The financial collapse resulted in a political crisis as Yeltsin, with his domestic support evaporating, had to contend with an emboldened opposition in the parliament. A week later, on 23 August 1998, Yeltsin fired Kiriyenko and declared his intention of returning Chernomyrdin to office as the country slipped deeper into economic turmoil.[9]Powerful business interests, fearing another round of reforms that might cause leading enterprises to fail, welcomed Kiriyenko's fall, as did the Communists.

Yeltsin, who began to lose his hold on power as his health deteriorated, wanted Chernomyrdin back, but the legislature refused to give its approval. After the Duma rejected Chernomyrdin's candidacy twice, Yeltsin, his power clearly on the wane, backed down. Instead, he nominated Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov, who on 11 September 1998 was approved by the State Duma by an overwhelming majority.

Primakov's appointment restored political stability, because he was seen as a compromise candidate able to heal the rifts between Russia's quarreling interest groups. There was popular enthusiasm for Primakov as well. Primakov promised to make the payment of wages and pensions his government’s first priority, and invited members of the leading parliamentary factions into his Cabinet.

Communists and the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia staged a nationwide strike on 7 October 1998 and called on President Yeltsin to resign. On 9 October 1998, Russia, which was also suffering from a poor harvest, appealed for international humanitarian aid, including food.

Russia bounced back from the August 1998 financial crash with surprising speed. Much of the reason for the recovery is that world oil prices rapidly rose during 1999–2000 (just as falling energy prices on the world market helped to deepen Russia's financial troubles), so that Russia ran a large trade surplus in 1999 and 2000. Another reason is that domestic industries, such as food processing, had benefited from the devaluation, which caused a steep increase in the prices of imported goods.[10][11]

Also, since Russia's economy was operating to such a large extent on barter and other non-monetary instruments of exchange, the financial collapse had far less of an impact on many producers than it would had the economy been dependent on a banking system. Finally, the economy had been helped by an infusion of cash. As enterprises were able to pay off debts in back wages and taxes, in turn consumer demand for goods and services produced by the Russian industry began to rise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Russian_financial_crisis

In fact the Russian recovery was solved by Putin in a "government capitalism" which was the best way to manage a difficult situation. The Russians like steady system while the US go for the "boom and bust" system of financial management in order to provide change and oodles of cash to those who know how to manipulate the markets. Putin has a program to employ most ordinary people and he threw out the oligarch who were like leeches on the economy. Imagine throwing out the Koch brothers in the US for manipulating the US elections or throwing a few bankers in prison for having instigated the Global Financial Crisis?. In previous election years the Koshes invested oodles of cash, this year Trump will not get a cent...

The American military and industrial complex needs a new enemy to justify its massive budget and Vladimir Putin is “the right person at the right time,” says Peter Van Buren, former US Foreign Service employee. And here’s why.

“Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the conclusion of the Cold War (“the end of history,” as Francis Fukuyama called it), there was no global enemy for America to face down,” Van Buren who served in the US State Department for 24 years and the author of several book writes in his article for The Irish Examiner.

“No big nasty to spur weapons procurement, to justify a huge standing military with hundreds of bases around the world, or to pick fights with to allow a president down in the polls to morph into a superhero,” he further explains.

“The US made a good-faith effort trying to label all sorts of others — Gaddafi, Assad, Islamic State — as global enemies worthy of perpetual war, but the Middle East in general has turned into a quagmire,” he further notes, adding that meanwhile “America likes a winner, or at least the appearance of winning.”

So why then President Putin and why now?

“Ahead of the next administration, Washington really needs an arch enemy, a poster-child kind of guy who looks like a James Bond villain. And preferably one with nuclear weapons he’ll brandish but never use,” Peter Van Buren explains.

Secondly, he says, Americans are “already well-prepared by the old Cold War to see Russia again as an evil empire, and Vladimir Putin looks the part.”

Besides, the “Russians are involved in Syria’s civil war, so there is some sense of continuity.”

A new Cold War with Russia, in turn, would require America to buy more expensive military hardware, and find new areas of Europe, such as the Baltic states, to garrison.

“It might even breathe new life into a North Atlantic Treaty Organization that is confused about its role vis-a-vis terrorism.”

The Muslim threat however “has proved to have downsides”: it has inflamed many Muslims, perhaps pushing them toward radicalization.

“In addition, it turns out there are Muslim voters in the US, and people who respect Muslims,” the author noted.

Vladimir Putin however doesn’t vote and not many in the present-day America “think he’s a good guy,” hence “he can be slapped around in soundbites without risk that he will actually launch a war against the US.”

Besides, he can even “be accused, without penalty, of meddling in the US democratic processes.”

All the above make the Russian “a political-military-industrial-complex dream candidate.”

“Expect him to feature heavily in the next administration’s foreign policy,” the author forecasts.

http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160806/1044004233/us-military-putin.html

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran of the State Department, spent a year in Iraq. Following his book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, the Department of State began proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from the State Department on his own terms.

Peter’s commentary has been featured in The New York Times, Reuters, Salon, NPR, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, The Nation, TomDispatch, Antiwar.com, American Conservative Magazine, Mother Jones, Michael Moore.com, Le Monde, Japan Times, Asia Times, The Guardian (UK), Daily Kos, Middle East Online, Guernica and others. He has appeared on the BBC World Service, NPR’s All Things Considered and Fresh Air, CurrentTV, HuffPo Live, RT, ITV, Britain’s Channel 4 Viewpoint, Dutch Television, CCTV, Voice of America, and more.

His second book, Ghosts of Tom Joad, A Story of the #99Percent (2014) is fiction about the social and economic changes in America between WWII and the decline of the blue collar middle class in the 1980’s.


Van Buren returns with a deeply-researched anti-war novel, Hooper’s War, coming May 2017. Set in WWII Japan, Lieutenant Nate Hooper isn’t sure he’ll survive his war. And if he does make it home, he isn’t sure he can survive the peace. He’s done a terrible thing, and struggles to resolve the mistake he made alongside a Japanese soldier, and a Japanese woman who failed to save both men. At stake? Souls.

With allegorical connections to America’s current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the reverse chronology telling of Hooper’s War (“Fighting over the covers is better than remembering the empty side of the bed,” Hooper says) turns a loss-of-innocence narrative into a complex tale of why that loss is inevitable in societies that go to war. Think Matterhorn and The Things They Carried, crossed with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five.

Federal election observers can only be sent to five states in this year’s U.S. presidential election, among the smallest deployments since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965 to end racial discrimination at the ballot box.

The plan, confirmed in a U.S. Department of Justice fact sheet seen by Reuters, reflects changes brought about by the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision to strike down parts of the Act, a signature legislative achievement of the 1960s civil rights movement.

Voting rights advocates told Reuters they were concerned that the scaling-back of observers would make it harder to detect and counter efforts to intimidate or hinder voters, especially in southern states with a history of racial discrimination at the ballot box.

The Supreme Court ruling undercut a key section of the Act that requires such states to obtain U.S. approval before changing election laws. The court struck down the formula used to determine which states were affected.

read more: http://fortune.com/2016/07/17/us-federal-election-observers/

Now imagine that such a massacre unfolds more than five times a day, seven days a week, unceasingly for five years, totaling perhaps 470,000 deaths. That is Syria. Yet even as the Syrian and Russian governments commit war crimes, bombing hospitals and starving civilians, President Obama and the world seem to shrug.

I admire Obama for expanding health care and averting a nuclear crisis with Iran, but allowing Syria’s civil war and suffering to drag on unchallenged has been his worst mistake, casting a shadow over his legacy. It is also a stain on all of us, analogous to the indifference toward Jewish refugees in the 1930s, to the eyes averted from Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, to Darfur in the 2000s.

This is a crisis that cries out for American leadership, and Obama hasn’t shown enough.

In fairness, Obama is right to be cautious about military involvement, and we don’t know whether the more assertive approaches favored by Hillary Clinton, Gen. David Petraeus and many others would have been more effective. But I think Obama and Americans in general are mistaken when they seem to suggest: It’s horrible what’s going on over there, but there’s just nothing we can do.

“There are many things we can be doing now,” James Cartwright, a retired four-star general who was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told me. “We can do many things to create security in selected areas, protect and stabilize those safe zones and allow them to rebuild their own country even as the conflict continues in other parts of the country.”

Cartwright, who has been called Obama’s favorite general, acknowledges that his proposal for safe zones carries risks and that the American public should be prepared for a long project, a decade or more. But he warns that the risks of doing nothing in Syria are even greater.

Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, agrees that we can do more, like set up safe zones. She emphasizes that the U.S. should be very careful in using force so as not to make problems worse, but she adds that on balance, “We should be prepared to try and create these humanitarian areas.”

This critique is bipartisan. Kori Schake, director of defense strategy in the George W. Bush White House, says, “Yes, there is something that we can do.” Her recommendation is for safe zones modeled on Operation Provide Comfort, which established the highly successful no-fly-zone in northern Iraq in 1991 after the first Gulf war.

Many experts recommend trying to ground Syria’s Air Force so it can no longer drop barrel bombs on hospitals and civilians. One oft-heard idea is to fire missiles from outside Syria to crater military runways to make them unusable.

One aim of such strategies is to increase the odds of a negotiated end to the war. Obama’s reticence has robbed Secretary of State John Kerry, who is valiantly trying to negotiate a lasting Syrian cease-fire, of leverage. The U.S. was able to get an Iran deal because it held bargaining chips, while in Syria we have relinquished all clout. And Obama’s dithering has had a real cost, for any steps in Syria are far more complex now that Russia is in the war.

Two years ago, Obama faced another daunting challenge: an impending genocide of Yazidi on Mount Sinjar near the Iraq-Syria border. He intervened with airstrikes and may have saved tens of thousands of lives. It was a flash of greatness for which he did not get enough credit — and which he has not repeated.

“If you care about extremism, you’ve got 200,000 Syrian kids growing up in Lebanon with no education,” notes David Miliband, the former British foreign secretary, now head of the International Rescue Committee.

Perhaps it’s unfair to reproach Obama when other politicians and other countries are also unmoved — and the U.S. has been generous with financial aid — but ultimately the buck stops on Obama’s desk. He will host a summit meeting on refugees next month and I hope will seize that chance to provide the global leadership needed to address the crisis.

I met recently with two brave American doctors who, at great personal risk, used their vacation time to sneak into Aleppo, Syria, to care for children injured by barrel bombs. They described working in a makeshift underground hospital and their quiet fury at the world’s nonchalance.

“Sitting idly by and allowing a government and its allies to systematically and deliberately bomb, torture and starve hundreds of thousands of people to death, that is not the solution,” Dr. Samer Attar, a surgeon from Chicago, told me. “Silence, apathy, indifference and inaction aren’t going to make it go away.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/opinion/obamas-worst-mistake.html?_r=0

-------------------

One could believe by reading the above diatribe that Obama has done, is doing, will be doing nothing in Syria. Nothing is further from the truth. Obama has been supplying weapons and training to the "rebels" — most of whom are mercenaries doing most of the atrocities while the government of Assad is trying to protect the ethnic mix of Syria. 

A lot of the American supplied weapons are now in the hands of ISIS, Al Nusra and Al Qaeda fighters. The US made the wrong call to demand "regime change" in Syria (a similar call made in Iraq by Junior Bushit, a demand which led to a lot of grief in that country and the US as well) — a regime change which would give carte blanche for the mercenaries under the control of Saudi Arabia/(and the US) to destroy the other ethnic groups in Syria, especially the shia population. This war would never had happened had Washington not supported the "moderate" rebels, who are no more than hypocritical in their quest. The Syrian and Russian government are trying hard  to protect "innocent" populations but we only cynically hear of the tragedy brought by these two government, while the other side, despite being "moderate" is doing a far worse destruction of local people.

It is undeniable that the successive demands by Washington to do "regime change", here there and everywhere in the Middle East has given rise to ISIS, including in Libya, which Ms Clinton was the main destructioner thereof. 

Obama can stop this war tomorrow. He can stop this war today. All he has to do is withdraw the support of Washington to the Saudi/US coalition sponsored mercenary rebels and demand a cease fire, plus a peace treaty in which regime change is not a "demand", but a possibility in the future through peace with strong safeguards, while maintaining the secularity of Damascus government. Letting the Sunni rebels win would turn Syria into a despicable caliphate.

All the old crappy former US Secretary of State, especially Ms Clinton, are responsible for encouraging this mess with stupid foreign policies, possibly wilfully designed to create an impossible mess to solve and keep the weapon US industry with an inexhaustible supply of customers.

It all starts with a Wahhabi-Zionist lovefest.

The Saudi Foreign Ministry was forced to go on a non-denial denial overdrive about a visit to Israel on July 22 by a delegation led by retired Gen. Anwar Eshki.

Eshki happens to be close to Saudi intel superstar and onetime close Osama bin Laden pal Prince Turki bin Faisal, who recently met in the open with former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) generals Yaakov Amidror and Amos Yadlin.

While in Israel, Eshki met with Foreign Ministry Director-General Dore Gold, and Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai, the top IDF honcho in the West Bank.

There’s absolutely no way the House of Saud would not have given a green light for such a visit – and such high-level meetings. By the way, the Interior Ministry in Saudi Arabia bans all travel to Israel – as well as Iran and Iraq. 

...

Both Bibi Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and de facto House of Saud ruler and Prince of War Mohammad bin Salman in Riyadh have been reduced, under the Obama administration, to the status of proverbial, euphemistic “estranged allies”. Between them, they are de facto allies – even as they cannot admit it to the Arab street. Both are dead sure, under the Queen of War, there will be – what else – war. The question is against whom.  

Informed speculation points towards the Saudi/Israeli common enemy, Iran. That’s complicated. The joint Saudi/Israeli strategy across the Middle East is indeed in tatters. Tehran has not been trapped in a quagmire neither in Syria nor in Iraq. ISIS/ISIL/Daesh and assorted “moderate rebels” – covertly supported by the Saudi/Israeli axis — are on the run, even if they insist they are not “al-Qaeda” anymore.  Prince of War bin Salman is entrapped himself in an unwinnable war on Yemen.

And then there’s the spectacular post-coup pivot by Sultan Erdogan in Turkey – for all practical purposes abandoning those elaborate no-fly-zone dreams of annexing a post-Assad Syria to his neo-Ottoman set up.

The House of Saud is livid as Turkish diplomats have started to spread this blockbuster news: Erdogan has proposed to Iran’s Rouhani an all-embracing alliance with President Putin to finally solve the Middle East riddle.

Whatever erratic Erdogan’s agenda may be, a possible ice-breaking new deal between Moscow and Ankara will be discussed de facto in the upcoming Putin-Erdogan face-to-face meeting. All geopolitical signs at this stage point – albeit tentatively – towards a revived Russia/Iran/Turkey alliance, even as a horrified House of Saud is going no holds barred to gain Moscow’s trust by offering “untold wealth” and privileged access to the GCC market.

http://sputniknews.com/columnists/20160804/1043937453/hillary-clinton-war-queen.html

Can Putin trust Erdogan?... Who knows... Was the "failed coup" in Turkey a set-up by Americans to make Erdogan palatable to the Russians, in order to get Erdogan to "spy" on/or manipulate Putin's intentions, on behalf of the Americans? I believe that the CIA did such set up with Chalabi during the Iraq war, then burning his bridges with the Yanks to make it palatable to the Iraq government, possibly to report on the new Iraq government to the CIA... Chalabi died in 2015...

In January 2012, a French intelligence official stated that they believed Chalabi to be an Iranian agent. Gus actually believe that Chalabi was a CIA operative to prepare the US invasion of Iraq...

Chalabi was a useful cover for the CIA "muck up" of the intelligence on the WMDs of Saddam... 

“While we reserve the right to take reciprocal measures, we’re not going to downgrade ourselves to the level of irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy,” Putin announced. “In our future steps on the way toward the restoration of Russia-United States relations, we will proceed from the policy pursued by the administration of D. Trump.”

The Russian President didn’t stop there, as he also invited "all children of US diplomats accredited in Russia to the New Year and Christmas children's parties in the Kremlin," and offered "New Year greetings to President Obama and his family. Now, after Putin announced that he is taking the high road, American experts are shocked, and even embarrassed for the Obama administration.

"This is frankly the most damaging and embarrassing answer the US could receive," Michael Kofman, a global fellow at the Wilson Center specializing in Russian and Eurasian affairs, told Business Insider on Friday. "It's quite clear that both the Obama administration and Congress are trying to box Donald Trump in on Russia policy. But instead of responding to this latest salvo with predictable retaliatory measures, Russians have chosen to make them a nonissue." Boris Zilberman, a Russia expert at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, also told the website that he believes the decision not to retaliate is a win for Putin.

Read more: https://sputniknews.com/us/201612301049152333-experts-putin-embarassed-obama/

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