Exclusive: Any propaganda war starts by planting stories that your target is getting rich, whether he is or isn't, the latest move in demonizing Vladimir Putin. But the larger question is what might happen if the neocons succeed in destabilizing nuclear-armed Russia, asks Robert Parry.

Now that the demonization of Russia's President Vladimir Putin is in full swing, one has to wonder when the neocons will unveil their plan for "regime change" in Moscow, despite the risks that overthrowing Putin and turning Russia into a super-sized version of Ukraine might entail for the survival of the planet.

There is a "little-old-lady-who-swallowed-the-fly" quality to neocon thinking. When one of their schemes goes bad, they simply move to a bigger, more dangerous scheme.

If the Palestinians and Lebanon's Hezbollah persist in annoying you and troubling Israel, you target their sponsors with "regime change" - in Iraq, Syria and Iran. If your "regime change" in Iraq goes badly, you escalate the subversion of Syria and the bankrupting of Iran. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War."]

The United States expanded its sanctions against Russia on Monday, targeting members of President Vladimir Putin's "inner circle" and technology that could be useful to Russia's military.

President Barack Obama said the "targeted" sanctions are in response to Russia's actions in Ukraine.

"The United States has taken further action today in response to Russia's continued illegal intervention in Ukraine and provocative acts that undermine Ukraine's democracy and threaten its peace, security, stability, sovereignty, and territorial integrity," the White House said in a statement. Since a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, on April 17, Russia "has done nothing" to meet its commitments "and in fact has further escalated the crisis," the White House said in a statement.

"The Department of the Treasury is imposing sanctions on seven Russian government officials, including two members of President Putin's inner circle, who will be subject to an asset freeze and a U.S. visa ban, and 17 companies linked to Putin's inner circle, which will be subject to an asset freeze.

The Barack Obama administration seems to love the sound of unilateral sanctions in the morning. It must feel like "victory".

Real, hardcore sanctions, if ever applied, would be devastating mostly for North Atlantic Treaty Organization poodles, not Moscow. Meanwhile, (energy) adults continue to do business as usual.

There's no way to understand Cold War 2.0 without a flashback to November 2010, when Vladimir Putin directly addressed Germanbusiness/industry, proposing an economic community from Lisbon to Vladivostok.

German interest in this key strategic relationship has been reciprocal. Amplified to other nations, that implies in the long run a full European Union-Russia economic/trade integration, and, in the bigger picture, a step closer to Europe-Asia integration. Which translates as absolute anathema for the embattled, Monopoly-addicted hyperpower/hegemon.

For all of US Think Tankland talking and theorizing, breathlessly, about "containment" of a "rogue state" - which in itself is laughable, as if Russia was Somalia - the Obama administration's overarching "strategy" is really in a class by itself. This masterpiece of juvenile delinquent diplomacy boils down to "ignore Putin".

Call it the "I don't like you; I don't wanna talk to you; I just wish you'd die" school of diplomacy. How come Talleyrand never thought if it? Well, with advisers such as the astonishing mediocrity Ivo Daalder, a former ambassador to NATO, no wonder Obama does not need enemies.

The Petrodollar Wars: The Iraq-Petrodollar Connection
(Miss Part One and Two? Start here.)

Introduction to Part Three: "The Petrodollar Wars"

As we have learned from the previous articles in this series, the petrodollar system that was created in the 1970′s has served America well, both economically and politically. What began as a way to drive more demand for the U.S. dollar, in the wake of a move away from the international gold standard in 1971, has provided benefits that few could have ever imagined including the solidification of the U.S. dollar as the global currency of choice. This was important, especially following a temporary loss of dollar credibility after President Nixon's decision to close the gold window.

Put simply, this 'dollars for oil' system has greatly enriched our nation. But this national prosperity has come at the expense of other nations and their potential prosperity.

This brings us to one of the more sensitive, and therefore veiled, aspects of the petrodollar system. Namely, how it has impacted America's relations with foreign nations, especially in the Middle East.

In this third installment of our series, I will explain how America has handled the growing international challenges to the petrodollar system. The consequences have been nothing short of tragic.

I have entitled this piece, The Petrodollar Wars. This article will focus specifically on the 2003 Iraq war. A follow-up article will detail the Petrodollar connection to the Afghanistan war, the Libyan war, and now, the build up to a war with Syria and Iran.

Part 3

The world currently consumes nearly 90 million barrels of oil per day.

According to some projections, global oil demand will reach well over 100 million barrels per day by 2015. And thanks to the petrodollar system, growing global demand for oil leads to an increase in U.S. dollar demand. This artificial demand for U.S. dollars has provided remarkable benefits for the U.S. economy. It has also required the Federal Reserve to keep the dollar in plentiful supply.

By perpetually expanding the U.S. money supply, America's standard of living increases as well. (If this logic does not make sense, be sure to go back and read Part One of this series.) The only problem with this situation is that the only way that it can be sustained is if the demand for the dollar and for U.S. debt securities remains consistently strong.

Grasping this last point is extremely important. For if the artificial global dollar demand, made possible by the petrodollar system, were ever to crumble, foreign nations who had formerly found it beneficial to hold U.S. dollars would suddenly find that they no longer needed the massive amounts that they were holding. This massive amount of dollars, which would no longer be useful to foreign nations, would come rushing back to their place of origin... America.

Obviously, an influx of dollars into the American economy would lead to massive inflationary pressures within our economic system.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this concept as the entire American monetary system literally hinges on this "dollars for oil" system. Without it, Washington would lose it's permission slip to print excessive numbers of dollars.

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that America has a vested interest in maintaining the petrodollar system. And, if you are an American citizen, so do you.

When the International Monetary Fund announced a tentative loan agreement with Ukraine last month, the move was widely acclaimed as vital to saving the country's struggling economy. Headlines trumpeted the decision to "help" Ukraine with a $14 - 18 billion "financial lifeline." In Italy later that day, President Barack Obama called the deal a "major step forward" that will "meet the needs of Ukrainian people over the long term."

But the news headlines and political statements only tell half the story: The IMF loan comes with demands for "economic reforms," i.e., austerity measures, that will be borne by the working-class Ukrainians, one-fourth of whom already live below the poverty line. It is this imposition of conditions, which have grown more numerous in recent loan deals, that led the European Network of Debt and Development to call in a report last week for reform of the IMF.

A few weeks ago, I had a private high-level discussion with some experts in geopolitics, economics and global finance and I had only one objective for participating in the discussion - to find out what was not said and or avoided in the discussion by the participants.

I learned early in my political career as a student anti-war activist that more can be learned from anyone and in any situation by what has not been said and avoided than from all the hours of lengthy dialogue. In most cases, I already knew the positions of the participants on the subject matter of the discussion from their writings, interviews, press statements, their educational backgrounds and their careers. Usually anything that is being said in a discussion reflects the latest position on the participant's previously declared stance on the subject matter.

And quite often, what has been revealed through discussions may not necessarily reflect the entirety of the participant's stance. The difficulty is to be conscious of what the participant has not said and detect what are his reservations and why the reluctance to disclose his thoughts on the matter. In the day-long discussions, I had only intervened twice and I took no more than ten minutes at the most to elicit the reaction that I had anticipated.

The first intervention was in relation to the inevitable implementation of the "Bail-In" (the confiscation of depositors' monies in financial institutions to pay the bondholders / other creditors) to rescue the Too Big To Fail Banks (TBTF), the template being taken from the Cyprus experience for which all the relevant global central banks and institutions such as BIS, IMF, the World Bank have prepared the groundwork.

Transcript:

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

And I'm Robert Siegel.

The International Monetary Fund is coming up with some cash to keep Ukraine out of bankruptcy. The IMF has agreed on an offer of up to $18 billion in loans. The package still needs final approval. It's intended to give the acting government some breathing room and keep it from defaulting on debts. But Ukrainians themselves will feel the bite of austerity measures that come with the bailout. Along with higher natural gas prices, there will be tax increases and other measures. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Kiev.

PETER KENYON, HOST:

Ukraine's acting prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk came to power promising to make badly needed but politically suicidal economic reforms that his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, failed to enact. Today, Yatsenyuk moved to deliver on that promise, presenting an economic package designed to give confidence to international investors that this time, Ukraine is prepared to swallow the bitter medicine that comes with an IMF bailout.

Members of the Bundy family brought "disturbing new evidence" to Greta Van Susteren on Monday, claiming that federal officials killed some of their cows and threw them into a mass grave during the tense standoff between the Bureau of Land Management and armed supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy.

Bundy's wife, Carol, claimed they discovered some of their cattle that had been "shot" dead and tossed into "shallow grave that had been dug and covered up."

When asked if they had received any explanation from the BLM regarding the dead cattle, Carol said they are not in communication with the agency. The family says they have found a total of eight dead cows so far - "four from the pit, two in the corral and then two bulls out on the range that we found."

"We just can see the evidence that I have some of my cattle that are no longer with us," she said.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 685 pp., $39.95

Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn't a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age - or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque - defined by the incredible rise of the "one percent." But it has only become a commonplace thanks to Piketty's work. In particular, he and a few colleagues (notably Anthony Atkinson at Oxford and Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley) have pioneered statistical techniques that make it possible to track the concentration of income and wealth deep into the past - back to the early twentieth century for America and Britain, and all the way to the late eighteenth century for France.

The result has been a revolution in our understanding of long-term trends in inequality. Before this revolution, most discussions of economic disparity more or less ignored the very rich. Some economists (not to mention politicians) tried to shout down any mention of inequality at all: "Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution," declared Robert Lucas Jr. of the University of Chicago, the most influential macroeconomist of his generation, in 2004. But even those willing to discuss inequality generally focused on the gap between the poor or the working class and the merely well-off, not the truly rich - on college graduates whose wage gains outpaced those of less-educated workers, or on the comparative good fortune of the top fifth of the population compared with the bottom four fifths, not on the rapidly rising incomes of executives and bankers.

The United States and other nations in the Group of Seven agreed Friday to "move swiftly" to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia in response to its actions in Ukraine.

In a joint statement released Friday night by the White House, the G-7 nations said they will act urgently to intensify "targeted sanctions." The statement said the G-7 will also continue to prepare broader sanctions on key Russian economic sectors if Moscow takes more aggressive action.

The White House said U.S. sanctions could be levied as early as Monday.

The announcement came as top Ukrainians spoke of imminent invasion and Moscow said that pro-Russian separatists would not lay down their arms in eastern Ukraine until activists relinquish control over key sites in Kiev.

The G-7 nations said they were moving forward on the targeted sanctions now because of the urgency of securing plans for Ukraine to hold presidential elections next month.

The penalties are expected to target wealthy Russian individuals who are close to President Vladimir Putin, as well as entities they run. However, the U.S. will continue to hold off on targeting broad swaths of the Russian economy, though the president has said he is willing to take that step if Putin launches a military incursion in eastern Ukraine.