are challenged in the populace it is called treasonous.

Remind us as to exactly what represents his academic legacy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

Pipes is also a notorious Zionist Islamophobe and published numerous racist anti-Arab tracts in neocon publications in the 1990s and 2000s. He figured prominently in the buildup to the bogus "War on Terror." He is as close to an agent of evil and maker of mischief as exists in the halls of American power and influence.

It is truly amazing, and a testament to the tremendous influence of the mass media, that pseudo-left liberals, who fancy themselves people of reason and moderation, can side with this vicious faction of power and not see the connections that bind them to some of the most destructive elements anywhere in the world today.

It's a testament to the organic role of a social layer situated between two classes of opposing material interests.

There's NO profit in peace.

Actually there is lots of profit in peace, Charlotte, even from a capitalist ruling class point of view. Just not from a military/industrial/intelligence complex point of view, and that is who controls the US and UK governing regimes.

You have a different situation in China or Russia where the arms manufactures are state owned, removing the profit motive. Post WW iI Germany and Japan rebuilt thriving competitive economies precisely because they were prohibited by their constitutions from squandering their capital on a war machine, so they invested heavily into their civilian infrastructure and projects like Airbus, high speed rail, commercial shipbuilding, automobile manufacturing, and consumer electronics.

It is precisely the US ruling class focus on investing in the corrupt arms manufacturers that has resulted in the decay of the US economy and the loss of its industrial capacity in consumer goods, turning it from the "workshop of the world" in 1946 to an importer of everything you find on the shelves of a department store in 2019.

It is those countries that are not involved in wars that are enjoying the "peace dividend".

It is precisely the US ruling class focus on investing in the corrupt arms manufacturers that has resulted in the decay of the US economy and the loss of its industrial capacity in consumer goods, turning it from the "workshop of the world" in 1946 to an importer of everything you find on the shelves of a department store in 2019.

That's precisely upside-down. It's the decay of the US economy driving investment in the corrupt arms manufacturers.

Fifty years ago, a significant portion of profits was directed into new investments, bringing about an increase of economic growth and jobs as well as rising real wages. But this was not because, as Dalio and Jones maintain, there was a different “business culture” at the time. Rather, such investments were undertaken in the search for increased profit—the same driving force of the capitalist economy today.

However in the past, because reinvestment of profits brought economic growth and rising living standards, the underlying social reality could be obscured. The notion was advanced that capital and the working class were not irreconcilably opposed social forces but were locked together in some kind of mutually beneficial partnership. In the words of President Kennedy, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

But by the mid-1970s, the post-war boom, which had brought a steady profit rate and rising real wages, had well and truly come to an end as profit rates turned down.

This brought two responses: a ferocious and unending offensive against the working class from the beginning of the 1980s—the level of real wages in the US by some estimates has not risen since 1973—and a turn to the accumulation of profits, not through investments in the real economy where profit rates had fallen, but by means of parasitic financial speculation.

Starting under the Reagan administration, the stock market became a key arena for these operations. This required changes in the legal system, one of the most significant of which was the 1982 decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission—the agency responsible for the regulation of the stock market—to allow companies to buy back their own shares, thereby reducing the number of shares and causing their price to rise. Previously, such measures would have brought charges of stock manipulation.

The 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat once wrote: “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”   -Growing inequality risks social revolution, hedge fund chief warns

It seems that writer Chris Hedges, unfortunately, accepts Pipes's view of Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This has become the standard line of the imperialists. Mackinder and Brzezinski would be proud.

No one should be surprised that Hedges "accepts" Pipe's thesis!!!!!!!!!

By the way, Ukraine coup rulers did meddle in USA elections in 2016-backing Killary

The CBC says that was debunked....I obviously do not believe the CBC but I know not one way or the other about it.

https://www.thenation.com/a...

thnx.

See here, for ex
https://twitter.com/MoonofA...

The role is of the US in Ukraine is better compared to that of Britain and France during the American Civil War: supporting the South to weaken the US. Ukraine is Russia’s South, but worse: not just a country with manufactured borders, but with a manufactured history, language and now religion. This will result in a major ‘reconstruction’ one day.