Timothy Gatto

It is no secret that I spent twenty years in the U.S. Army. However the World has changed, and unfortunately, not for the better. At the time I enlisted, the Soviet Union was the biggest World threat, and had been so since my birth in 1950. When I manned the radars in the fire control section of the Nike-Hercules missile system (designed to protect the U.S. and our overseas allies from a Soviet bomber attack), I felt proud to be a part of using these nuclear devices to protect my country. It was a different era and I had a different mindset.

Today I am looking at the World that my service, along with millions of other people helped to create. The least I can say is that I am aghast at what we have helped to create and I apologize for my part in what we have succeeded in achieving; a near fascist nation with the military power to subjugate every nation on the planet. This is what we have achieved, and the American people need to understand the implications of this. The fact is that the people in power in this country are trying to use this military power, along with our economic power to create World hegemony, another way to say that they want to conquer the World.

This is what we accused the Soviet Union of trying to do during the Cold War. This was the reason millions of Americans signed up to go to war and to work in the defense industries and allow our tax dollars to go toward bigger and better armaments to defend the "Free World" from Russian and Chinese Communism instead of rebuilding out infrastructure and trying to devise ways to develop green energy to get off the fossil fuels that are killing this planet. This was also the reason we neglected to properly fund medical research that could have culminated in destroying diseases that are still rampant around the World. The fear of Communism also took funds away from the American people that had contributed their tax dollars and now find themselves worse off than their parents and under trillions of dollars in national debt in order to fund a military that uses an amazing 54% of our discretionary national budget.

We have seen our political system being used to a degree never seen in our history by the wealthiest amongst us in order to receive favors from Congress and the Executive branch. We have allowed these bought politicians to allow for foreign manufacturing of "American" products to allow our industrialists to reap bigger profits for themselves and their shareholders through "Free Trade" agreements that sold off American manufacturing to other nations. We hear talk of a "World Economy" that is in essence a way to skim the profits from manufacturing the products in the World to the people that own the companies that produce these products and those that fund their International manufacturing adventures (Wall Street).

We are told that America is the richest nation on Earth. I have no doubt that this is true, but I can see that this nations riches are not being dispersed to the American people that fought the wars and paid their taxes to create the monster of a global economy. Instead, the money is being held by the richest families that run and control these huge American assets and to those shareholders wealthy enough to buy stock in these companies that manufacture globally instead of giving manufacturing jobs to the American people that allowed them to do this through a system of half-truths and lies foisted upon them by every party in power after the Kennedy era.

We have seen the creation of institutions such as The World Bank and The International Monetary Fund that are run by the same bankers that have run the Western System of banking for well over a hundred years. The same six families that have control over much of this banking system have used their interests to create World Wars and supported both sides of these wars at times to create huge fortunes that added to their coffers. Now they are humankinds greatest predators. They set the stage for nations to wage economic wars against each other and when some nations economies falter, they rush in to render huge loans to "save" these nations.

Meanwhile, as with most things that are too good to be true, they also dictate how these funds (which amount to billions of dollars) are to be used. They make sure that debtor nations only use the borrowed money to buy equipment and to use contractors from an approved list that they supply, adding to the profits of their subsidiaries. The proceeds of the money borrowed doesn't usually flow back into the economies that borrowed this money and there isn't enough economic expansion to pay back the banks that made these loans. Now the real fun begins. The desperate nations that are in debt to the World Bank and the IMF now must sell off its assets such infrastructure (transportation facilities, hospitals, airlines) to internal conglomerates. They also sell mining rights and fisheries and other national resources to international interests to pay their bills, in other words, these nations are raped by the bankers.

This brings us to this "special relationship" we have with the United Kingdom. It seems that most of these bankers come from the U.S. and the UK. After 150 years of trying to derail the United States in almost every endeavor we undertook, we now are the World's greatest allies. We forget that it was the threat of war with the UK and France from Russia that stopped those nations from recognizing the Confederate States of America that almost started a first World war. The Russians even sent two fleets to the United States and put one in San Francisco and one in New York Harbor. That part of history has been scrubbed out of history since the cold war by American revisionists.

While many allied soldiers died during World War II, it was the Russians that paid the price in blood. Over twenty million Russians died fighting and having their citizens killed by the Nazi's. It wasn't just German Nazi's that did the killing however, it was Hungarian, Romanian, Italian and yes Ukrainian Nazi's. It was no surprise to FDR when Russia demanded control of Eastern Europe. It was completely understandable to anyone that understood the horror that they had gone through. Still, the American propaganda machine after FDR's death hyped the take-over of Eastern Europe as nothing but a Communist plot, downplaying the carnage that most of these nations had brought against the Soviet Union. Still, in the Khrushchev Era (Khrushchev, by the way was Ukrainian), The Ukraine was given Russian provinces in order to temper the nation and remove the threat of unrest. One of those provinces was Crimea.

Russian troops fought Ukrainian fascists well after the official end of World War II. It was a few years before the Ukraine was at peace. Many Ukrainians fled to the US and Canada to escape the USSR and were greeted with open arms. Unfortunately, many of these emigrants escaping communism were hard core Nazi's. Huge communities in Canada and the U.S. of Ukrainians popped up, sending money back to their homeland and keeping their traditions including National Socialism. When the "Orange Revolution" happened (with CIA help) they sent money and materials. When the Orange Revolution fell apart, they waited until another period of unrest.

They got it when the EU (UK, Germany and others) made overtures to Ukraine. The Western part of the nation (including Galicia with the largest concentration of Nazi's in their population) was ecstatic. Many Western Ukrainians despised Russia. They were also tempted by the richness of the West and the promise of economic help by the IMF and the World Bank, not understanding the ramifications of taking their "help". Huge demonstrations erupted in Kiev helped in part by 5 Billion U.S. taxpayer Dollars admitted by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. Now the demonstrations got ugly. Snipers were killing not only the police, but protestors. It was recently reveled that the shots were coming from a building that the protestors occupied. It has been determined by some as an attempt by the protestors to create a revulsion towards the democratically elected government.

It apparently worked. With mounting pressure from the protestors and under EU pressure he signed a deal to transfer powers to parliament and hold early elections. But within hours the President had fled the capital and his administration had crumbled. He then went to Russia with his family and to safety. Putin admits that Viktor Yanukovych was a horrible leader and he is politically doomed, but he still contends that he was ousted in a coup. He doesn't mention that it was a Western backed coup but look at the facts. Putin has been acting as diplomatically as he can.

Most people in the World understand that Crimea is occupied by a 95% Russian population and was ceded by Khrushchev in the 1950's. The Crimean's, seeing a chance to return to Mother Russia, immediately organized a referendum to rejoin Russia. Russia never invaded the Crimea, contrary to what the State Department, President Obama and the mainstream media tell you. Russia is allowed to have 26,000 troops in Crimea and had a 50 year lease on the port of Sevastopol, the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. These Russian military took no part in the events in the Crimea, it was the military self-defense force of Crimea that detained Ukrainian solders at their bases.

The referendum passed with 97% of the vote and the Russian Duma passed a bill to incorporate them back into the Russian State and President Putin signed the bill. End of story. The U.S. government and U.S. media story that the Crimea was "invaded" by Russia is a propaganda event designed to mislead the American people and it is working... unfortunately. Many Americans still trust in the mainstream media to tell them the truth, it doesn't. The corporate media regurgitates exactly what the government wants them to say. People like Scott Pelley on CBS is nothing but a lackey that spews out American State Department information designed to deceive the American public.

This time, American propaganda has overstepped its ability to deceive many Americans. There are U.S. citizens that are rethinking what the government is telling them. I credit Edward Snowden for telling us the truth about the mass surveillance on American citizens for raising the consciousness of the American public. I also credit President Obama for informing us on how the American government stoops to lies and deception by letting him tell us outright lies and distortions about the events in the Ukraine and the Crimea. Congressman Alan Grayson just stated about the events in the Crimea;

“Why are we pretending otherwise? Why are we speaking about naked aggression, why are we speaking about stealing Crimea, why are we speaking about bullying, or the new Soviet Union, or thuggery, or audacious power-grabbing, or bully bear Putin, or Cold War two?”

Our nation wants the Ukraine to loot the natural resources of that country and to put it into NATO and use it as launching pad for missiles in order to render Russia helpless to retaliate after a U.S. first nuclear strike. This would make Russia pliant and subservient to this coalition of the U.S. and the EU.

The sad part of this story for me personally, is that I now find myself living in a country (and pardon the hackneyed phrase) that is on the wrong side of history. I admire Steven Segal (who I don't like as an actor) for going to Russia and siding with President Putin. If I had the resources I might also move to Russia. I find myself living in a country that fails to live up to our Constitution and treats its people, not as citizens, but as subjects. There is no real democracy in this nation and our political system is broken with no chance of repairing it. It is controlled by influential people with money to act in their interests.

Everything you hear in the Mainstream media is suspect. Everything that comes out of Congress is suspect. The President lies to his people. The government spies on us. This is something I didn't sign up for.

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Tim Gatto's new book "Contempt to Outrage" available from Oliver Arts and Open Press.

By Timothy V. Gatto, a retired Army Sergeant and former Chairman of The Liberal Party of America. He can be reached at: timgatto@hotmail.com Read Tim's Book "Complicity to Contempt" and his Novel "Kimchee Days or Stoned Cold Warriors From Oliver Arts and Open Press and available on Amazon and all other online bookstores.