Hidden History: The Interlocking Relationships Between Wall Street, the CIA and the So-Called Free Press

Mosaic of Facts: Inside the Information Web

RT (2014)

Film Review

In this 2014 documentary, free lance journalist Miguel Francis Santiago examines what he refers to as the “information war” between the US and Russia over recent events in Ukraine.

He begins by looking at evidence uncovered by late investigative journalist Robert Parry that the 2014 coup in western Ukraine was actually a US-sponsored “color revolution” to remove a democratically elected president (Viktor Yanukovych) and replace him with pro-EU/pro-NATO Petro Poroshenko.

Parry’s evidence pointed to open collaboration between former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the fascist and neo-Nazi Svoboda Party that (based on a 2012 BBC investigation) has a history of violently targeting Jews and ethnic Russians.

Santiago goes on to review a slew of widely promoted YouTube videos of both the Maidan uprising and the subsequent referendum in which 93% of Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine and request membership in the Russian Federation. In examining the origin of various pro-Kiev/anti-Russian videos, he discovers all were produced by people with links to the NED, USAID and/or the US State Department.

The film also includes interviews with retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, aid to former Secretary of State Colin Powell; Naomi Wolfe, former political advisor to Bill Clinton and Al Gore; geopolitical analyst Eric Draitser; and Peter Joseph, producer of the radical Zeitgeist film series.

Santiago uses these various sources to paint an extremely sophisticated picture of closely interlocking relationships between the US corporate plutocracy, US intelligence agencies and America’s so-called free press.

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*”Color revolutions” is the term used  to describe a series of failed “revolutions” in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa funded by the CIA, State Department and George Soros. The intent was to use popular uprisings to install more US-friendly regimes.

**National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is a so-called non-governmental organization funded mainly by the CIA and State Department, used extensively to promote regime change via popular unrest.

***USAID is an agency of the State Department used extensively to promote regime change via popular unrest.

Putin: A Russian Primetime TV Documentary

 

Exclusive: Fantastic Russian Prime Time 2 HR Putin documentary

Masterskaya (2016)

English subtitles

Film Review

This film, despite being an obvious pro-Putin propaganda piece, provides interesting historical background on his role in thwarting western efforts to turn Russia into a third world sweatshop.

The beginning of the documentary, describing the plans laid by Putin’s cabinet to remove the oligarchs from power (see How Putin Outwitted the Russian Oligarchs ), confirm what I have always suspected: that his rise to global prominence relies heavily on his ability to choose skilled advisors.

This documentary also clearly conveys that he’s as much a populist as Donald Trump – though a far more skilled one. An amazingly effective speaker, his ability to influence and manage large groups is unparalleled among world leaders.

Although he tends to be extremely guarded about disclosing personal feelings, the film contains a few revealing clips from TV interviews. In one, he admits to his mistaken belief as a KGB agent that political conflict with the West would dissolve once Russians abandoned their Communist ideology. He now realizes that Russia will always have tension with the West based on competing geopolitical interests (ie competing demands for resources, markets, labor etc).

I was also intrigued to hear him discuss his enormous debt to teacher and mentor Anatoly Sobchak. Sobchak was a legal scholar and politician who co-wrote the constitution of the Russian Federation and was the first democratically elected mayor of St Petersburg. He died under suspicious circumstances in 2000.

The film’s main weakness is its total dismissal of Russia’s opposition movement as being too chaotic and disorganized for Putin to take seriously. While there is good reason to suspect CIA involvement in various anti-Putin street protests, it seems to be there would also be legitimate protest against the enormous obstacles to registering new political parties in Russia, as well as major censorship by the mainly state-controlled media.

I was also irritated by the repeated emphasis on Putin being a self-sacrificing leader with no interest whatsoever in personal wealth or power. According to various former insiders, Putin has immense personal wealth and may be one of the richest men in the world. See Putin Corruption: Five Things We Learned About the President’s Secret Wealth

 

Untold History of the US – Bush and Clinton Squandered Peace

Part 9 of Oliver Stones Untold History of the United States covers the Bush senior and Clinton presidency

Bush Senior Presidency

Stone begins by exploring the role of Bush’s father Prescott Bush and other Wall street figures in supporting the rise of Hitler and the Nazi war machine. The list of Wall Street corporations that supplied money, weapons, chemicals, tanks, aircraft and other material support to the Third Reich is a long one: Ford, IBM, GM, Hearst, Standard Oil, Dupont, Kodak, United Fruit, Westinghouse, Douglas Aircraft, ITT, GE, Singer, International Harvester, Union Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank, JP Morgan and the Bank of International Settlements.

Many of these companies demanded (and received) reparations when the Allies bombed their German factories.

Stone devotes much of this episode to the fall of totalitarian rule in Eastern Europe (1989-91), which he describes as the largest peaceful revolution in history. He also discusses the military coup by Boris Yeltsin that shut down parliamentary rule in the Russian Federation and the role of Wall Street, the World Bank, IMF and a handful of Russian oligarchs in systematically stripping the Russian people of their industrial wealth. During this period, many Russians died of malnutrition and medically preventable illness. The life expectancy would drop from 67 to 57 for men and from 76 to 70 for women.

Bush senior, surrounded by anti-Soviet hawks (eg Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who would go on to found Project for a New American Century) rebuffed all Gorbachev’s overtures for world peace. Stone maintains Gorbachev would never have been forced out of office if Bush had supported him.

The Clinton Presidency

Instead of delivering the promised “peace dividend” when the Cold War ended, Clinton initiated a new wave of defense spending and multiple military interventions overseas. Among them

• He launched a war on Yugoslavia to gain access to Caspian Sea oil for US oil companies.
• He authorized numerous bombing raids on Iraq, supposedly as enforcement of the no-fly zone in regions controlled by Kurds and Shiite rebels.
• He began expanding NATO to former Eastern Bloc countries to enable US oil companies to build pipelines to transport Russian oil to Europe.
• He ordered 75 cruise missiles (at $750,000 each) to be fired on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory and Zawhar Kili Camp in Afghanistan to distract public attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Bush and Clinton: Squandered Peace – New World Order