Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post delivers a
hypocritical sermon on American values
By Andre Damon
14 July 2017
On Thursday, the Washington
Post, a newspaper wholly owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, published
an editorial branding Russia a “hostile power” because it is opposed to
“bedrock American values” like self-determination and a free press.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, writes the Post, “favors spheres of
influence over self-determination; corruption over transparency; and repression
over democracy.”
One reads these lines not knowing whether to be more amazed by
their arrogance or their utter blindness. Bezos’s newspaper indicts Russia for
a set of circumstances that apply to the US as much as—or more—than they do to
Russia.
There is no doubt much to be criticized in Russian society and the
Putin regime. The Russian working class, as it recovers from the trauma of
Stalinism and the restoration of capitalism, will draw upon the lessons of its
revolutionary history and deal as it must with this reactionary regime. But the
Russian working people and youth, as they prepare to settle accounts with the
Russian oligarchs, will not need (or heed) lessons in morality from the
American oligarchs and their editorial mouthpieces. “Dear American physicians
of imperialist morality,” they might rightly reply to Bezos and the scribes of
the Washington Post, “heal thyself!”
The Post accuses
Vladimir Putin and his “cronies” of “becoming immensely wealthy” at the expense
of Russian society. But the editorial appears in a newspaper owned by a man
who, as America’s second-richest person, controls more wealth than the five
richest Russian oligarchs.
The United States is the most socially unequal developed country
in the world. Every aspect of American society is dominated by exploitation and
social inequality. It is a society with levels of concentrated poverty and
social misery seen only in former colonies.
Mr. Bezos, who may well have
commissioned the editorial,
exemplifies this great social ill. This
sweatshop kingpin, with a net worth of
over $80 billion, earns $25,000 every
minute by paying hundreds of
thousands of
people poverty wages.
Why doesn’t Mr. Bezos walk through an Amazon factory and look at
the conditions that his workers are forced to toil under? The workers who make
$12 an hour or less are monitored every second of the workday and are penalized
for going to the bathroom. And yet this modern-day slave-driver wants to
lecture others about becoming “immensely wealthy.”
The Post further
complains that Putin has “maintained the trappings of democracy—a parliament,
national elections—even as he has made them meaningless by shuttering most
independent media and eliminating most political opposition.”
That is an interesting observation, given the fact that Russia’s
parliament has six political parties, while the United States House and Senate
have only two! The despised two-party duopoly in the US maintains its grip
simply because any oppositional party that attempts to get on the ballot is
systematically excluded, whether through restrictive ballot access laws,
spurious challenges by the established parties, or just the overriding
domination of money over the whole process.
The Post adds
that Putin favors “corruption over transparency; and repression over
democracy.” Yet in the United States, despite two voluminous reports, one by
the Senate and another by a special government commission, detailing widespread
and specific criminal actions that led to the 2008 financial crisis, not a
single banker has gone to jail.
In no country are elections more openly bought by the rich than in
America. The US is so corrupt that one researcher recently calculated exactly
how much money it takes in “campaign contributions”—i.e., legalized bribes—to
get a law passed in Congress.
As for the “independent media,” the major news outlets in the US
are so derided that the word “media” has become a swearword. They simply spout
whatever lies the military, intelligence agencies and billionaire oligarchs
demand of them.
The Post declares
that in Russia, unlike in the US, “when people try to expose the corruption,
they are imprisoned or killed.” We are simply expected to forget Chelsea
Manning, who was imprisoned for seven years and subjected to what the United
Nations called “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment for exposing American
war crimes.
And then there is Julian Assange, who has been effectively
imprisoned in London’s Ecuadorian embassy for exposing official corruption and
criminality. Edward Snowden was forced to flee his home country to Russia
because he revealed systematic violations of the Constitution by the US
government.
As far as Americans being killed for exposing corruption, there is
no shortage of dark rumors, from the unexplained death of Democratic Party
staffer Seth Rich, who Assange said may have leaked the transcripts of Hillary
Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street, to journalist Michael Hastings, who died in
a suspicious car crash after he ran afoul of General Stanley A. McChrystal.
The Post ’s
editorial has one more crowning hypocrisy: its lionization of the corrupt and
hated war criminal Hillary Clinton. Putin’s “antipathy toward Hillary Clinton,”
writes the Post,
“was not personality-driven but based on her advocacy of values that would
threaten his rule.”
The name Clinton “stinks to high heaven.” After leaving the White
House, Hillary and Bill Clinton amassed a huge fortune, racking up a
quarter-billion dollars in personal wealth over the past 15 years.
So mad for money was this American Lady Macbeth that she
decided—against the advice of many of her staffers—to give paid speeches to
banks like Goldman Sachs, which were vastly enriched by the elimination of
financial regulations under her husband’s presidency.
But Clinton, who laughed over the fact that her actions led Libyan
President Mummar Ghadaffi to be sodomized to death with a bayonet, is held up
as the ideal of “democratic” values. After all, the newspaper declares, she
“supported Ukraine’s democratic aspirations.” This is what Bezos’ newspaper
terms the 2014 fascist-led putsch aimed at reversing the outcome of the
country’s 2012 election.
The Post declares
that Russia, unlike America, favors “spheres of influence over
self-determination.” This comes in defense of a country that spends more on its
military than the rest of the world combined, and which declares itself to be
the only military hegemon—not just globally, but in every region of the world.
Russia maintains military bases in eight countries; the United States maintains
them in over 70.
According to the Post,
Russia is a “hostile power.” But Saudi Arabia, if one is to rate it by the
scale of US arms exports, is America’s closest ally.
The United States spies on the people of every nation, including
its allies (such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel). It has sponsored coups
and destabilization operations throughout South America, Asia, the Middle East
and Africa. It has killed more people in wars than any country since Adolf
Hitler’s Germany.
The Post has
the gall to dispense its cheap moralism in the very week that the press has
been flooded with images of the ruins of the Iraqi city Mosul, in what Amnesty
International described as an American war crime.
And perhaps one should ask the people of Haiti, Iraq or
Afghanistan about the United States government’s attitude toward
“self-determination.”
Ultimately, the Post argues
that the conflict between the United States and Russia is of an entirely moral
character, devoid of economic and geopolitical interests. The US and Russia,
the Post declares,
are not “about to go to war”—they “are two continental powers on opposite sides
of the world with no territorial disputes.”
But this is just a half-hearted lie, contradicted by repeated
statements of US military officials. In testimony before Congress in May,
General Curtis M. Scaparrotti, head of United States European Command, said a
“resurgent Russia” is seeking to “reassert itself as a global power,” leading
the United States military in Europe to “return to our historic role as a war
fighting command.”
“Five or six years ago, we weren’t concerned about being ready [to
fight] today,” Scaparrotti added. “That has changed.”
This state of affairs has “changed,” despite the insistence of
the Post,
because Russia got in the way of the United States’ plans for regime change in
Syria.
There is perhaps no better analysis of the Post’s sad attempt to
wrap US geopolitical machinations in cheap moralism than that offered over a
century ago by the critic of British imperialism John A. Hobson, who wrote:
It is precisely in this falsification of the real import of
motives that the gravest vice and the most signal peril of Imperialism reside.
When, out of a medley of mixed motives, the least potent is selected for public
prominence because it is the most presentable, when issues of a policy which
was not present at all to the minds of those who formed this policy are treated
as chief causes, the moral currency of the nation is debased. The whole policy
of Imperialism is riddled with this deception.
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