Replies to post #447373 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

B402 sure sees it as dark as about anyone could. It's the way Trump painted it in his latest Mar-a-Lago rant, after his latest court appearance.



Piers Morgan .. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171853568 .. not a favorite ..

Cohen is. Might watch the interview later.

[B402]

The invitation remains open...Lol......Thanks for the Noam

The underlying theme is corporate power one way or the other, be it military or political....

His favorite pres, FDR and 'the rest' are in competition for the worst, lol....If it was expanded on in the interview my guess it would circle back to corporate power and influence too.....

To bad he wasn't asked about inequity and its role etc......But its just change, right?.......(circle back to the competition between presidents racing to the bottom)

Just skip to Trump,,,,,,The storm all those Presidents created.....And How? Corporate corruption of the American government.....

Noam was spot on, couldn't see any point to disagree on........Perhaps another interview before the good fella passes on to delve a bit deeper in how we got where we are and why, the ramifications of the past and how they affect today and how those scenarios have played out prior to the US empire........

He has seen it before.....

[fuagf]

Note Piers Morgan's body language. I see it drastically changing when Chomsky started outlining how he sees the US (all administrations) as provoking China rather than working to preserve relative peace between the two. He says the USA has broken the One China deal. And he sees the move to Asia as part of a provocative encircling of China move. All to maintain America's position of the one nation with predominant power in the world. All seemingly supported by fact, actually.

Anyway, Morgan's deference to Chomsky does drift there. He clearly becomes agitated in his, i'd say, conservative instinctive attempt to question Chomsky's stance. Piers becomes quite defensively aggressive. That comes, not sure around 10 min. or earlier in your:

Chomsky one tiny slip at about 8 min. where he says Putin's comment that 'anyone who thinks the USSR
can be restored is nuts' is not reported in the West. I've read it at least once. Ok, see bottom here

PATH TO POWER: A political profile.; Putin Steering to Reform, But With Soviet Discipline

By Michael Wines
Feb. 20, 2000

Nine years ago a sea of Russians celebrating the collapse of a Communist-backed coup jammed the traffic circle outside K.G.B. headquarters in Moscow and stripped away icons of dictatorship, including a bust and plaque honoring the late spymaster and Soviet ruler, Yuri V. Andropov.

On Dec. 20, in a little-noticed ceremony at entrance 1A of the old headquarters, workers put them back -- on the personal order of Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.

To Westerners, it seemed a curious tribute: a gesture of respect from a self-proclaimed democratic reformer to a chief of an infamous machine of repression. Now that Mr. Putin is acting president and the runaway favorite to win a full term in presidential elections next month, it is a bit unsettling, too.

But in a country that believes in a strong hand at the tiller, there was logic to the affinity. Mr. Andropov was not simply a shadowy terror chief propping up a disintegrating totalitarian state; he was also a leader who recognized that the system had to be reformed -- not to make it democratic and Western, but to make it great and powerful. He began with draconian discipline in the streets and a crackdown on vodka.

After half a year as prime minister and a month as acting president, Mr. Putin -- his ambitions, his methods, his intentions -- remains largely unknown. But what is known -- his career in the K.G.B., his tough suppression of Chechnya, his statements, his ascetic habits -- point in many ways to an updated version of the Andropov model.

He may have little use for Mr. Andropov's Soviet system, and a greater appreciation for law and order and the value and efficiency of Western-style business. But he has shown himself a man every bit as intolerant of Russia's disarray, and as determined to do something about it.

''Why did the Soviet Union break up?'' he asked in a December interview, then answered himself: ''Because things were allowed to happen; laxness. And if we continue like this, Russia will fall to pieces, and it will happen so quickly you and I cannot even imagine.''

''Then there will be a real tragedy, much bigger than we are seeing today in the north Caucasus, much bigger,'' he said. ''You can imagine what will follow if we see the Russian Federation fall apart, a nuclear power. We do not have the right to be lax; we do not have the right.''

The unanswered question is what he intends to do about it. Mr. Putin advertises himself as a democrat. He says that a free press is an essential deterrent to tyranny; that Russia's only dictatorship should be ''a dictatorship of laws,'' that Russia is committed to ''fundamental political rights and human liberties.''

But his six months in the Kremlin present a far muddier picture. In prosecuting the war in Chechnya, Mr. Putin has proved not just indifferent but belligerent toward international criticism of Russian behavior there. His aides have used both financial and police levers to cow critics of that war in the press, even fingering some skeptical reporters as potential collaborators with the enemy.

Apparently for the purpose of skewering Mr. Putin's potential rival, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, deputies aligned with Mr. Putin struck a power-sharing deal with the Communist Party in Parliament, shunning democratic forces. The acting president has talked of fiscal, legal and social reforms, but his presidential agenda remains vague.

What he has offered are gestures -- like mandatory military education in schools -- which hint at a streak of nationalism and a bent for strong, centralized rule.

Mr. Putin clearly has an intellectual grasp of democracy and of what he has called the ''historic futility'' of communism. He is a veteran of an intelligence service in which, as an agent in East Germany in the 1980's, he could witness the reality of socialist economics and Soviet rule.

But his defining characteristics seem to be a passion for order and a desire to see Russia rise from the ashes.

Matthew H. Murray, a former United States Senate aide who has worked with investors here for the last decade, frequently negotiated with Mr. Putin when he worked with foreign businesses. Mr. Murray called Mr. Putin very tough, mentally swift, immaculately prepared and ingenious at navigating Russia's labyrinthine bureaucracy.

''He's a 'khozayin,' '' a tough taskmaster, Mr. Murray said. ''He knows how the pieces of this society fit together. He knows how to take care of people. And he knows how to get results.

''There's a great potential on the part of the West to misinterpret Putin,'' Mr. Murray added. ''You shouldn't mistake a lack of an economic worldview for a lack of economic purpose. He has a purpose: to get Russia back on its feet.''

Igor Antonov, a retired K.G.B. officer who says he has worked with Mr. Putin, and carries a tattered snapshot which appears to prove it, agreed in a long conversation this week that Mr. Putin and Mr. Andropov shared some traits. But Westerners seeking a clue to Mr. Putin's style of leadership, he said, might look to a more familiar ruler, an iron-fisted democrat and abrasive nationalist of the 1950's and 60's.

''To me, Vladimir Vladimirovich is most like De Gaulle,'' Mr. Antonov said. ''I don't know if that's good or bad. But in my opinion, he is close to this.''

By comparison with many of his countrymen, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin seems almost monkish. He does not smoke. If he drinks, it is rarely. He seldom shows anger and does not make snap decisions. He regularly works 16- and 17-hour days. He is a practicing Orthodox Christian -- his mother secretly arranged for his baptism when he was a baby -- and actually delivered a Christmas Eve sermon to reporters last month outside a Moscow church.

He holds not just one diploma -- a distinction shared among Kremlin predecessors only by Mikhail S. Gorbachev -- but two: a law degree from Leningrad State University and a doctorate in economics from Russia's oldest technical university. He speaks some English and such impressive German that he can imitate dialects. He holds a black belt in judo and played handball in high school. He is a runner, an avocation roughly as common among his predecessors as break dancing.

When President Boris N. Yeltsin appointed Mr. Putin chief of the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the K.G.B., in 1998, he sought to promote him to general, the rank held by all espionage chiefs. Mr. Putin, who only rose to lieutenant colonel during his own K.G.B. days, would have none of it, saying he had not earned the rank.

''His most outstanding trait, I would say, was his fighting spirit and his strong will to achieve his goals,'' said Pavel Koshelev, a college classmate and fellow K.G.B. officer who wrote a recommendation for Mr. Putin's application to join the agency. ''In general, he exercised total control over himself.''

''Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin, they relax by going to the baths, by going hunting, by heavy drinking,'' said Anatoly Sobchak, a former mayor of St. Petersburg and, early on, Mr. Putin's mentor. (Viktor S. Chernomyrdin was the longest-serving prime minister under Mr. Yeltsin.)

''For Putin and his team, the new people who are now coming into the government, they don't drink or smoke, they don't go hunting, and if they go to the baths, it's only to wash, and not to get drunk or be with girls. They're entirely different people -- not only by age, but by upbringing and behavior.''

Early Education

Physical Training And an Elite School

In fact, Mr. Putin's upbringing was not atypical. He was born Oct. 7, 1952, in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, the only child of a factory foreman and his wife who were, it is said, decorated war veterans. Like countless Russians and the vast bulk of Leningraders, he spent his first decades in a communal flat, where he shared a carved-up apartment with two other families.

Still, the Putins were not poor. His father's job, at a shop that made experimental parts for devices conjured up at a neighboring institute, was highly specialized. It probably paid well for the time: unlike many Soviet women, Mr. Putin's mother did not work.

Although small for his age -- he remains short and wiry today -- Volodya Putin was enrolled in martial arts classes by his parents. By the time he entered secondary school No. 281, at age 16, he was a top-ranked expert at sambo, a Russian combination of judo and wrestling dating from the 1930's, and able to handle schoolyard fights, one teacher said, with devastating results.

As it turned out, Mr. Putin was no academic weakling, either. School 281 was a college-preparatory institution for ninth- and tenth-grade students -- the Soviet system ended at the tenth grade. It was the only school in Russia stressing chemistry, and only students with near-perfect grades -- straight ''fives,'' with perhaps one four -- could get in.

Graduates were guaranteed a spot in the city's most prestigious technical university. Mr. Putin planned to be a chemist, but it was not long before he discovered that his true interests lay elsewhere. The education at an elite school like No. 281 was not ordinary. The director encouraged teachers to shun lectures and rely on debates and even arguments to impart their lessons. The school's most popular instructor, a literature teacher named Mikhail Demenkov, peppered his course with samizdat -- banned literature circulated underground in carbon or handwritten copies. The history teacher, Tamara Stelmakhova, staged discussions on whether Nikita S. Khrushchev's promise to build a true communist state within 20 years was realistic.

In this environment, Volodya Putin was drawn to humanities and softer sciences like biology, where he scored steady fives. His math and chemistry grades fell to threes.

''I spoke to his father about this,'' Mr. Putin's biology teacher, Raisa Polunina, now 68 and retired in a tiny third-floor flat outside the city, said in an interview. ''He said his son was so goal-oriented that he already knows what he wants -- and between us, why should he be expending so much energy on chemistry and math when he is going to do something else?''

In teachers' and students' memories -- made rosier, perhaps, by time and his rise to prominence -- Mr. Putin was the steadiest and hardest-working of all: the boy everyone called when the school radio station broke down, as it often did; the one who made weekly current events reports to class and, several times, to the entire school; the sole boy who agreed to dance with girls in an interschool competition because the honor of No. 281 was at stake.

Mr. Putin played music by the Beatles and other Western rock bands on the school radio station. He attended after-school get-togethers, though he held none in his flat. He was well-liked by girls, who apparently admired his athleticism and quiet competence.

''It is hard to say that we had a lot of time for recreation,'' said Aleksandr Matveyev, a classmate. ''After high school graduation, we still would meet sometimes over the weekend at each other's places. We danced, talked about our life; had a party. Still, Putin was a little more adultlike than the rest of us. It was clear that he was a responsible person who wanted to make something of himself.''

In 1970, Mr. Putin enrolled at Leningrad State University, one of the more prestigious Soviet institutions, where he majored in civil law and studied German.

''Putin didn't have much free time at school, and when he did, he spent it on sport,'' said Mr. Koshelev, who first met him there in 1970. ''While he's not a big man, he has fantastic reactions as a judo and karate expert. He was my instructor at the K.G.B. school for karate, and he impressed us all with the inner strength he exuded.''

K.G.B. Career

A Plum Position In a Gentler Time

In 1974, Mr. Putin was Leningrad's judo champion. A year later, he graduated with honors from the university. Mr. Sobchak, who taught civil law to Mr. Putin and presided over the oral examination for his diploma, says now that his student acquired not just a solid education, but also an appreciation of democratic rule.

''The atmosphere at the university was free-thinking, democratic and dissidentlike,'' Mr. Sobchak said during a long talk in his St. Petersburg law office. ''It is not necessary to convince him that we need to have a market economy, to respect private property and the rule of law. It's already his professional credo, one he acquired while he was at the university.''

Mr. Sobchak, like many others, has much to gain by burnishing Mr. Putin's reputation. He lost his bid to become governor of the St. Petersburg region in 1996, and subsequently was accused of major corruption -- accusations that drove him into virtual exile in western Europe until his return to St. Petersburg last year.

Perhaps Mr. Putin did soak in some distinctly un-Soviet customs. But Soviet law was a subject drenched in ideology, and the law school was considered a finishing school for future government workers -- not exactly free thinkers. At the same time, former students say, the faculty was peppered with older professors with an almost prerevolutionary attitude toward the law. And the students, many of them children of the victims of Stalin's repression, were relatively progressive, interested in -- and allowed to experiment with -- foreign films, music and opinions.

The K.G.B. also trolled the Leningrad law school, looking for future spies, but it was extremely selective. Of the 100 or more students in the class of 1975, it picked but one.

Yuri Andropov's K.G.B. was anything but free-thinking. Mr. Andropov himself helped crush the 1956 revolt in Hungary, ran the agency during the 1968 suppression of the ''Prague Spring'' in Czechoslovakia, and popularized the Soviet practice of imprisoning dissidents in psychiatric hospitals.

But by the 1970's and 80's, the K.G.B. -- while still feared and fearsome -- was no longer the tool of Stalin, sending millions to their deaths in the gulag. It still had ears everywhere and was vigilant for any sign of dissidence, but those who knew their place and their limits could stay out of the K.G.B.'s web.

''There was a mood in the country,'' said Ms. Polunina. ''If you weren't touched by Stalin's repression, it was like it never happened. The K.G.B. had become helpers of the state.''

For many, it also was a coveted career choice, a club of elite Soviets given superior education and a unique chance to sample the forbidden world -- if only to fight it. And so when recruiters offered a job in the service in 1975, Mr. Putin accepted instantly.

Soon he owned a new car, which he told disbelieving friends he had won in a lottery. Mr. Putin was schooled in espionage in Moscow, but passed much of the next decade in Leningrad.

After briefly working in counterintelligence, he joined the K.G.B.'s First Chief Directorate as a foreign intelligence agent, focusing on Western visitors and, presumably, handling informers who passed through the region to drop off information or receive instructions.

Mr. Putin's superiors were reluctant to send him abroad, Mr. Antonov, his K.G.B. co-worker, said this week, because he was single. But sometime in the early 1980's, Mr. Putin met and married his wife, Lyudmila, a specialist in English and French some eight years his junior. In 1985, the K.G.B. sent him to East Germany. He became Mr. Adamov, director of a German-Soviet friendship society in Leipzig, living in a two-and-a-half-room apartment in Dresden. His office in a two-story brick villa was across the street from the sprawling Stasi headquarters.

Mr. Putin's real work is partly a matter of speculation. His K.G.B. co-worker, Mr. Antonov, said that he remained a foreign agent, traveling frequently to the West to gather information and manage informers. Others have suggested -- Mr. Antonov calls it ''rubbish'' -- that Dresden was an espionage backwater where Mr. Putin's main job was to keep tabs on an East German population growing increasingly restive under the nation's Stalinist dictatorship.

Either way, the winds were changing. In 1985, Mr. Andropov's protege, Mr. Gorbachev, came to power and began his perestroika, and suddenly Communist rulers across Eastern Europe were tottering.

At least part of Mr. Putin's work in Dresden may have involved preparation for the collapse. According to some published accounts, he worked with seven other K.G.B. agents on an operation code-named ''Luch,'' Sunbeam, aimed at creating a network of spies separate from the one then shared with East Germany's intelligence agency. The notion was to maintain a stable of agents that could survive a collapse of East Germany's government.

That fall, however, came swifter than anyone imagined. By December 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen and East and West Germany were on their way to being reunited under a democratic government. Mr. Putin has yet to give his own public account of those events.

Mr. Antonov, who did not serve in Dresden but claims to have remained close to Mr. Putin through the 1980's, said Mr. Putin's principal reaction to East Germany's collapse was not ideological. He realized that the walling off of the two Germanys was fated to end. The major regret, rather, was that the end was quick and chaotic, and not managed better in the interests of Moscow.

Political Climb

From Mayoral Aide To Kremlin Post

Mr. Putin returned to Leningrad with a bronze medal from his Stasi co-workers and took up work in the international affairs department at his old university, a job that was really a cover under which to continue intelligence work.

Soon, he heard from Mr. Sobchak, who had quit teaching to become the first mayor of a newly renamed St. Petersburg. Mr. Putin became his external affairs aide, charged with recruiting foreign companies and promoting business. In a city embracing capitalism, he became the man to see, in no small part because it quickly became clear that he got things done.

Soon he was deputy mayor, and by Mr. Sobchak's description, ''my most reliable, responsible and hard-working assistant.'' Mr. Antonov, no admirer of Mr. Sobchak, said Mr. Putin told him that he quit intelligence work for politics because government work offered a prospect ''to make something happen'' at a critical period in history.

In Mr. Sobchak's administration, Mr. Putin made the law his specialty. He excelled at unraveling the Gordian knots of Russian bureaucracy and building an infrastructure -- highways, telecommunications, hotels -- to support foreign investment. He also became known as an exacting, workaholic taskmaster who gave underlings one chance -- two, at most -- to reach a goal. He seldom stayed at receptions and city functions longer than a half-hour, preferring to slip away to his desk.

Co-workers said his anteroom was perennially jammed with callers, usually foreign investors, and that his meetings always ran beyond schedule. ''Putin is the kind of guy who wants to listen to everything you have to say,'' said Aleksandr Kostrykin, an aide in his office from 1992 to 1996.

---
[INSERT: This article actually reads as quite complimentary to Putin. Maybe just because it's more accurate than so much others. Perhaps, more likely, because it is of 23 years ago. Anyway, the bit there about Putin being open to listening struck me as very different from another just read again. Here,

Putin's Russia today - Former Ambassador Michael McFaul on "Intelligence Matters"
[...]But today, I would say a couple of things about his mannerisms. Remember, he's been in power for over two decades. So he thinks he knows everything. He doesn't listen even to his closest advisers anymore. They're all second-tier people compared to him. It kind of reminds me of what I used to read about Stalin. He has no peers inside the country anymore, in his view. So he's quite arrogant.
P - And number two, he has that view about the world. The last great leader, in his view, that was a peer to him in the West was Angela Merkel, and now her time is coming to a close. Xi Jinping, he admires. That's real, and I think we should understand that to be real. There is a kind of affinity there ideologically, and I think on a personal level. But the rest of the world, he doesn't think he has any peers.
Updated only two years ago - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168100162 ]
---

His success is hard to measure. St. Petersburg never realized Mr. Sobchak's grand ambitions to become Russia's financial capital; Mr. Putin's plans for a world trade center fell through in 1995; through much of the 1990's, the city struggled.

But in fairness, Mr. Putin started from scratch, and St. Petersburg today appears prosperous -- in part, some say, because of the economic foundation he laid. Mr. Sobchak and others say Mr. Putin had a major hand in every significant foreign investment in St. Petersburg in the early 1990's, from Coca-Cola to Credit Lyonnais to Dresdner Bank to NEC, the Japanese electronics giant.

Sergei Bazhanov, a St. Petersburg banker, first met Mr. Putin in 1995 at the Davos international economic forum. When Mr. Bazhanov later asked the city to help find his bank an office, Mr. Putin produced -- and promptly asked the bank to sponsor the purchase of $500,000 in equipment for city hospitals.

Mr. Murray, the American investment adviser, described a 1994 instance in which a Russian government agency sought to seize a $9 million donation by an American charity -- until Mr. Putin personally persuaded the former prime minister, Mr. Chernomyrdin, to push legislation through Parliament thwarting the agency's plans. Mr. Putin extracted his own payment for the favor: a hefty donation of sterilization equipment to a city medical clinic to slow the spread of AIDS.

''The guy's very professional; very disciplined,'' Mr. Murray said. ''And in the end, you got a result. Usually at the end, you don't know if someone's looking for a bribe. But that's not Vladimir Putin.''

Nina Odling, a senior analyst at the Leontieff Center for social and economic research in St. Petersburg, said: ''Everyone in government in Russia has skeletons in his closet. But Putin was one of the more honest and decent people in the St. Petersburg government.''

Mr. Putin was literally tossed out of St. Petersburg politics in 1996, when Mr. Sobchak lost his political campaign, which Mr. Putin shaped. Alone among top aides, he resigned after the loss. ''Better to be hanged for loyalty than rewarded for treason,'' he told friends.

He was rewarded anyway, with a Kremlin job some say was arranged by another reformer from St. Petersburg who is now his deputy finance minister, Aleksei Kudrin. That job, in 1997, kicked off a rise in Kremlin politics which, by any definition, has been meteoric.

Should it continue after the March election, as seems likely, Russia's De Gaulle may well give the West even greater headaches than did the original. Mr. Putin appears every bit as dry-eyed about the merits of liberal democracy and one-superpower worlds as he was about the demise of East Germany.

Whether he is, like De Gaulle, an authoritarian leader longing to restore the greatness of the state, has yet to be fully answered. Mr. Putin himself was oblique when he last pondered the question.

''Anyone who doesn't regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart,'' Mr. Putin said in a recent interview. ''Anyone who wants it restored has no brains.''

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/20/world/path-power-political-profile-putin-steering-reform-but-with-soviet-discipline.html

That tiny point made, gotta add, Chomsky most certainly would be generally correct in saying,
the last bit about that Putin quote not being mentioned in the West. One example here:

[ Russia Today: why western cynics lap up Putin’s TV poison
[...]Putin was less ambivalent about the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2005, he called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the past century.” Although it was Yeltsin who brought Putin to Moscow, Putin has expressed barely concealed contempt for the nineteen-nineties, the Yeltsin era, as a period of unrelieved chaos, theft, and humiliation.
2016 - https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=125582447]