Did the Russians Help to Put Bush-Cheney and the GOP Into Power?

There's no question that under Bush-Cheney and the GOP, America is in serious decline. We all know the symptoms, but just for a moment let's consider the possibility that this is no accident, and that the Party in power have been extraordinarily successful in accomplishing exactly what they set out to do when GOP strategist Grover Norquist, who is fond of paraphrasing Lenin, remarked that the Republicans sought not to cripple the U.S. government but to drain the bathtub.

That's a revolutionary, and a subversive, notion. And drained we are. Iraq certainly seems to be America's Afghanistan -- except, Russia's invasion of South Asia didn't cost anywhere near $2 trillion. America's reputation and credibility have suffered a similarly staggering decline in just a few years. The Treasury has been looted, the currency is falling, and the official economists are clearly lying to us.

Replay of the fall of the Soviet Union?

Under the present Republican White House and Congress, America has endured something frighteningly close to the malevolent One Party Dictatorship of the former Soviet Union. The suits worn by our Politburo, in most cases, look better. Our torturers have nicer airplanes. Now, we learn that state surveillance has been nearly universal --something that the KGB could only dream of. All this has led to some speculation around here, most of it pure snark, that the Saudis, the Chinese, the Israelis, take your pick, are behind this. The point is to push the U.S. into imperial overreach as quickly as possible, so that capital and resources tied up here can be released for more productive uses elsewhere. Creative destruction. Based on what happened to the Brits and the Soviets during the 20th Century, this theory seems to have some plausibility.

But, what if there's another, perhaps competing force, that have been subtly and skillfully manipulating American interests from abroad? What if this is good, old-fashioned nationalistic payback?

Either way, ask yourself: who benefits the most from America's decline under Bush-Cheney and the GOP? The first place to look is domestic, of course. There are others who might gain, and the obvious foreign Suspect Number One has to be oil-rich, now hard-currency-rich Russia, the old rival we thought we had buried 15 years ago during Bush 41.

Earlier, I came across these interesting articles about Abramoff's Russian deals, which illustrate how figures in the Russian oil industry tied to the former KGB and Ministry of Defense indeed fed the coffers of GOP funders that fueled the GOP revolution. Anyone who did business with Abramoff and Buckham knew, of course, that they were funneling cash to Tom DeLay and the Republican Party.

The first is by Josh Marshall at The Hill:
http://www.hillnews.com/thehill/export/TheHill/Comment/JoshMarshall/033006.html

Back in his heyday, Tom DeLay’s political operation was being bankrolled — to a significant degree — by Russian “energy executives” with some murky mix of ex-KGB and Russian mafia ties. The money didn’t come in formal political contributions — it couldn’t have, since it was being paid by foreign nationals. It came funneled through a sham nonprofit that DeLay’s chief political handler set up to take money from now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff.

Buckham’s use of the U.S. Family Network looks like a major violation of U.S. tax law at a minimum. DeLay’s political operation was getting a lot of its funding from foreign interests looking for favors on Capitol Hill. (Most of the rest of the money for the U.S. Family Network came from the Marianas sweatshop owners and one of Abramoff’s Indian tribes — money that manages to seem almost clean in comparison.)

Both facts show that Jack Abramoff — whom DeLay now pretends hardly to know — was a major funder of DeLay’s political activities.

If this isn’t enough to drive DeLay out of Congress, really, what is?

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And this more detailed account from the WaPo:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/AR2005123001480_pf.html
The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail
Nonprofit Group Linked to Lawmaker Was Funded Mostly by Clients of Lobbyist

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 31, 2005; A01



The U.S. Family Network, a public advocacy group that operated in the 1990s with close ties to Rep. Tom DeLay and claimed to be a nationwide grass-roots organization, was funded almost entirely by corporations linked to embattled lobbyist Jack Abramoff, according to tax records and former associates of the group.During its five-year existence, the U.S. Family Network raised $2.5 million but kept its donor list secret. The list, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that $1 million of its revenue came in a single 1998 check from a now-defunct London law firm whose former partners would not identify the money's origins.

Two former associates of Edwin A. Buckham, the congressman's former chief of staff and the organizer of the U.S. Family Network, said Buckham told them the funds came from Russian oil and gas executives. Abramoff had been working closely with two such Russian energy executives on their Washington agenda, and the lobbyist and Buckham had helped organize a 1997 Moscow visit by DeLay (R-Tex.).The former president of the U.S. Family Network said Buckham told him that Russians contributed $1 million to the group in 1998 specifically to influence DeLay's vote on legislation the International Monetary Fund needed to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.

SNIP

Whatever the real motive for the contribution of $1 million -- a sum not prohibited by law but extraordinary for a small, nonprofit group -- the steady stream of corporate payments detailed on the donor list makes it clear that Abramoff's long-standing alliance with DeLay was sealed by a much more extensive web of financial ties than previously known. Records and interviews also illuminate the mixture of influence and illusion that surrounded the U.S. Family Network. Despite the group's avowed purpose, records show it did little to promote conservative ideas through grass-roots advocacy. The money it raised came from businesses with no demonstrated interest in the conservative "moral fitness" agenda that was the group's professed aim.

SNIP

The records, other documents and interviews call into question the very purpose of the U.S. Family Network, which functioned mostly by collecting funds from domestic and foreign businesses whose interests coincided with DeLay's activities while he was serving as House majority whip from 1995 to 2002, and as majority leader from 2002 until the end of September. After the group was formed in 1996, its director told the Internal Revenue Service that its goal was to advocate policies favorable for "economic growth and prosperity, social improvement, moral fitness, and the general well-being of the United States." DeLay, in a 1999 fundraising letter, called the group "a powerful nationwide organization dedicated to restoring our government to citizen control" by mobilizing grass-roots citizen support. But the records show that the tiny U.S. Family Network, which never had more than one full-time staff member, spent comparatively little money on public advocacy or education projects. Although established as a nonprofit organization, it paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to Buckham and his lobbying firm, Alexander Strategy Group.

SNIP

Some of the U.S. Family Network's revenue was used to pay for radio ads attacking vulnerable Democratic lawmakers in 1999 ; other funds were used to finance the cash purchase of a townhouse three blocks from DeLay's congressional office. DeLay's associates at the time called it "the Safe House." DeLay made his own fundraising telephone pitches from the townhouse's second-floor master suite every few weeks, according to two former associates. Other rooms in the townhouse were used by Alexander Strategy Group, Buckham's newly formed lobbying firm, and Americans for a Republican Majority (ARMPAC), DeLay's leadership committee. They paid modest rent to the U.S. Family Network, which occupied a single small room in the back.

'Red Flags' on Tax Returns

Nine months before the June 25, 1998, payment of $1 million by the London law firm James & Sarch Co., as recorded in the tax forms, Buckham and DeLay were the dinner guests in Moscow of Marina Nevskaya and Alexander Koulakovsky of the oil firm Naftasib, which in promotional literature counted as its principal clients the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior.

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SNIP

Whatever has been done to us surely isn't conservative. I will wager that the American people will come to realize when they look at who fueled the GOP revolution, that it is downright un-American.

Russia I think is looking in the wrong direction. Remember the $1 trillion fiasco called Star Wars? Reagan started the stupid thing. It's suppose to be able to shoot down missles from other countries. Total missle defense for the USA. One of the people that was involved in creating the program quit when he found out it was for offense, not defense as the Pentagon and Reagan explained. Clinton canned the thing as soon as he was in office. * restarted it the minute he got into office. I would be willing to bet Russia knows the repubs and neocons are not friends of Russia. They would have to be exceedingly stupid to try to get him in office. I don't know anyone knew how bad * was in terms of bankrupting a country. And he would have gone nowhere and done nothing if it had not been for 9-11.

Except, perhaps, those who nurtured this man:

I expect that, like corporations, Russia is willing to deal with either party, or both parties at the same time, if it's practical. There is certainly enough of an oil lobby in Moscow to create amutual interest.

The Russians may have been looking to strike a better deal with the Texas GOilP.

GHW Bush had his vision of a New World Order. Poppy was the trailblazer....he traded US longterm energy security by negotiating cheap oil for the public and big profits for his buds. Did his plan for the NWO just go away or was the plan delayed and put into motion with Dimson's selection? If global domination that is extra-governmental is your plan....you need to take down the richest and most powerful country first. I am convinced that the taxbreaks to the rich are designed to given the top 3% more liguidity to invest their money out of this country and a safe exit out when things implode totally. Capital goes where capital grows.

Really, where is George Bush's alliegence? Did he and Dick and many more like them answer the call to fight in Viet Nam? Of course not. That should be the American people's 1st clue. Hey, I didn't fight either, but I'm not making a killing sending other people's kids to die to shore up Exxon's profits.

The Republican Syndicate is built on greed and get rich quick. It permeates their national politics. In fact, I'd go so far as to surmise that they don't want any honest, patriotic national leaders with integrity because it would threaten the whole racket. It's not random coincidences that we see Republicans in Florida, Kentucky, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, California, and Montanna all under criminal indictment. What do they have in common? They are all Republican "conservatives". I think that is their code word for criminal. So you have a bunch of people all agreeing to loot this country, sell out to the highest bidder, taking care of themselves and their friends. These people are ripe for the plucking by any country that can see what's happening. It's amazing how cheap they can sell this country out, no question.

I think they've done themselves in, though. They got ahead of themselves. They got the HAVA and rigged votes in place; they had their broadcast/print media Wurlitzer tuned up and cranking; they got their 9/11 "event" to get thir GWOT under way, and the money started moving fast and loose. They had a bullet-proof Congressional majority and a WH that were looking out for each other's backs. They started taking over the judiciary with their 'passivist' judges. They had the country divided and distracted, blaming each other for the country's demise. Perfect.

Even with all of this, though, they needed an insurance policy. This is where the NSA and the datamining came in. They must have realized that the gig would be up at some point in time...so they got busy expanding and refining their domestic intelligence capabilities as soon as they took over the office in 2000. Start to build files on national media people and leaders who could be blackmailed. Because you need to have the tools that can mute the institution that can expose your corruption. Same with opposition leadership. I wonder what they have on Joe Lieberman and Joe Biden, for instance? And if you can't blackmail them, there may be other ways to silence them....anthrax, plane crashes, family threats, suicides, etc. It only takes a few examples to drive that message home.

..... But they didn't factor a few things.

The Power of the Internet. They bought into the business aspects but never saw the communication platform that it gave the opposition. Collecting, analysing, and disseminating information in an open source environment.

The Spirit and Intelligence of a critical mass of Americans that didn't lose their minds on 9/11 and certainly didn't buy the "war on terror". Bush's 90% approval on 9/12 started melting on 9/13....and hasn't stopped.

The Complete and Utter Incompetence of the executive branch to keep the storefront up and running. If they had selected Jeb, I think they might have actually had someone who could have kept the base on the reservation. They needed the critical mass of bigots, homophobes, gun nuts, anti-socialists, and assorted brain dead American consumers in their camp. Without a significant segment of the American people behind them, election stealing becomes more problematic. But George just couldn't keep it together. A string of screw-ups, Iraq, and Katrina showed his uncaring incompetence. Their bought and paid for corporate media could only cover the emporer's nakedness for so long.

And finally, the secret of secrets: The Exposure of the NSA Domestic Spy Network. The unified field theory of total Republican corruption - it's.just.starting.to.sink.in.with.ALL.Americans.

So here we are...at the crossroads. The magnitude of the criminality is becoming exposed 6 months before a mid-term election which could change everything. No more "events" or wars will change the public's opinion or understanding. As powerful as they are, they aren't nearly powerful enough. They don't have the numbers. If I'm George Bush and a member of the Republican Syndicate, I'm getting very nervous and thinking about the consequences of treason.

the guy that claimed he was some sort of agent, and translated Russian, and had some sketchy foreknowledge of 9/11. That story still gnaws at me sometimes, the whole Russian angle.

See, Cooperative Research, http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/essay.jsp?article=essaytheytriedtowarnus

Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly stated that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the US in the summer of 2001 that suicide pilots were training for attacks on US targets. The head of Russian intelligence also stated, “We had clearly warned them” on several occasions, but they “did not pay the necessary attention.” The Russian newspaper Izvestia claimed that Russian intelligence agents knew the participants in the attacks, and: “More than that, Moscow warned Washington about preparation for these actions a couple of weeks before they happened.”


I don't normally quote Ruppert, but this observation at FTW about Delmart Vreeland really rings true:

Even by his own statements, Vreeland, now 35, was a relatively low ranking officer and an intelligence field operative. Never in the history of covert operations has any government entrusted field operatives with total strategic knowledge because the knowledge held by those who make the plans is compartmentalized and locked away. Perhaps 80 percent of all intelligence work is disinformation, and governments know that their field operatives risk capture, interrogation and torture. Quite often field operatives are themselves fed disinformation so that if they talk, they will still spread lies that serve a larger strategic purpose. Quite often they carry documents that are deliberately inaccurate and their capture is engineered to give those documents credibility.

To the U.S. government, Vreeland is totally expendable. And those who run with every piece of information he has disclosed will themselves be proven fools in a fool's game.

But one question remains. And it is a question that now stands vindicated by time and events. He knew something chillingly accurate about the 9-11 attacks before they happened. And if he knew something, based upon documents given to him by Russian officials indicating U.S. knowledge, and if the U.S. government went to great lengths to discredit him, rather than bring him in from the cold --then there is real meat on the plate . . .

It's interesting to read what some informed Russians have to say about who is really behind 9/11. Again, this is a site I don't usually reference, but it's a point of view that should be considered carefully:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NIM20060123&articleId=1788
According to Russian General, 9/11 was a Globalist Inside Job
“The organizers of the 9/11 attacks were the political & business circles interested in destabilizing the world order


by Kurt Nimmo

January 23, 2006
One Day in the Empire


It’s ironic General Leonid Ivashov, former Chief of Staff of the Russian armed forces, delivers the truth on globalism and this truth, unavailable in the corporate media of the “free world,” is published in a newspaper in Las Tunas, Cuba. Ivashov tells us so-called international terrorism “is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite” and “is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people’s intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance from power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries’ policies and the behavior of people.”
Ivashov hits the nail square on the head. “The organizers of attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order” because they “were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction.” As others have explained—most notably Andreas von Bulow, Bundestag member of a parliamentary commission which oversaw the three branches of the German secret service—only “secret services and their current chiefs” (or retired staff with “influence inside the state organizations”) have the “ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these organizations cannot exist—let alone carry out operations of such magnitude inside countries so well protected.” Thus the obvious patsy “Osama bin Laden and ‘Al Qaeda’ cannot be the organizers or the performers of the September 11 attacks” because they “do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders” (or the military and intelligence experience and knowledge required). Instead, “a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.”

According to General Ivashov, the covert operation nine eleven was effective because it turned “the people’s demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy … destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation” and also depriving “peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services.”

SNIP

Andy Stephenson knew him

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=924780

They were from Russia. I'm searching for the links. It was talked about during the Bev Harris haydays. I had pictures of them I got when the Diebold source code was posted on the net but have lost track of them. They had associations with Theonomic Reconstructionism

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/HE09Ag01.html

Ruble-denominated oil exchanges could launch in 2007 - expert
In his Wednesday's address, Putin urged work on achieving ruble convertibility sped up and completed by July, six months ahead of the original January 1, 2007 deadline.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20060511/48003539.html

http://p216.ezboard.com/frigorousintuitionfrm10.showMessage?topicID=4271.topic