Eric Zuesse
The anti-Russian ‘news’ organization Bloomberg, owned by the former Mayor of Wall Street, Michael Bloomberg, says in a March 3rd editorial about Ukraine, that “Only swift and radical debt relief can help the country out of its economic quagmire,” and that since such debt relief can’t likely be negotiated, “a complete write-off is what creditors will have to consider as their best alternative to a negotiated agreement.”
However, “The first obstacle is Russia,” says Bloomberg, because “Putin expects to be paid in full” (as if his country shouldn’t be “paid in full”).
They recommend “a several-year moratorium on debt payments,” in order to “give Ukraine’s leaders the time and resources they need to right the economy.”
They go on, “Then, assuming the country emerges intact,” there would be “the IMF and the Western nations offering financial support.”
In other words, they propose: taxpayers in the United States and Europe (the IMF) would absorb the inevitable losses from Western aristocrats’ bad bets in Ukraine.
Moreover, that anti-Russian ‘news’ operation says, “They would have to watch a big chunk of their money go out the door to pay off Russia,” even though “As the instigator of the Ukrainian conflict, Russia has only a weak moral argument for getting paid,” says Bloomberg without explanation. Nothing is said there about Russia having lent the earlier loans to Ukraine, the ones that were lent while Ukraine was at peace, prior to the overthrow of Yanukovych (whom Obama replaced); and nothing is said about Western loans pouring in only during the past year while Ukraine has been waging war to exterminate the residents in its Donbass region (the region that had voted 90% for Yanukovych) – so, obviously, those new loans are not going toward any productive enterprise but instead toward the exact opposite: destruction – war – which Bloomberg wants Western taxpayers to pay for, so as to protect Western aristocrats’ investments made in war.
Bloomberg says that Western taxpayers must take the hits because Russia “has an airtight economic and military case – which rests on its crucial natural gas supplies to Ukraine and its ability to rekindle the conflict there.”
Russia would “rekindle” the war that it didn’t actually start; the war actually started at Obama’s Ukrainian coup. However, the nation that started it by overthrowing the democratically elected President, which is the United States, isn’t the nation that’s facing the sanctions; it’s the one that’s imposing the sanctions, just as it imposed the current racist-fascist dictators upon Ukraine and requires them to exterminate the residents in the region that had voted 90% for the man Obama overthrew. (If those people aren’t eliminated but remain as voters in Ukraine, then Obama’s coup in Ukraine won’t survive a future election – especially now, after Obama’s ethnic cleansing to kill them.)
Bloomberg blames not Obama, who perpetrated the coup and ended the peace and requires the ethnic cleansing in order to get rid of the residents in the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the man he overthrew, but instead Bloomberg blames Putin, for unidentified reasons. Obama himself established the sanctions against Russia, as a response to Russia’s blocking Obama’s new Ukrainian regime from invading Crimea, where the public were overwhelmingly opposed to Obama’s coup and feared an invasion from the coup-Government.
In other words: Bloomberg wants Western taxpayers to eat the losses from Obama’s campaign to place NATO missiles near Russia in Ukraine. That’s what’s happening, in short.
“Russia has only a weak moral argument for getting paid,” Bloomberg says, though Russia was lending to Ukraine while Ukraine was at peace. But Russia “has an airtight economic and military case – which rests on its crucial natural gas supplies to Ukraine and its ability to rekindle the conflict there,” not on the seniority of its loans, nor on the peace when the Russian money was being lent.
It’s Russia that’s the warmonger here, according to Bloomberg.
How interesting it is that Bloomberg gives false reasons for Russia’s having by far the stronger legal case, despite what Bloomberg falsely refers to as the ‘moral argument’ in the Ukrainian bankruptcy case, which is instead the actual legal argument that Russia has. There is no actual difference between Russia’s legal argument, and its moral argument. The United States is the actual criminal regime here – both morally and legally.
If nationalism is a blindness to the crimes by one’s own nation’s aristocracy (such as America’s, which includes Michael Bloomberg) and a tendency from that, to whip up hatred against fake demons so as to deceive the general public to accept the losses while the nation’s aristocracy wins the profits on any upsides of its risky and shady bets, then Bloomberg’s editorial is entirely understandable, as being a nationalist expression – an expression of, by, and for, one’s own nation’s aristocracy – especially when they had bet on a profoundly corrupt economy, such as Ukraine, an economy which is at least as corrupt as America’s (perhaps even more corrupt).
Nonetheless, despite Bloomberg’s propaganda, Bloomberg’s reader-comments did not generally go along with Bloomberg’s proposal here.
For example, one said: “The Ukraine is an ongoing criminal enterprise,” and “the west is now the sucker on the hook for the billions being poured into a rat hole.”
However, even those comments did not point out that Michael Bloomberg’s operation wants Western taxpayers to eat the financial losses from Western aristocrats’ bad bets on Ukraine. This bottom line was instead ignored, thought it’s what is actually behind the slaughter in Ukraine, and though it’s the take away from the readers of the article.
All of the hatred in that article was by the aristocratic Bloomberg against “Russia” and “Putin,” and there was no hatred by the readers, against the aristocrats who are systematically robbing them blind and trying to deceive them about what’s going on and who’s actually to blame for it all.
Should there be hatred against the perpetrators? Would that be far more rational than the editorial position of Bloomberg – hatred of Russia – is ‘rational’? Would a hatred of one’s own nation’s exploitative and lying aristocrats be more productive than a hatred of some foreign nation or ethnicity, which didn’t actually cause the problem?
Perhaps this issue should be discussed in reader-comments here. It’s an important question, which is suppressed (not raised) in the media, and it needs to be discussed in a democracy, because false assignment of blame (the ‘news’ media’s specialty – think of blaming Saddam Hussein for 9/11) is not only profoundly unjust; it is or ought to be criminal, because it wreaks enormous harm, throughout history. Think of lynchings. Think of pogroms. Think of the ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’ bombing against the residents in what was formerly the Donbass region of Ukraine. The causes of such injustice should be discussed. Especially because it’s rampant.
There should be public discussion of the hate-mongering that comes from aristocrats and their agents. Or should this question instead continue to be blocked by the owners of the ‘news’ media? Should that continue? Should there continue to be no penalties for the ‘news’ media’s lying? Should they continue being held harmless for their lying and their hate-mongering, even though it’s now heading toward a World War III?
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.