Category: Former Soviet Union

Oh Crap

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Russia has annexed the Crimea.

This is going to be a complete clusterf%$3 for everyone involved, particularly the people of the Ukraine, about whom all the actors profess to care.

There is a lot of blame to allocate:

  • Some of it goes to Vladimir Putin, because, after all, he is the one sending troops.
  • Some of it also goes to the EU, which is so hell bent on expansion that it ignored the nature of its premature attempts to bring the Ukraine into its its orbit because ……… Europe.
  • Viktor Yanukovych for his abject corruption and venality.
  • Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko for their abject corruption and venality, which is what got Yanukovych elected.
  • The oligarchs, because ……… oligarchs.

That being said, the decision to support and bolster the Fascists in the Svoboda party and the Right Sector militia, and make them the tip of the spear in the protests that drove Yanukovych from power after a deal had already been cut, tripping every switch in Russian psyche, that wasn’t any of them.

That was us.  That was neocon Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland and our State Department, and our CIA, and our front groups like the National Endowment for Democracy that put the Fascists in control of the defense and interior portfolios in the new government.

The Neocons have been wrong about everything since before they were Republicans, when they were staffers for Scoop Jackson’s (D-WA) staff, and yet they continue to drive our foreign policy decisions.

Where are the “Adults in the Room” who are supposed to keep the metaphorical firearms out of the metaphorical hands of metaphorical children (neocons)?

Theoretically, Barack Obama, who won the primaries, and later election as president, over his opposition to “stupid wars”, and so should be keeping these people’s hands away from the reigns of power.

The fact that Nuland was promoted from spokesman to Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs by Secretary of State John Kerry, but Obama is in charge, and the decision to place a former Cheney aide in such a position is ultimately his decision.

Or, to stretch a metaphor to its breaking point, the Cossacks work for the Czar, which is kind of ironic, because the Cossacks actually come from the Ukraine.

    Thank You Victoria Nuland

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    Thanks to neocon support right-wing nationalists Ukraine, courtesy of Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, Ur-neocon Robert Kagan’s wife, a deal got killed, and there was coup in the Ukraine, followed by anti-ethnic Russian legislation, which was in turn followed by the Russian occupation of the Crimea.

    Well, now we have an overwhelming vote for the Crimea to join Russia:

    Russian state media said Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to break with Ukraine and join Russia on Sunday, as Kiev accused Moscow of pouring forces into the peninsula and warned separatist leaders “the ground will burn under their feet”.

    With over half the votes counted, 95.5 percent had chosen the option of annexation by Moscow, the head of the referendum commission, Mikhail Malyshev, said two hours after polls closed. Turnout was 83 percent, he added – a high figure given that many who opposed the move had said they would boycott the vote.

    Western powers and leaders in Kiev denounced it as a sham.

    Underlining how Moscow’s military takeover of the peninsula two weeks ago has driven Russia and the West into a crisis with echoes of the Cold War, Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama spoke by telephone and, according to the Kremlin, the Russian and U.S. presidents agreed on a need to cooperate to stabilize Ukraine.

    This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, and Victoria “F%$# the EU” Nuland, and those who have decided to employ her in (Obama, Clinton, Kerry) need to realize that neocon triumphulism has been a recipe for a US foreign policy disaster.

    I’m not saying that neocons should not be employed by the State Department, but I am saying that they should not be put in positions of authority.

    Witness how we are now repeating the South Ossetia debacle all over again.

    It’s like giving an AK-47 to a hyperactive 6-year old child.

    This is More than a Russian-Ukrainian Thing

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    At the New Yorker, Natalia Antelava notes that Crimean Tatars are completely without any ally or patron:

    At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them—almost two hundred thousand people—were evicted from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of Crimea.

    Kadyrov’s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was eight at the time, was among those deported. “The soldiers gave us five minutes to pack up,” she told me, when I visited the family on Thursday. “We left everything behind.” Memetova still has vivid memories of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children off of the moving train—the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead. Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.

    Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova’s forty-four-year-old daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me—which she believes were lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after Memetova’s deportation, her house had been marked once again. “Just as we thought we finally had a future,” she said. “How could anyone do this in the twenty-first century?”

    On one side of the conflict are the Russians, (Yes, I know that Stalin was a Georgian) who engaged in Genocide in 1944, and on the other side is the neo-Nazi influenced government in Kiev.

    It’s kind of like what happened to the Roma following the fall of the Warsaw pact.

    The new Europe has some frightening echos to the interwar years.

    Ukraine: Sniper Theory Leaves Tinfoil Hat Territory

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    We have another leaked conversation between high level diplomats involving the Ukraine, in this case Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Catherine Ashton.

    The big story in this discussion, a lot bigger than Victoria Nuland’s, “F%$3 the EU,” comment is Paet’s statement that sources on the ground strongly implied that the snipers at the protests were from the opposition, not Yanukovich:

    A leaked phone call between the EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign minister Urmas Paet has revealed that the two discussed a conspiracy theory that blamed the killing of civilian protesters in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on the opposition rather than the ousted government.

    The 11-minute conversation was posted on YouTube – it is the second time in a month that telephone calls between western diplomats discussing Ukraine have been bugged.

    In the call, Paet said he had been told snipers responsible for killing police and civilians in Kiev last month were protest movement provocateurs rather than supporters of then-president Viktor Yanukovych. Ashton responds: “I didn’t know … Gosh.”

    The leak came a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, said the snipers may have been opposition provocateurs. The Kremlin-funded Russia Today first carried the leaked call online.

    The Estonian foreign ministry confirmed the leaked conversation was accurate. It said: “Foreign minister Paet was giving an overview of what he had heard in Kiev and expressed concern over the situation on the ground. We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the opposition’s involvement in the violence.” Ashton’s office said it did not comment on leaks.

    During the conversation, Paet quoted a woman named Olga – who the Russian media identified her as Olga Bogomolets, a doctor – blaming snipers from the opposition shooting the protesters.

    “What was quite disturbing, this same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows that people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among policemen and people from the streets, that they were the same snipers killing people from both sides,” Paet said.

    Note that there is no accusation of blame for the snipers, nor for a cover-up in the phone conversation, but it does indicate that allegations that elements among the protesters were behind this bears further investigation.

    Also, Paet gives an eyewitness account of a member of the Ukrainian Parliament being beaten just outside of the parliament building, and harassment of MPs by “uninvited visitors” (militiamen), which would imply that there is a use of violence or threat of violence against MPs to ensure that they vote “the right way.”

    I do not know what is up in the Ukraine, but it does seem that this sh%$ is all f%$#ed up and sh%$.

    Hillary Drops the H-Bomb

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    No, I do not mean thermonuclear weapons, I mean the full up Godwin.

    She invoked Hitler on the events in the Ukraine:

    Hillary Clinton Likens Russia’s Passport Move In Ukraine To Nazi Germany

    Hillary Clinton likened aspects of Russia’s involvement in Crimean Ukraine to Nazi Germany during a fundraising event, according to two people present.

    Buzzfeed, citing two sources, reported that the former secretary of State said at a fundraiser on Tuesday that Russia’s move to start issuing passports in Crimean Ukraine was akin to “population transfers” that happened in Nazi Germany during World War II.

    “Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the 30s,” Clinton said according to the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “All the Germans that were … the ethnic Germans, the Germans by ancestry who were in places like Czechoslovakia and Romania and other places, Hitler kept saying they’re not being treated right. I must go and protect my people and that’s what’s gotten everybody so nervous.”

    Seriously, her need to go to war at the drop of a hat was why she did not get the nomination in 2008, and here she is making John McCain look like Timothy Leary.

    She is not going to be the President-Elect in November of 2016. Hillary Clinton just flushed that down the toilet.

    Your Daily Dose of Ukraine Related Incompetence and Hypocrisy

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    It turns out that one of the first acts of the new parliament in the “no-bigotry, ethnocentrism, or fascist parties here” Ukraine was to rescind the status of the Russian language one of the official languages of the Ukraine: (and note how this was buried at paragraph 5 of the story)

    Officials in Moscow continued Tuesday to express displeasure with events in Ukraine, if not as harshly as the day before. One bill that flew through the Rada on Monday downgraded the status of Russian as an official language, which struck critics as an unnecessary and incendiary move and which opened Ukraine’s new authorities to stinging criticism from their larger neighbor.

    Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, tweeted Tuesday, “We want to curtail the influence of radicals and nationalists who are trying to play first fiddle in Ukraine.”

    Note that this story was from February 25, 4 days before Russia sent troops.

    Do you think that there is any connection?

    As Ted Rall pithily observes that, “Millions of ethnic Russians in former Soviet Republics have suffered widespread discrimination and harassment since the 1991 collapse — and that their troubles began with laws eliminating Russian as an official language.”

    BTW, the person who seems to be deepest in our shenanigans in the Ukraine, you know, things like funding the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party the Pravyi Sektor militia, that would be Victoria Nuland, the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, who is literally in bed with the Neocons.

    I mean it.  She is married to Robert Kagan, who is not just a Neocon, but is pretty the much the ur-Neocon, having co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which has called for:

    • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein (1999)
    • The overthrow of Saddam Hussein, because he was behind 9/11 (2001)
    • Called for American hegemony across the world
    • Repeatedly called for preemptive military strikes
    • Permanent U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia
    • Hostilities with China

    Yeah, he founded the group that more than any other organization put us in Iraq.

    And his reward for this? 

    Why, he is on the State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.

    How do these folks, and here I am referring to both the Neocons like Kagan and Nuland, and Liberal Interventionists like the Samantha Powers, continue to maintain influence in our foreign policy?

    Why is an an uninterrupted record of failure, misery, and the death of innocents considered an endorsement for greater responsibilities in Washington, DC?

    It’s like promoting the guy who designed the Edsel to run the company.

    Quote of the Day on the Ukraine

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    Courtesy of Ian Welsh:

    I will be frank: the West needs to stop fomenting these revolutions.  Russia is not going to allow NATO to creep up to their border without taking action.  You’d have to be crazy to think that Russia was going to allow the Ukraine, including Crimea, to become part of NATO, and yes, that was the West’s (or rather, America’s) endgame.  (The Europeans think the Americans are crazy to be baiting the bear like this.  But the Europeans need Russian natural gas.)

    He also notes that since 1991, the official public spending on changing the Ukraine’s government has been 5 billion dollars.

    By comparison in 2010 California Senate race Barbara Boxer Spent $29,537,796.00, and Carly Fiorina Spent $21,521,397.00, for total spending of $51,059,193.00, (Link), and California’s population is 37,253,959, so the spending was $1.37 per person.

    So if you took the $5 billion that was spent over the last 23 years on the 44,573,205 residents of the Ukraine, you get $4.88 per person per year.

    And this is in a place where the media market for the whole country has got to be considerably less than that of the Bay Area.

    And BTW, much of this money is going to the Neo-Nazi Svoboda party and its accompanying Pravyi Sektor militia, which payed a large role in the current revolution.

    OK, I Don’t Have Any Special Insights, But Here are My Unspecial Insights On the Ukraine

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    First, as in Georgia, the Russian operation was well considered and well executed. This was a tougher job than was done in Georgia, because as I noted at the time of that invasion, there was months of Georgian preparation for their attack on Sough Ossetia, and the Georgian military had been completely penetrated by the Russians, so the Russian forces had months to prepare.

    In this case, it was all pulled together in about 1½ weeks:

    At first, it wasn’t clear who exactly the armed men were—spotted at airports in Sevastopol and Simferopol overnight on Feb. 28. But on March 1, the Russian senate unanimously approved a request from Pres. Vladimir Putin to use the military “on the territory of Ukraine pending the normalization of the social and political situation in that country.”

     The operation was already underway. Russian forces had launched a coordinated takeover of key sites, including airports, government offices, television stations and the two land routes connecting Crimea to the rest of Ukraine.

     Someone sabotaged Ukrtelecom, which provides phone and Internet service to the peninsula.

    Well executed, and John Kerry, aka the Clown Prince of Foreign Policy, has a response that is jaw dropping in its hypocrisy:

    Secretary of State John Kerry made the round of Sunday shows this morning to condemn Russia’s “incredible act of aggression” in Ukraine, warning Prime Minister Vladimir Putin that the country faces harsh economic sanctions from the international community.

     “It is really a stunning, willful choice by President Putin to invade another country,” Kerry said on Face the Nation.

     But in the seriousness of the situation, the irony of Kerry’s next comments may have gone missed. ”You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” he said.

    Yes, that WAS his talking point of the day.

    Meanwhile, the Ukranians are mobilizing their military, and a member of their interim government, and a member of the right-wing Svoboda party, Mikhail Golovko, is suggesting that the Ukraine will restore its nuclear arsenal.

    Needless to say, this is a complete mess, and there are not a lot of lessons learned at this point.

    The only one that immediately comes to mind is that the EU’s hasty moves toward expansion work against its viability and continued existence.  (The start of this crisis was the rejection of an EU deal intended to lead toward Ukrainian accession)

    A Correction:

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    While still feel that the the government transition in the Ukraine will likely lead to an upsurge in anti-semitism.

    The Ukraine has a long and inglorious tradition of virulent Jew hatred, and periods of social unrest lead to an upsurge in bigotry of all kinds.

    That being said, Mark Ames, former editor in chief of the eXile, a former Moscow based English language tabloid, knows a LOT more about the former Soviet Union than I do.

    One of the things that he knew was that Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, whom I quoted as advising that Jews leave Kiev, is a Chabad rabbi, and Chabad is really tight with the Kremlin.

    So, I have to question the reliability of Reb Azman’s pronouncements.

    Ames’ thesis is basically that the sh%$ is f%$#ed up and sh%$, and that teasing out alliances and philosophies is simply not a productivity, or as he sums up, “Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong“:

    ………

    Everyone looking for a proxy side to support or oppose in the Ukraine political dynamic will be disappointed. Ukraine politics go by their own rules. Today’s neoliberal ultranationalist could be tomorrow’s Kremlin ally, and visa-versa. Just look at what happened to the Orange Revolution—nothing. To wit:

    a) One Orange Revolution leader, Yulia Tymoshenko, wound up turning against her partner Viktor Yushchenko and allying with Yanukovych to strip Yushchenko of presidential powers; later, Tymoshenko allied with the Kremlin against Yushchenko; now she’s free from jail and the presumptive leader of the anti-Yanukovych forces.

    b) The other Orange leader—the pro-EU, anti-Kremlin Viktor Yushchenko—wound up allying with pro-Kremlin Yanukovych to jail Yulia Tymoshenko.

    c) John McCain has been the big driving force for regime change against Yanukovych, but McCain’s 2008 campaign chief’s lobby firm, Davis Manafort, managed Yanukovych’s political campaigns and his lobbying efforts in the US.

    d) Anthony Podesta, brother of President Obama’s senior advisor John Podesta, is another Yanukovych lobbyist; John Podesta was the chief of Obama’s 2008 transition team.
    4. Yanukovych was not fighting neoliberalism, the World Bank, or oligarchy — nor was he merely a tool of the Kremlin.

    There’s another false meme going around that because the World Bank and IMF are moving in to “reform” Ukraine’s economy — for the umpteenth time — that somehow this means that this was a fight between pro-neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forces. It wasn’t.

    Yanukovych enthusiastically cooperated with the IMF and pledged to adhere to their demands. Six months after Yanukovych was elected president, the headline read “International Monetary Fund approves $15 billion loan to Ukraine”. ………

    ………

    The point is this: Ukraine is not Venezuela. This is not a profoundly political or class fight, as it is in Venezuela. Yanukovych represents one faction of oligarchs; the opposition, unwittingly or otherwise, ultimately fronts for other factions. Many of those oligarchs have close business ties with Russia, but assets and bank accounts—and mansions—in Europe. Both forces are happy to work with the neoliberal global institutions.

    In Ukraine, there is no populist left politics, even though the country’s deepest problem is inequality and oligarchy. Memories of the Soviet Union play a big role in turning people off to populist-left politics there, for understandable reasons.

    So Mark Ames thesis is that the political culture of the Ukraine is largely one of corrupt politicians and oligarchs grasping for advantage.

    This does not mean that Jews in the Ukraine are not likely to see harassment, because (as Ames notes) the ultra-nationalist parties were at the lead of the most recent protests, and because the history of that part of the world.

    And Ukraine Returns to Form………

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    I am not surprised that a prominent Ukrainian rabbi has called for Jews to flee Kiev.

    He is that there have been credible threats against the Jewish community:

    Ukrainian Rabbi Moshe Reuven Azman, called on Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the country if possible, fearing that the city’s Jews will be victimized in the chaos, Israeli daily Maariv reported Friday.

    “I told my congregation to leave the city center or the city all together and if possible the country too,” Rabbi Azman told Maariv. “I don’t want to tempt fate,” he added, “but there are constant warnings concerning intentions to attack Jewish institutions.”

    According to the paper’s report Azman closed the Jewish community’s schools but still holds three daily prayers. He said the Israeli embassy told members of the Jewish community to avoid leaving their homes.

    It’s a fact that a significant number of of the protesters had ties to right wing nationalists, most notably the Svoboda party.

    What’s more the history of the Ukraine, and Kiev in particular has been extremely antisemitic Even By the Standards of the Russian Empire and the Republics of the Former Soviet Union.

    Seriously, the 200,000 or so Jews living in the Ukraine need to make arrangements for a quick exit.

    I expect to see synagogues to burn.

    From the Department of Double Standards………

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    I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!

    The big news in diplomacy recently is the leaking of a conversation between Victoria Nuland,the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and Geoff Pyatt, the Ambassador to the Ukraine, regarding the recent political upheavals in that former Soviet republic.

    Diplomatic heads have been exploding over Neuland telling Pyatt, “F%$# the EU.

    America’s new top diplomat for Europe seems to have been caught being decidedly undiplomatic about her EU allies in a phone call apparently intercepted and leaked by Russia.

     “F%$# the EU,” Victoria Nuland apparently says in a recent phone call with the US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, as they discuss the next moves to try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine amid weeks of pro-democracy protests which have rocked the country. The call appears to have been intercepted and released on YouTube, accompanied by Russian captions of the private and candid conversation.

     Although the US state department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, White House spokesman Jay Carney alleged that because it had been “tweeted out by the Russian government, it says something about Russia’s role”.

     ………

     State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Nuland “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologized for these reported comments”.

     She said that if the Russians were responsible for listening to, recording and posting a private diplomatic telephone conversation, it would be “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

    Well, first, I would argue that if a diplomat decides conduct a conversation over unsecured cell phones, they pretty much had it coming, and second, given the very recent history of the NSA targeting the sex lives of domestic political opponents of the Bush administration.

    If intercepting an unencrypted call between two people discussing how to intervene in political instability on a nation state bordering your own is “a new low in Russian tradecraft,” then there are simply no words to describe what the NSA has been doing against domestic critics of our government.

    Neither the EU’s outrage over the comments about the EU, which is a participant in the conflict, and therefore cannot be a good faith interlocutor on this issue, nor the US’s crocodile tears over being spied upon are justified.

    They are simply exercises in self serving hypocrisy.

    Pravda on the Potomac Blames Ukraine For Enacting U.S. Like Laws

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    The Washington Post is criticizing the Yanukovych government in the Ukraine for laws that exist in their hometown without any comment:

    The lunatics writing the Washington Post editorials want to blame the Ukraine (and the Russian president Putin) for its remarkable patient defense against the foreign supported, neo-nazi vandals of the Svoboda party who try to storm and take over government buildings in Kiev.
    One paragraph especially shows their unmatched hypocrisy:

    The repressive new restrictions, which criminalize such activity as wearing helmets and setting up tents in public spaces, look a lot like the strategy the Russian ruler used to crush mass demonstrations against his regime in 2011 and 2012. Mr. Yanukovych even adopted the regulation Russia imposed on nongovernment groups that receive foreign funding — a product of Mr. Putin’s paranoid conviction that pro-democracy movements in his country and elsewhere are the result of Western government plots.

    Wearing helmets and masks at demonstrations has been unanimously criminalized by the D.C. Council in the Washington Post’s hometown. Tents set up in public spaces by the Occupy movement have been outlawed and cleared by force all over the United States. The Russian and Ukrainian laws that regulate foreign money to political organisations are copies of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act which is law of the land since 1938.

    (emphasis original)

    There is very little difference between how the Ukraine is using law as an instrument for crushing political protest, and how the United States s using law as an instrument for crushing political protest.

    Snowden Has Flown to Russia, Is Expected to Ask for Asylum in Ecuador

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    I am not surprised.  Hong Kong is not a safe haven in the long term, and if he returns to the United States, he will be tortured through extended solitary confinement in an attempt to break him, as was done with Wen Ho Lee.

    So he is in Moscow negotiating asylum with Ecuador:

    Fugitive former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden is due to fly out of Russia in the next few hours in a bid to seek asylum in Ecuador.

    Reports suggest he will be on an early afternoon flight out of Moscow, heading first to the Cuban capital Havana.

    Washington says it is urging countries in the “Western Hemisphere” not to let Mr Snowden enter their territory.

    The US has charged him with espionage over leaked secret documents revealing US internet and phone surveillance.

    In a series of rapidly moving developments on Sunday, Mr Snowden flew to Moscow from Hong Kong where he had been holed up since fleeing the US.

    Once at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport it is thought he was met by Ecuador’s ambassador to Moscow whose car was seen arriving by reporters.

    On Sunday night it was unclear exactly where Mr Snowden was, but he was believed to be still at the airport.

    BBC Moscow correspondent Daniel Sandford says it is being reported that he will fly first to Cuba and then to Venezuela before heading to Ecuador. The first plane scheduled to fly to Havana was due to leave Sheremetyevo at 14:05 Moscow time (10:05 GMT).

    He will be trying to avoid any country that might arrest him on behalf of the US, our correspondent adds.

    At this point, I expect that Obama is looking into ways of having Snowden whacked, and Glenn Greenwald might be on his latest kill list as well.

    Russia to Order AN-70 Transports

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    The Russian Air Force is planning to order 60 of the transports:

    Ukrainian company Antonov together with Russian United Aircraft Corporation will participate in manufacturing Antonov An-70 transport airplanes. Russian defense ministry already placed an order for 60 such machines, USD 67 million apiece. Developed since 1978, An-70 can carry heavier cargo than existing transport planes and land on ill-equipped runways.

    An-70 can carry 300 troopers, or 200 injured persons, or 47 tons of freight. Comparably, the closest alternative to An-70 – the Airbus A400M Atlas – can carry 37 tons of cargo. Market price of the Spanish A400M is EUR 145 million, whereas the Ukrainian An-70 costs less than USD 70 million.

    Planes An-70 will be produced at JSC Gorbunov Kazan Aviation Production Association in Kazan, Russia. The plane can fly at a speed of 780 kilometers per hour at distances of up to 7,800 kilometers. An-70 is capable of landing on 600-800 meter runways with earth surfaces. Onboard navigation equipment allows the plane to land and takeoff at airports lacking special earth-based equipment.

    This is interesting, and not just because it represents a rapprochement between Russian and Ukrainian defense industry.

    By almost every metric (except for noise where, the contra rotating props create a racket), it equals the A400M, and if this order is sufficient to make the production line viable, it could be a major headache for EADS.

    What a Surprise

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    If you diss organized labor by holding a convention in an anti-union right to work state, they are not inclined to pony up sponsorship money:

    Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they’ve barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing.
    Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they have barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing. Peter Nicholas has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters.
    Now, one set of donors the party was banking on—organized labor—says it won’t help pay for the event or will scale back contributions, partly because it is upset that the convention will be in a state considered unfriendly to unions.
    Labor unions chipped in $8.6 million of the $60.5 million the party spent in 2008 in Denver. This year, a number of construction unions, as well as the labor organization Unite Here, plan to give nothing, officials say.
    The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers gave $1 million in 2008, but it isn’t planning to contribute this year. It cites North Carolina’s “right to work law” that is opposed by unions, as well as labor’s need to spend money on grass-roots campaign work. “Registration drives, get-out-the-vote drives and leafleting—that’s where we can make our best contribution,” said spokesman Jim Spellane.
    “We are making no contribution this year,” said Tom Snyder, a top official at Unite Here, which contributed $100,000 to the 2008 convention. “That’s all I’m going to say about that,” he said.

    With about four months to go before the Sept. 3 opening of the Charlotte convention—which has been scaled back from the one in Denver four years ago—Democrats are about $20 million short of their fundraising goal of $36.7 million, according to two prominent Democrats who have been briefed by convention planners.

    You know, if you sell your base down the river, this is what happens.

    Anyone regretting the Obama administration decision to actively slow walk the Employee Free Choice Act over the past 3 years?

    Probably not.

    It’s On Bitch

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    And by Bitch, I mean Ohio Governor John Kasich, who passed an even wider ranging assault on union rights, because the referendum to repeal the bill is on the ballot:

    Ohio residents will be voting this fall on whether to allow a controversial collective bargaining law to go into effect, officials said Thursday.

    Backers of the effort to repeal the law have successfully collected almost four times as many signatures needed to put the issue on the statewide ballot.

    Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said opponents of the newly passed law collected 915,456 valid petition signatures. A total of 231,147 were needed.

    “We Are Ohio has collected and validated more signatures than any other campaign in Ohio history,” said Melissa Fazekas, a spokeswoman for the group collecting the signatures. She expects voters will repeal the new law in November.

    According to Maddow it’s gotten so bad that Kasich is polling behind Rick Scott of Florida. He’s down to 35% approval, which means that not only is he less popular than a case of hemorrhoids, he’s probably less popular than Dick Cheney pole dancing.

    I expect that a lot of this vote will be about Kasich in addition to the union busting law.

    I just hope that the Koch suckers and their corporate money don’t turn this around.

    How the Russians Develop Weapons

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    The Russians have now successfully test-launched their Bulava missile:

    Russia successfully tested on Tuesday its new Bulava intercontinental missile which Moscow aims to make the cornerstone of its nuclear arsenal over the next decade.

    The Defense Ministry said the 12-meter long Bulava, or Mace, fired from a submarine near Russia’s border with Finland, successfully hit its target some 6,000 km (3,370 miles) away on the peninsula of Kamchatka in Russia’s far east.

    “The launch was successful in all respects. The Bulava missile delivered its warhead to the target area in the Kura testing site in the Kamchatka Peninsula region,” spokesman Colonel Igor Konashenkov told Interfax.

    The Bulava, which will face four more trials this year before being introduced into service this year or next, had failed half of its previous fourteen trials, calling into question the expensive missile program.

    The program was never in serious question.

    The Russians do missile testing: test, fix, test, fix.

    Americans just do tests to validate their analysis, we operate under the assumption that our missiles will, after a few decades of simulation and systems analysis will work perfectly out of the box.

    One of these methods is faster and cheaper, but it is not ours, and catches serious problems early enough that when you do catch a stinker, you don’t have so much invested in your techno whiz bang that you cannot abandon it.

    The Rude Pundit Asks the Right Question

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    You should read his whole post about what is going on in Wisconsin, but in the last paragraph, he asks the important question:

    Where the f%$# is the President? Where the f%$# is the President? Where the f%$# is the President?

    (%$# mine)

    The answer, of course is that the President is busy, “Winning the Future,” because pursuing a lame ass slogan in order to be reelected in 2008 is more important than defending the rights of the ordinary working man.

    Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?!?

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    Recall time!

    So, the Wisconsin State Senate just pulled the anti-union provisions out of the budget bill, and then, since they did not require a quorum, since they were non-budgetary, they passed it with an 18-1 vote.

    I will note that the motion appears to be in violation of the state constitution:

    The measure approved Wednesday forbids most government workers from collectively bargaining for wage increases beyond the rate of inflation. It also requires public workers to pay more toward their pensions and double their health insurance contribution, a combination equivalent to an 8 percent pay cut for the average worker.

    Those savings would appear to be budgetary to me, and hence subject to the state constitution’s quorum requirement.

    Firedog Lake’s invaluable David Dayen has some more of the finer points, and it appears that this is definitely headed to court, though the Wisconsin State Supreme Court is heavily Republican.

    If you want to donate to the recall efforts, you can go to my Act Blue Page. There is a link there for donations.

    Also note that in the middle of the most important fight for ordinary working Americans in decades, the Obama administration has decided that they don’t want to be involved:

    Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

    Administration officials said they saw the events beyond Washington as distractions from the optimistic “win the future” message that Mr. Obama introduced in his State of the Union address, in which he exhorted the country to increase spending for some programs even as it cuts others so that America can “out-innovate and out-educate” its global rivals.

    I guess that someone in the administration finds unions, and ordinary working people to be icky. After all, they expect to spend a billion dollars in 2012 on the Presidential election, and the working man just does not have that kind of money.

    Barack Obama is very lucky that the Republicans are as awful as they are, because otherwise, as awful as he is, he’d have a serious primary challenger right now.

    What can I say, when Mitt Romney is the class act in the room, you have a very scary political party.