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Category Archives: transnational crime

A Note on the Demise of the Medieval Rus

09 Monday May 2022

Posted by commart in 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Eurasia, Europe, International Development, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Qualities of Living (QOL), Russia, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, Ukraine

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Medieval Rus, medieval v modern, Putin Ruins Russia, Russia v Ukraine War

The Rus warlords Oleg of Novgorod and Sviatoslav I of Kiev launched several wars against the Khazar khaganate, often with Byzantine connivance. The Schechter Letter relates the story of a campaign against Khazaria by HLGW (Oleg) around 941 (in which Oleg was defeated by the Khazar general Pesakh; this calls into question the timeline of the Primary Chronicle and other related works on the history of the Eastern Slavs.

Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”

McGill Wikispedia. “Khazars: Rise of the Rus”. n.d.

5/8/2022

5/9/2022

Putin’s delusional accusations regarding Nazism in Ukraine better fit description as the “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation” than any dominant or significant political stance held in modern Ukraine, and the same may better inform Russians and the residents of EU/NATO of the character of his insanity than any truth about international affairs.

While The Great Paranoid Leader confuses and inverts reality–Putin’s the fascist blood-and-soil nationalist even while wearing his anti-fascist St. George’s ribbon today–and bluffs with the same convincing act that stalled the mob foaming around KGB headquarters in East Germany (ref. para. 4) at the fall of the German Democratic Republic (December 1989), he can do nothing either to alter past or present realities (as more accurately and truthfully conveyed and apprehended in the Open Information Space of the democratic open societies of the west) or now his own declining and ignominious image before the world. The development of a partially criminal and fraudulent KGB in the mid-early 1990s has in Ukraine finally reached NATO’s western-leaning Ukrainian buffer, a state once controlled in its corruption by Moscow. As Ukraine engaged Putin’s bombarding and invading forces to push them back and safely beyond its own sovereign writ, one may only wish Russia’s dictator would develop conscience, insight, integrity, and guilt.

As the murderous fraud Putin has been, he has no possession of good character and cannot purchase any authentic nobility. Deep down, I suspect he knows as much himself, and it is that (along with the narcissist’s early “Narcissistic Mortification“) that makes him so touchy as well as dangerous and errant.

One may hope that modern Russians when more fully and accurately informed en masse will finally part ways with their distant medieval and barbaric forbears.

Related Online

Amelin, Anatoliy, Andrian Prokip, Andreas Umland. “The Forgotten Potential of Ukraine’s Energy Reserves.” Harvard International Review, October 10, 2020.

Bubola, Emma. “‘A Frightening Repeat’: Ukrainian World War II Survivors Face Conflict Again.” The New York Times, March 24-25, 2022.

Dixon, Robyn and Mary Ilyushina. “On Victory Day, Putin defends war on Ukraine as fight against ‘Nazis’.” The Washington Post, May 9, 2022.

Furlong, Ray. “Showdown In Dresden: The Stasi Occupation And The Putin Myth.” RFE/RL, December 2, 2019.

Jankowicz, Mia. “Captured Russians said their leaders lied about the plan to invade Ukraine, leaving them unprepared for fierce resistance.” Business Insider, March 7, 2022.

Kellogg, Michael. The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945. (New Studies in European History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005.

Kuzio, Taras. “How Putin’s Russia embraced fascism while preaching anti-fascism.” Ukraine Alert, Atlantic Council, April 17, 2022.

Motyl, Alexander. “Yes, Putin and Russia are fascist–A political scientist shows how they meet the textbook definition.” The Conversation, March 30, 2022.

Nekrasov, Andrei and Olga Konskaya. “Rebellion: The Litvinenko Case” also titled, “Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File”. 2007.

Oppenheim, James S. “Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation.” BackChannels.

Prentice, Alessandra. “Ukrainians fear fiercer assault as Russia marks Soviet WW2 victory.” Reuters, May 9, 2022.

Ruane, Michael E. “Kyiv was surrounded in 1941 as the Nazis closed in. The Russian army defended the city.” The Washington Post, March 4, 2022.

Satter, David. “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power.” National Review, August 17, 2016.

Snyder, Timothy. “Germans must remember the truth about Ukraine–for their own sake.” Eurozine, July 7, 2017.

Stanley, Jason and Eliyahu Stern. “Putin’s Fascism.” Tablet, March 20, 2022.

The White House. “G7 Leaders’ Statement.” May 8, 2022.

Walker, Shaun. “How the Soviet Union’s Fall Pushed Putin to Try and Recapture Russia’s Global Importance.” History.com, February 28, 2022.

Walker, Shaun. “Putin uses Victory Day speech to rehash list of grievances against west.” The Guardian, May 9, 2022.

Wikipedia. “Narcissistic Mortification”.

Wikipedia. “Ukrainian collaboration with Nazi Germany”.

Wikipedia. “War crimes in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine”.


9/24/2008


3/10/2022
4/3/2022


5/9/2022

–33–

A Note on Putin’s Unbridled War on Integrity

11 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, 21st Century Modern, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Epistemology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Russia, transnational crime, Ukraine

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

KGB Playbook, malignant narcissism, medieval v modern, psychology of dictatorship, Putin's Special Truth, Russia v Ukraine

Start with what cannot be found outside of the mind of the malignant narcissist, i.e., the traumatic memory of “Narcissistic Mortification”. Diminishment. Humiliation. Shame. Whatever it was–a bullying theft on the street; an instance of sexual abuse by an authority or other overwhelming power; a “Jack and the Beanstalk” beat down by a parent–would have set off two related processes: covering over the moment and making of it either a terrible personal secret not to be shared or, perhaps, a complaint to shadow and ruin the life (for Putin, one might choose the former option, i.e., compartmenting the trauma); and splitting off the invention of a noble and undamaged self abetted by deceit in the creation of an heroic personal theater.

Most of us toughen up some with psychic injury, adjust our behavior to avoid a repeat experience or engage from a position of greater determination to prevail with dignity and strength. We’ll talk back to the nasty, speak truth to power, or dare introduce the bully to punishment as we produce greater force or response in relation to the presence of the same.

Chin up, in other words, and walk a little taller.

The malign might demand greater compensation in the way of power and emotional assurance. It may not be how they are or might be as ordinary persons that matters: it’s how they look–how others may perceive them–as extraordinary personages that matters most, for deep down they are still hiding their own humiliation and the dreaded fear of its return.

And how may one hide the truth?

Lie about it.

And how may one control the perception of others?

Create around or before them sufficient convincing theater to get them to do as one’s image may demand.

Punks have an easy list at their disposal: cheat, deceive, lie, and steal.

Get her a ring–who cares how you do it?–if it comes to that.

🙂

The personal and smaller matters lend themselves to convenient chicanery.

The corrupt and evil among politicians know more difficult strategies: big lies, deflections; false accusations, false flags, false presentations.

Where Putin lives, notch it up with military, paramilitary, and secret police forces tasked to manage state-devised compromise and reflexive control operations as well as total perceptual control buttressed by the methodical elimination of all of the sources of competition and criticism.

And should anyone in the darkness and shadows fuck up . . . cover it up–practice helps–and lie about it.

And should anyone possessed of integrity observe and report what has taken place, well, there are ways in which politically criminal and ruthless power may choose to defend its good image while in fact engaged in the most execrable evil.

A Few Reflections on Putin’s KGB Manual Updated to Support State Capitalists

How to Create Friendships with Powerful People

How to Deal with Adverse Intelligence or Related Battlefield Results

How to Discourage Democracy and Produce Healthy Authoritarians and Powerful Families Using Reflexive Control

How to Get Education

How to Handle the Dead the Modern Way

How to Handle the Memory of the Dead in Wartime

How to Honor the Dead in Small and Large Groups

How to Handle the Press

How to Inspire and Lead Troops Into Battle

How to Tell a Whopper!

How to Win Election to Presidency

How to Install a Useful War

How to Win Hearts and Minds in War

I’m sure there are other similarly clever methods for developing bear hugging personal relationships and influencing nations, quietly, and from behind the curtains, and as sources, insights, and opportunities develop, I may add to the above useful instructions.

Related Online

Bella, Timothy. “Thousands protest in Melitopol after Russian forces reportedly abduct mayor with a hood over his head.” The Washington Post, March 12, 2022.

Bertrand, Natasha. “Putin is going to extreme lengths to hide Russians who are dying while fighting in Ukraine.” Business Insider, May 26, 2015.

Davis-Marks, Isis. “Mass Graves in Ukraine Hold Thousands of Victims of Stalin’s Great Purge.” Smithsonian Magazine, September 3, 2021.

Dixon, Robyn. “Russian court abolishes country’s most prominent human rights group, Memorial.” The Washington Post, December 28, 2021.

Harding, Luke. ‘Old-style espionage’: Briton’s arrest feels like cold war throwback.” The Guardian, August 11, 2021.

Harding, Thomas. “Russian general killed and clutch of spy chiefs arrested.” National News UK, March 11, 2022.

Politkovskaya, Anna. “A Small Corner of Hell.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Satter, David. “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power.” National Review, August 17, 2016.

Schindler, John. “Exploring Al Qaeda’s Murky Connection to Russian Intelligence.” Business Insider, June 10, 2014.

Simon, Scott. “Why Do Russian Journalists Keep Falling?” NPR, April 21, 2018.

Stewart, Will, Chris Pleasance, and Tom Brown. “Putin ‘has placed the head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch under house arrest because he is furious at security services for failing to warn him’ that Ukraine could fiercely resist invasion.” Daily Mail, March 11, 2022.

Tiplady-Bishop, Lottie. “Jeffrey Epstein boasted about ‘flying to Moscow to visit Vladimir Putin’ as secrets behind his millions are revealed.” The Sun, July 19, 2020.

Whitmore, David. “Potemkinism.” The Power Vertical, RFE/RL, September 3, 2010.


The Telegraph, March 8, 2022.

History on YouTube, March 7, 2022.

The Telegraph, February 23, 2022.

–33–

FTAC: A Note on Greed

30 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, transnational crime, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

addiction, Florida Shuffle, greed, Soulless America

Greed obliterates authentic purposes to become an end in and of itself. Perhaps it helps create an ordered society, bureaucratic, impersonal, programmed — but that rather misses the mark as regards human services and well-being.


By way of cold categorization, it might be said that all addicts are criminals, but one may wonder what part are themselves predators and what other part preyed on by dealers and doctors or equivalents in counseling.

“Florida Shuffle“.

From time to time, I catch the boilerplate conservative prescription “personal responsibility!” in relation to the kind of damaged, enslaved, marginalized, and traumatized person that has lost all agency, confidence, efficacy, and esteem and wonder how pernicious and greed-ridden a society we have become. Can we tell the difference between the sad sack hipster and self-serving and profiteering sociopaths? Have we overemphasized the substance — whatever it may be or have been — and under-emphasized disconnection, marginalization, ostracism? And if so, for what?

In business terms, we are each and everyone of us our own “cost centers” — we want to live with means; we wish to pay our way; and for the most part, that’s what we do — but for a portion of America’s 320 millions souls — about a million or so the last time I checked (2019 with figures from 2017 compiled by authorities in 2018)— personalities or problems attach to expensive dependencies, and those persons then become the smallest of “profit centers” — revenue generators — for the money mad among sociopaths, and that from the curb to the corporate suite. Family’s gone and all the connections left are “fiduciary”, i.e., all about money and control bereft of conscience and soul.


As so often happens, a frantic mother called us about her 19-year-old daughter, who I’ll call Jen. A heroin addict, Jen had been shuttled between multiple treatment centers and sober homes by greedy marketers looking to cash in on the teenager’s insurance benefits by keeping her perpetually in recovery, but never sober.

Aronberg, Dave. “Opportunists Are Exploiting the ACA to Prey on Opioid Addicts.” Time, September 20, 2017.

Related Online

Aronberg, Dave. “Opportunists Are Exploiting the ACA to Prey on Opioid Addicts.” Time, September 20, 2017.

Daniels, Lisa. “My Son Got Stuck In the ‘Florida Shuffle’ and Lost His Battle to Addiction.” RyanHampton, January 13, 2019.

Fix the Florida Shuffle. “What is the Florida Shuffle?”

Lopez, German. “She wanted addiction treatment. She ended up in the relapse capital of America.” Vox, March 2, 2020.

National Association of Drug Diversion Investigators. “Florida Shuffle.”

Wooten, Colton. “My Years in the Florida Shuffle of Drug Addiction.” The New Yorker, October 14, 2019.


“There’s more to life than a little bit of money, you know.”

Published by Vice News, August 30, 2021.

–33–

At the Far End of the Poppy Field

29 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by commart in 21st Century Modern, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, transnational crime, United States of America

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Addiction in America, Afghani Poppy, Heroin, Kensington Avenue, Philadelphia, Philly

In the American failure lies a paradox: Washington’s massive military juggernaut has been stopped in its steel tracks by a small pink flower – the opium poppy. Throughout its three decades in Afghanistan, Washington’s military operations have succeeded only when they fit reasonably comfortably into central Asia’s illicit traffic in opium – and suffered when they failed to complement it.

McCoy, Alfred. “How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan: Western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.” The Guardian, January 9, 2018.

The world’s mafia — call them “Transnational Crime Organizations (TCOs)” for this world made smaller by the Internet and jets — sustain themselves through corrupt or intimidated officials who keep the traffic illegal, the profits high, and the goods coursing through the financial bloodstreams of the world as well as, of course, the bodies and minds of the world’s addicts. At the far end of the poppy field and well beyond its horizons, a human refuse washes up on the world’s streets, leaving governments in which the corrupt grow rich while the good drown before a dangerous and endless;u horrifying surge of affliction, crime, bodily damage, and emotional need that repeatedly defies bureaucratic processes and solutions.

Here for about 10 minutes is what the end of the poppy field looks like.

Recorded along Philadelphia’s Kensington Avenue on July 26 and posted to YouTube by kimgary on July 29, 2021, conditions may have been attenuated some by a clean-up of the street on August 18, but the greater story bearing down on that street hasn’t changed. “Heroin tourism” by the user community and guys with cameras continues. And the money changing hands in proximity to the above location: $1 billion annually, so suggested to Mike Newall writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer (listed in “Related Online”).

A Brief Comment on Narcotics, Realpolitik, and East-West Rivalry

I don’t want to go too far into Darkness and Light on this post, but it may no longer prove sufficient to “Act Locally, Think Globally” in light of an apparent willingness in states as well as persons to serve not only both sides of a conflict (with visible sales of common enough deliverables) but as well demonstrated in Afghanistan both the Devil and God or the Evil and the Good. Toward the end of America’s long tour in Afghanistan, generals made note of the use of Russian arms and materiel by Taliban forces, a black market trade if ever was — but who has picked up the chips, so to speak, in Asia but Russia, which is now doing a brisk business in defense sales to the neighbors of a soon to be Talibanized Afghanistan.

For heroin laced with fentanyl, credit China’s mafia interests that appear to have had until relatively recently fair latitude for keeping the west’s glamorous or vulnerable or both high and high on their way out of this world. For lack of directed Chinese resources, they may still have it.

Around the world, “Kash”, so it may be called, is King, and ain’t manipulation o’ the King — and on the King’s behalf and one’s own — part and parcel of all politics?

Obama may not have flinched when he authorized a billion dollars worth of cocaine sales for Hezbollah in the JCPOA deal, but from a strategic if not moral perspective, one wonders whether he should have stood at that juncture and said “No!” for the greater effects such a decision might have on long-term American political cohesion and coherence.

An America Broken, Compromised, Lost

Whatever the motives of each of its drifted “residents”, McPherson Square’s “Needle Park” and Kensington Avenue’s Junktopia host a portion of the nation’s most damaged and most lost children, “dipping” and homeless as well as short on options into recoveries more reliable than stopovers for intramural billing between service-providing bureaucracies and their subcontractors. Few, if any, have a clue as regards the nefarious “international relations” and “supply chains” that put the poppy seed in the ground and nursed it all the way to a spoon and needle and arm on the streets of Philadelphia (“City of Brotherly Love“) for some in Beijing and Moscow to smile and between them say, “How well America takes care of her people!”


Related Online

AFP News Agency. “Poppies bloom across Afghanistan as drought eases.” YouTube Video (1:30), April 18, 2019: “Though we are cultivating the poppies, smugglers are the ones who pocket all the money by converting it into heroin” (1:07).

AML Films. Assorted YouTube video testimonials on heroin addiction between 6 and 35 minutes each.

Brown, Erik. “I Work Near the Largest Open-Air Heroin Market On The East Coast: Philadelphia shows us what it looks like when a city commits suicide.” Dialogue & Discourse, Medium, May 25, 2021.

Byman, Daniel. “Hezbollah, Drugs, and the Obama Administration: A Closer Look at a Damning Politico Piece.” Lawfare, January 30, 2018.

Congressional Research Service. “Illicit Fentanyl and China’s Role.” PDF. Federation of American Scientists (FAS), January 29, 2021.

Dasa, Pandit. “Karma: What Goes Around Comes Around.” HuffPost, Januarary 11, 2012.

Felbab-Brown, Vanda. “Fentanyl and geopolitics: Controlling opioid supply from China.” Brookings, July 22, 2020.

Feng, Emily. “‘We Are Shipping to the U.S.’: Inside China’s Online Synthetic Drug Networks.” NPR, November 17, 2020.

Gibbons-Neff, Thomas. “Russia is sending weapons to Taliban, top U.S. general confirms.” The Washington Post, April 24, 2017.

kimgary. “Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave Story” – Assorted videos, 16-to-25-minutes.

Marin, Max. “‘There still is no answer’: Philly cracks down on Kensington encampments again as homelessness crisis intensifies.” BILLYPENN, August 18, 2021.

Meyer, Josh. “The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.” Politico, December 2017.

McCoy, Alfred. “How the heroin trade explains the US-UK failure in Afghanistan: Western intervention has resulted in Afghanistan becoming the world’s first true narco-state.” The Guardian, January 9, 2018.

Newall, Mike. “Business and bloodshed.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 21, 2021.

Newall, Mike. “What it’s like to live at the edge of Needle Park.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 9, 2017.

Percy, Jennifer. “Trapped by the ‘Walmart of Heroin'”. The New York Times, October 10, 2018.

Project Cassandra.

Reuters. “Russia says boosts arms supplies to Central Asia amid Afghan conflict.” August 5, 2021.

Rowlatt, Justin. “Russia ‘arming the Afghan Taliban’, says US.” BBC News, March 23, 2018.

U.S. Department of the Treasury. “Treasury Targets Chinese Persons Involved with Drug Trafficking Organization Moving Fentanyl.” August 27, 2021.

Williams, Nick. “The history of heroin as a lyrical muse.” Dazed, August 22, 2017.

Whitlock, Craig. “Overwhelmed by Opium: The U.S. war on drugs in Afghanistan has imploded at nearly every turn.” The Washington Post, December 9, 2019.


Published by Afghanistan Geographic, May 24, 2021.

Posted to YouTube by Late Night Tales, September 20, 2014.

Everything we say and do determines what’s going to happen to us in the future. Whether we act honestly, dishonestly, help or hurt others, it all gets recorded and manifests as a karmic reaction either in this life or a future life. All karmic records are carried with the soul into the next life and body.

Dasa, Pandit. “Karma: What Goes Around Comes Around.” HuffPost, Januarary 11, 2012.

Moscow has positioned the Taliban of Afghanistan right where it wants them, i.e., as a block and goad to the west, as a proxy for war by needle, and as another of the most honorable, most pious, and most hypocritical entities of the world, preaching sobriety by the book while taking up its role as the world’s foremost exporter of intoxication and death.

–33–

FTAC: If ‘Paper Covers Rock’, Perhaps Causes Cover the Drugs

27 Friday Dec 2019

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, transnational crime

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Burmese-Chinese Relations, China-Myanmar Development, Global Economics, Narconomics, transnational crime

Layer Cake sequence starring Daniel Craig and commenting on the world’s “narconomy”. Posted to YouTube by Funny Clips from TV & Movies, August 19, 2015.

In Myanmar, so I have read, there’s today a booming market in little blue meth/meth-caffeine pills much enabled by China’s determination to maintain stability along the route of the Belt and Road Initiative. It seems (to BackChannels, at least) these days that everyone with a cause and a Kalashnikov (whatever) comes up with cash in exchange for ‘wokefulness’ of the cartoonish kind — and the fighting and funding and the building and the struggle for better and more and more and more of the same rages on . . . .

From the Awesome Conversation

Inspiration for this pass-along: Tobin, Meaghan. “What does China’s Belt and Road have to do with Myanmar’s meth problem?” South China Morning Post, January 8, 2019.


Governments may strengthen their resolve, take the profit out of the business, “medicalize” the results, suffer the loss of some portion of the income of their secondary economies (narcotics represent primary import-export $$$), and move on, or they may play “ostrich” on limited time while their cultures plus political and spiritual missions hollow out and destroy their sense of purpose.

Was Great Britain shutting down its opium trade when the Chinese were paying for its existence?

I’ve grown old(er) having a look into this region in the vicinity of how things work — and with the comparative roles of what gets us high, low, or back to in-between — far inside the human condition and experience, and it’s all a little bit ugly and sad.


More on Myanmar’s ‘Dependence’ Issue

SULLIVAN: But there are a number of factors working against an end to Myanmar’s long-running civil war, understanding is just one of them. The government’s refusal to budge on the ethnic groups’ demands for greater autonomy is another. And then there’s money.

JEREMY DOUGLAS: The biggest source of finance for conflict is clearly drugs.

SULLIVAN: Jeremy Douglas is regional director for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Bangkok. He says the trade is much bigger now than it was decades ago, when the area was better known for its opium and heroin production. Now it’s mostly synthetics like crystal methamphetamine, or ice, destined for markets in Australia, Japan, South Korea and beyond, a business the UNODC reckons is worth a staggering $60 billion a year.

NPR. “Myanmar’s Lucrative Drug Trade is Increasingly Fueling The Country’s Conflict.” NPR, August 30, 2019.

BackChannels has published on Rhakine-Rohingya issues and recommends this piece for a fast backgrounder: “Political Perception: Myanmar, Rohingya, and Terrorist Provocateur” (October 29, 2017).

There’s a thematically related story out of Vancouver having to do with money laundering (off of the lucrative black market trade in fentanyl that has attracted high-end everything and inflated housing prices in the area: “Chinese Triads Launder Billions Through Vancouver, Buying Luxury Real Estate, Cars: British Columbia Launches Public Inquiry After Triad Activities Drive Up Cost of Homes.” The Mob Museum, June 5, 2019. Here’s a teaser for you:

This story reveals more than just the failure of Canadian controls against money laundering. It highlights the current global problem of money laundering, in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Based on recent accounts, the criminals are winning.


Related Online

The breadth and depth of crime fighting agencies and institutions would seem greater as a global community than the global scourge, but it equally clear that criminal operating capacities in manufacturing and distribution have been an “overmatch” for that effort. The money and violence involved in addressing this aspect of our humanity would seem also to have proven more than equal to the task. Here, nonetheless, may be two starting points for those far on the outside looking into how someone else’s condition — nations included — has become the condition into which the whole world appears to be growing.

InSight Crime

International Narcotics Control Board



–33–

FTAC: A Bid for the Lost and Missing of America

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Canada, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, United States of America

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

American Fascism, American politics, American Social Conscience, Authoritarian America, democratic socialism

Inspiration for the post: a tirade against the specter of Democratic Socialist America in the fashion of the Soviet Communist sphere of influence and the detritus of the irresponsible authoritarian mafia states left behind for western conscience and vision to address.


” . . . who despite enjoying the benefits and protections of a free society . . . ” (would vote the Democratic ticket).

What happened to these, especially our approximately 490,000 missing Americans under age 21?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/10/04/an-american-report-card/ — the page provides a glance at the numbers associated with America’s most troublesome social pathologies–cocaine use, homelessness, missing persons, opioid addiction, prostitution.

Life has its hooks, ladders, and chutes, of course, and will never be perfect for everyone, but the numbers represent some systematic decimation of a modern — not 1950s white bread — culture. Are those of the middle class and of the privileged supposed to completely turn away from the social epidemiology swirling around the apparently Lost of America?

We should know who is in the mix — and why — and get that unholy street stew separated and channeled in some helpful way.

If Americans hadn’t “social conscience”, there would be no laws involving environment, health, labor, housing, or much else that has brought and held the nation together as a unified polity. Politicians on the Left / Far Left have walked down their own streets and asked about the same questions for the same reasons. Now it would seem up to radically responsible moderates to steal that flame to produce an overall healthier state, not an environment fit to elite, rapacious, and ruthless personalities.


Some Red-Green elements that have flowed down from the Soviet Era machinery have infected America’s Democratic Party with the familiar Far Left cocktail of anti-capitalist, radical, and anti-Semitic (anti-Zionist) cant that in effect poisons their own projects before they can progress. The social conscience of the Democratic Party as stamped by Presidents Roosevelt in the 1930s and Johnson in the 1960s appears well under attack by the vanguard of a bullying old White Right political culture that really doesn’t care to address the misery it has learned to overlook.

Far be it, however, for BackChannels to overlook Hollywood’s role in the glamorizing and promoting of the very scourges that have both enriched the world’s mafia and — with dollars cleaned and spiffy — spilled back into working communities — here: read about Vancouver’s pleasant (not really) influx of wealth — as to make economic retreat and the decoupling from evil virtually impossible.

–33–

Venezuela: Background for the Liberal Perspective

03 Friday May 2019

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, International Development, South America, transnational crime, Venezuela

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

economic mismanagement, Revolution, transnational crime, Venezuela

Just as in interventions past, those who oppose war are labeled supporters of dictators and haters of “freedom.”
 
We saw this playbook in Iraq.
 
The situation in Venezuela is dire and the Trump Admin is making it worse. We must support diplomacy, not war.

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) May 2, 2019

Dickey, Christopher. “How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela a Mafia State.” Daily Beast, June 2, 2019.

InSight Crime. “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” Seven-part series, May 16, 2018 to May 25, 2018. Full report: InSight Crime. “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” Report (PDF): 1) “7 Reasons for Describing Venezuela as a ‘Mafia State’”, Mary 16, 2018; 2) “Drug Trafficking Within the Venezuelan Regime: The ‘Cartel of the Suns’”, May 17, 2018; 3) “The Devolution of State Power: The ‘Colectivos’”, May 18, 2018; 4) “The Devolution of State Power: ‘The Pranes’,” May 20, 2018; 5) “Colombia and Venezuela: Criminal Siamese Twins,” May 21, 2018; 6) “Honduras and Venezuela: Coup and Cocaine Air Bridge,” May 23, 2018; 7) “Dominican Republic and Venezuela: Cocaine Across the Caribbean,” May 24, 2018; 8) “Venezuela and El Salvador: Exporting Aid and Corruption,” May 25, 2018.



Instead of abetting or encouraging the survival of President Nicolas Maduro’s now brutal regime in Venezuela, Representative Ilhan Omar may do better to review how starvation came to visit the South American state — wondrously rich with resources — in the first place.

Johnson, Keith. “How Venezuela Struck it Poor.” Foreign Policy, July 16, 2018.

Venezuela as petrostate had a fine run on high and rising oil prices, but as crude pricing fell, the state discovered discovered itself as yet . . . undeveloped — and foremost in its oil sector. From the above cited Foreign Policy piece:


The problem for Chávez was that many of the PDVSA’s then-managers wanted to increaseproduction, by continuing the development of Venezuela’s technically challenging heavy oil fields. To do so, they needed to reinvest more of the company’s earnings rather than hand them all over to the government. So the managers had to go.


It was only the beginning of the mismanagement of Venezuela’s oil reserves.

What about other sectors of the economy?

On agriculture, here’s an excerpt from The Washington Post (Mariana Zunig and Nick Miroff, “Venezuela’s paradox: People are hungry, but farmers can’t feed them”, May 22, 2017):


“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”

Several of his cavernous hen houses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable, and armed gangs have been squeezing him for extortion payments and stealing his eggs.


As well known to other communist and socialist bureaucracies, the government owns all, but to play the role of an enlightened hub for all that the state needs and needs to share equally, it has to have something to distribute. As the oil economy collapsed, much around it appears to have caved as well.

Add desperation to insolvency: what the government hasn’t discouraged, ordinary thieves — not to blame them too much for their response to starvation — have apparently stepped in to pick up the slack.

Alas, also, Venezuela’s program had some items it distributes all too well for cash:


The network used a string of heavily guarded nightclubs to generate profits from the forced prostitution, which where then laundered through at least eight companies the group owned.

Thirteen victims were rescued and more than 2 million euros (almost $2.4 million) worth of properties, cash, jewelry and vehicles, as well as weapons, were seized as part of the operation.

Albaladejo, Angelika. “Transnational Sex Trafficking Rings Cash In on Venezuela Crisis.” InSight Crime, June 28, 2018.


Basically, Maduro’s dictatorship and its military (and the state’s mafia) have had between narcotics — noted at the top of this blog — and sundry other criminal undertakings — some nefarious ways of raising cash for themselves.

In the global politics, the regime has also the support of other feudal and absolute powers: Beijing and Moscow have both made arrangements with the hard-struck “socialist” state, and Turkey, famously, has been buying up Venezuelan gold now scraped off the earth by others scrambling for useful cash.


The state of war has become a constant between Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, but the issues are worked either “by other means”i.e., “diplomacy” or through punitive measures that would be violent swipes — and they are that — without the gun play. What works and how far it goes may be indicated by Venezuela’s continuing decline into chaos, darkness, and despair.

The western-supported alternative President Juan Guaido has been able to inspire defections — and that is saying something about the state of the Venezuelan state — but not yet raise the army to compete with Maduro’s heavily leveraged forces.





Related on the Web

O’Connor, Tom. “Russia, China and Iran Defend Support for Venezuela, warn U.S. Cannot Tell Them or Latin America What to Do.” Newsweek, April 15, 2019.

–33–

Venezuela: Bella Dodd’s Arch 1954 Observation and Maduro’s “Mafia State”

04 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, International Development, Politics, South America, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, Venezuela

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bella Dodd, dictatorship, kleptocracy, Maduro, Mafia States, malignant narcissism, Venezuela

In the Party I was beginning to see many people of a different stripe. During the war period I saw how opportunism and selfishness engulfed many comrades. They wore expensive clothes, lived in fine apartments, took long vacations at places provided by men of wealth. There was, for one, William Wiener, former treasurer of the Party, manipulator for a score of business enterprises, who wore Brooks Brothers suits, smoked expensive cigars, and lunched only at the best places. There were the trade union Communists who rubbed elbows with underworld characters at communist-financed night clubs, and labor lawyers who were given patronage by the Party by assignment to communist-led trade unions and now were well established and comfortable.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd

Communist Party USA leader Bell Dodd’s 1954 remark as relayed by Wikipedia may have special resonance today in the socialist’s disaster continuing to unfold — or perhaps preparing to fold — in Venezuela.

While it had been one thing to share Venezuela’s good fortune and wealth with the public, perhaps especially with massive revenues pumped out of the ground, it has been another for the socialist government to suppress the private ownership of productive ideas and resources while utterly failing to diversify a national economy with the intent to forestall a one-market boom-or-bust (it busted) disaster.

For BackChannels, the cite-quote-cite-quote method has grown tiresome, so the reader may take this post as a reference page but with the suggestion that Maduro’s now patently criminal junta — access the OCCRP and InSight Crime reports cited in reference — may choose to loot and flee the country having proven themselves unable to judiciously and responsibly govern the same — or, in the manner demonstrated by Assad in Syria, they may enjoy being carved up by similarly predatory trade partners.

BackChannels’ humanism in relation to economic development would counsel the damping of dogma in the search for a good mix of private incentives for economic diversification x public policies and programs fit to constituent needs for “basics” plus psychological enthusiasm, fitness, and growth. From the same stance, the messianic self-aggrandizement associated with dictatorships would be viewed as damaging and limiting the greater public experience and potential for good things, starting with community-wide and personal security.

(For related exploration or some meditation on dictatorship, this blog offers portals for “Malignant Narcissism” and its own proposed concept, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy“. Neither would differentiate between Far Left and Far Right authoritarianism or kleptocracy — and it would place both as more appropriate in the operating environments of the feudal world and fit to related medieval worldviews associated with “political absolutism” and sovereignty. Wherever placed x space x time, the absence of conscience looms large with dictatorships and the related criminality associated with power becomes glaring and, eventually, beyond bearing).

Bella Dodd, by the way, would renounce Communism toward the end of her journey and again embrace the Catholicism with which she had been born.


Reference

Aslund, Anders. “Venezuela is Heading for a Soviet-Style Collapse.” Foreign Policy, May 2, 2017.

Ayres, Sabra. “Russia and China, heavily invested in Venezuela, warily watch the political turmoil.” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2019.

Doyle Liam. “Venezuela gold: 20 tons of GOLD BARS ‘shipped out’ of Venezuela on Boeing 777.” Express, January 30, 2019.

Faiola, Anthony and Karen DeYoung. “In Venezuela, Russia pockets key energy assets in exchange for cash bailouts.” The Washington Post, December 24, 2018.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Oil-Producing Countries and Debt”. Podcast with the bank’s public affairs content coordinator Kristie Engemann and Fed economist Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria detailing results of her research on the subject of interest. May 4, 2018.

Fox Business. “Venezuela is worse than the Soviet Union was: Lt. Col. Peters.” June 28, 2017.

Johnson, Keith. “How Venezuela Struck It Poor.” Foreign Policy, July 16, 2018.

Kew, Ben. “OAS: 10 Million Venezuelans Could Flee Country Within Next Four Years.” Breitbart, December 27, 2018.

Martin, Jorge. “US Tightens the Noose on Venezuela: Will the Coup Succeed?” Venezuela Analysis, February 4, 2019. On Venezuela’s travail (and America’s Far Right Imperialist Aggression) from the Marxist perspective.

McLaughlin, Eliott C. “Maduro says a US-led ‘coup’ is behind the political upheaval in Venezuela.” CNN, January 27, 2019.

OCCRP. “2016 Man of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption”.

Trevithick, Joseph. “Venezuela Agreed to Let Russia Set Up a Bomber Outpost On This Caribbean Island: Reports.” The War Zone, The Drive, December 18, 2018.

Venezuela Investigative Unit. “7 Reasons for Describing Venezuela as a ‘Mafia State’.” InSight Crime, May 16, 2018. Related off this article: “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” — A three-year project producing an eight-part series and full 84-page report. Herewith an excerpt from “7 Reasons . . . .”:

What is clear from our investigations is that the following institutions are staffed at the higher echelons by individuals we believe are, or have been, engaged in criminal activity:
The Vice Presidency, the Ministries of Interior (Ministerio del Poder Popular del Despacho de la Presidencia y Seguimiento de la Gestión de Gobierno), Defense (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Defensa), Agriculture (Ministerio del Poder Popular de Agricultura Urbana), Education (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Educación), Prison Service (Ministerio del Poder Popular para el Servicio Penitenciario), Foreign Trade and Investment (Ministerio de Estado para el Comercio Exterior e Inversión Internacional), Electricity (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Energía Eléctrica), the National Guard (Guardia Nacional Bolivariana), the Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Bolivarianas), the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional – SEBIN) and PdVSA.

The penetration of so many key institutions, and the fact that they constitute the state’s main organs in the fight against organized crime, means that Venezuela cannot even contain organized crime, let alone effectively fight it. With so many state actors with interests in criminal activity, be it fuel smuggling, the black market sale of food and medicines or the trafficking of cocaine, this factor alone suggests that Venezuela qualifies as a mafia state.

https://www.insightcrime.org/investigations/seven-reasons-venezuela-mafia-state/

Wikipedia. “Bella Dodd”.

Wikipedia. “Corruption in Venezuela”.



Posted to YouTube February 3, 2019.
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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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