I just have to laugh.

Editor,

The U.S. has its own own skimmers: banks, hedge funds, and CEO's, its own vacuum cleaner sucking 80% of the nation's wealth into the hands of the 1%.

I personally am neither gloating over Mr. Putin's problems nor enarmored with authoritarian fantasies. But the endless demonization of Mr. Putin, endless post-USSR expansion of NATO, and endless claims that American incitement of Russia's enemies is fine while Russia's support for its friends is not illustrate in my mind that: a) U.S. planners do not know how to conceptualize the world in multipolar terms, and b) the West wants Russia's natural gas and doesn't want to pay for it.

The hypocrisy in U.S. criticisms of what it calls authoritarianism and aggression by its enemies is as thick as molasses. American authoritarianism is hidden in plain sight, in its finely honed strategy of domestic division: from institutionalized racism to cultivating enemity among those who still have seats in the lifeboat for those tossed overboard.

American democracy is a system gamed by money. When it is hailed as the sine qua non, I just have to laugh.

Re: "Putin’s Bubble Bursts" (12/19/2014)