All oligarchs

Today’s US propaganda barrage seeks to demonize the Russians as thoroughly and completely as possible, which now ironically includes attacks on Russia’s oligarchy. This could, and hopefully will, open a can of worms for US oligarchic orchestrators of such propaganda, whose hypocrisy is apparently bottomless. If the Russian oligarchs are monsters, what about our own plutocrats? Today we are offered a typical capitalist ‘choice’. Which national set of oligarchs do we want to ‘support’ and die for?

In Great Britain they occupy Russian oligarchs’ houses and ‘take over’ their yachts (what the hell are they going to do with them?). Here in the US a large majority, especially those who have to sell their labor to survive, know we have ‘our own’ oligarchs, the infamous one percent. This class fragment of the hyper-wealthy, led by financiers, military contractors and oil corporations, easily surpasses their Russian rivals, as Jeffrey St Clair points out in his most recent Roaming Charges column in CounterPunch.

US corporations have, over a century of capitalist competition, concentrated in their hands ownership of means of production and control of institutions (including the Pentagon), politics (both big-business-run parties) as well as mass media, ‘education’, and (mis)information dissemination. Now they are taking advantage of fomenting another world conflict, arguably the most dangerous one since the last confrontation with Russia over missiles in Cuba, to continue selling weapons, oil, and looting the world’s working class and the world environment.

But so what! ‘We’ must support the brave Ukrainians in their struggle with Putin and those demonic Russians. By the way, do the Ukrainians have oligarchs? Are they lining up to fight now — like ours are doing, right? Do we see our oligarchs leading the military charges? Have we ever?

Our great leaders here have allowed almost a million people to die of Covid. They do nothing about the growing ranks of homeless along with lives ruined and incomes drained due to lack of decent affordable healthcare. They couldn’t imagine parting with a bit more of their multiple billions by paying enough in taxes to provide the people who do all the work here with guaranteed jobs at a living wage, that is, when those jobs are available. When they are not, there’s always homelessness, or if you are young and strong enough, join the military. You can fight and die for ‘your’ war profiteering oligarchs.

No, but these oligarchs care so much about the suffering Ukrainians that they can’t imagine fixing the situation by agreeing that the Russians might have a point about the expansion of that purely defensive organization Nato. If this outfit is ‘defensive’, why does it seek to expand right up to Russia’s borders? Oligarch propaganda doesn’t bother with such discursive parameters as logic.

Excerpted: ‘It’s All Oligarchs All the Way Down’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org