Note: Eight years ago, after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s henchmen, illegally operating in Eastern Ukraine, shot down a civilian airliner with massive loss of life, and following his illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, I wrote a column (below) which I am reprising here. Regrettably, the Obama Administration and our Western allies failed to punish Putin for these outrages. Then followed four years of Donald Trump pandering to Putin, which only further emboldened the Russian tyrant. This 8-year old Rant has as much resonance today as it did then (the only material difference is that Russia can now sell its oil and gas to China). I would add that now that Putin has launched his war against Ukraine, the Russian economy must be cut off at the knees: a ban on all trade and investment; zero cross-border financial transactions; and the launch of surgical cyberwar strikes against, for example, Russia’s transportation networks. In addition, Swiss banks and other offshore havens in which Putin, his former KGB colleagues and his oligarchs salt away the money they have stolen from the Russian people must be pressured into revealing and freezing those assets.
 
Rant 292
Punishing Putin
Copyright © 2014 by Richard L. Hermann
 
The latest outrage perpetrated by Vladimir Putin, the former KGB thug who took his criminal gang with him to the Kremlin, should not go unpunished. Downing a civilian airliner must be the last straw. Thus far, the so-called “sanctions” the U.S. and its traditionally timid European allies have imposed on Russia are a joke. They do not even amount to a slap on the wrist.
 
Putin has brushed them aside with contempt. Undeterred in the least, he continues his Stalinist revivalism assuming that the West is as weak as it was in the 1930s, when another brutal, murderous dictator flexed his muscles to intimidate the small nations of Europe.
 
Despite NATO’s feckless reaction to Putin’s disregard for international norms—motivated by Western European dependence on Russian oil and gas exports and London’s new-found status as a haven for the billions Russian oligarchs have stolen from their country and salted away in the UK—there is actually much that can be done to bring him to his knees, or at least into line.
 
Here are some of the weapons in the Western arsenal:

• Europe can stop buying Russian oil and gas. It is stunning don’t realize that Russdia has nowhere else to sell its fossil fuel production. Without the Euros that flow east, the Russian economy will quickly plunge into crisis and jeopardize Putin’s hold on power. Moreover, the U.S., now the world’s largest oil and gas producer, can partially supplant any loss of Russian supply.
• Britain can dispense with its addiction to ill-gotten Russian oligarch money. If Prime Minister David Cameron wants the “special relationship” with the U.S. to continue, he needs to understand that we will not tolerate his preference for profits over principle.
• Russia should be ousted for now from the community of nations. While expelling it from the United Nations is neither possible nor practical, ousting Russia from international organizations such as the World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, the Doha Round of trade negotiations, and other bodies vital to its economic well-being, can be done and would hurt.
• Travel by U.S. citizens to Russia and by Russian citizens to the U.S. can be banned; Russian airline landing rights in the U.S. can be suspended; and trade between U.S. exporters and Russia can be barred until it agrees to behave according to international legal norms.
• Moreover, the International Criminal Court at The Hague, Netherlands, should indict Vladimir Putin pursuant to its authority under Article 8 (war crimes) of the treaty establishing it for the crime he committed in providing the weapons that brought down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Eastern Ukraine. 

Certainly, there would be some blowback and pain for Americans were we to impose real sanctions that have clout. Companies prohibited from trading with Russia would certainly suffer. This could be alleviated by temporary government assistance. Americans might have to pay more for gas and heating oil. This kind of “shared sacrifice,” once a bedrock of Americanism, but missing in action for many years now, could make a welcome comeback.

Putin needs to be made to pay for his criminal transgressions. This is the way to do it. If we continue to respond weakly and look the other way, we are condoning his criminal acts and encouraging him to continue down this very dangerous road. Unfortunately, we are the ones who might then wind up in a very bad place.

 
Dick Hermann
July 27, 2014

​Vladimir Putin, assuming he does not invade Ukraine, needs something to show for his bluster and for positioning more than 130,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders. An assurance of Ukrainian neutrality by Russia and the West—provided Ukraine agrees--might just enable him to save face, declare “victory” for the benefit of the home folks, and back down.
 
Consider Austria. At the end of World War II, Austria, like Germany was divided into four occupation zones: American, British, French and Soviet. Similarly, Vienna was also carved up into four zones. In 1954, my Viennese-born parents went back to Vienna for the first time since they escaped from Nazi-occupied Austria 15 years before. They were upset to find that their old neighborhood was firmly within the Soviet occupation zone and, unlike the sectors under Allied control, was still riddled with rubble, the residue of wartime bombing. While the nation’s economy slowly recovered in the three zones controlled by the Western Allies, the Soviet zone lagged far behind. The Soviet occupying power impounded the entire oil production in its zone while also removing factories to the USSR and requisitioning virtually the entire railroad car stock.
 
The next year, to universal astonishment, the Soviets abandoned Vienna and recalled their occupation forces. The quid pro quo was that Austria would declare itself a neutral nation and not take sides in the Cold War. Austria has been a neutral ever since, although it is a member of the European Union, and a party to the Eurozone currency agreement and the Schengen Area comprising the 26 European countries that have officially abolished all passport and border controls at their mutual borders.
 
Its adherence to neutrality has been a boon to its prosperity. In addition to hosting the third largest repository of international organizations (after New York and Geneva), Vienna has become a center of East-West trade and business. Today, Austria is one of the world’s richest countries. Vienna has earned the designation of being designated the “most livable big city” in the world.
 
Thanks to the Marshall Plan and Austria’s rebuilding efforts, its astonishing economic recovery led to 20 years of average annual growth between 4.5 percent and 5 percent, among the highest in the world. American largesse and rising prosperity have oriented Austria towards the West.
 
A declaration of Ukrainian neutrality would cost the U.S. and its NATO allies nothing. Regardless of what happens as a result of this Putin-manufactured crisis, it is highly unlikely that Ukraine would be able to join NATO in the foreseeable future. To be accepted as a NATO member, all 28 current members have to agree, an outcome that is a big stretch. Given Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which requires all member countries to consider an attack on one member as an attack on all, it is a certainty that the NATO members on or close to Russia’s borders would veto a Ukrainian application for membership.
 
If precedent holds, the “Austrianization” of Ukraine could be one of the best things that ever happened to that country. As with the current crop of neutral European states—Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Malta, Sweden and Finland—it could be the beginning of a modernization and prosperity that Ukraine has never known and closer economic ties to the West.
 
In the West’s frantic search for an off-ramp to temper the military confrontation that Putin has conjured, this might be just what is needed.
 
Note. At this writing, the Munich Security Conference has convened in order for the parties to attempt to sort out the Ukraine mess. This conjures up disturbing images of an earlier Munich meeting (1939) when the West caved to a dictator, gave him free rein to consume Czechoslovakia, and added the ugly term “appeasement” to the lexicon. One hopes for a very different result this time.
 
Dick Hermann
February 18, 2022

Back in the day, it used to be that presidents received too much credit for the good stuff that happens and too much blame for the bad stuff, regardless of their actual involvement. More often than not, the good and the bad balanced out. Not anymore, thanks to (1) a sea change in the way the voting public gets its information, and (2) the media’s discovery that “gotcha” journalism and bad news sell much better than good news.
 
President Joe Biden’s current plight, being way down in public approval polls, is evidence of this. He, like a modern Diogenes, is burning the lamp oil late into the night seeking to understand why his approval rating is sinking despite some notable achievements.
 
Legislatively, he succeeded in enacting the American Rescue Plan, which put billions of dollars in the pockets of most Americans, including a Child Care Tax Credit that cut the child poverty rate by half, a stupendous achievement. He passed an infrastructure bill, something his immediate predecessor was utterly incapable of doing, that will create millions of good-paying jobs, provide fast broadband access nationwide, and make long-overdue repairs and retrofits to roads, bridges, water and waste systems, mass transit, ports and airports. He vaccinated the majority of Americans, upping shots in the arms from 2 percent when he took office to almost two-thirds of the population. He brought the economy roaring back from the doldrums, creating 6.6 million jobs in the process, an all-time record. He extricated the country from an unwinnable war that his three immediate predecessors bungled, a two-decade tragedy that wasted thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. As of this writing, he is managing the Russia-Ukraine crisis reasonably well.
 
Moreover, he accomplished all of this in the face of massive obstruction and resistance by the once-but-no-longer loyal opposition, a Republican Party in thrall to a criminal super-spreader of lies, and that is a policy black hole, its sole raison d’etre being to prevent President Biden from getting anything done. In sum, these are remarkable successes that are virtually unprecedented for a president after only one year in office.
 
Despite a record that any president would be proud of, Biden gets no respect. Why?
 
It is human nature to identify someone to blame for our national shortcomings. The president is by far the easiest target. Here are the principal grievances survey respondents cite as evidence of Biden’s shortcomings:

• He has failed to put the pandemic in the rear-view mirror. To a great extent this is the consequence of the massive right-wing disinformation campaign that lies about vaccines and pandemic safety measures.
• He has disappointed the so-called “Progressives” on his left flank by his inability to overcome arcane Senate rules and protect voting rights from yet another, concerted right-wing/Republican voter suppression effort based on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and the myth of massive voter fraud.
• Inflation has increased to a 40-year high under his watch, making essentials like food and fuel more expensive while offsetting impressive wage gains. A legitimate argument can be made that injecting almost $2 trillion into a growing economy via the American Rescue Plan added to an inflation largely caused by pandemic-induced supply chain bottlenecks for which a president bears little responsibility.
• He presided over the chaotic U.S. departure from Afghanistan. This is a valid complaint although contributing to it was his predecessor’s ill-advised, disastrous pact with the Taliban.

 
On balance, Biden’s track record is pretty good. However, it is being drowned out by the politics of grievance, victimization, rage, fear and hate that have become the Republican go-to election strategy combined with the mainstream media’s penchant for negative stories that attract more eyeballs than accentuating the positive.
 
Positing blame has become the governing principle that motivates both politics and the media as well as a large chunk of the voting public. When presidents get elected, they wittingly or not enlist for this. It comes with the office.
 
Richard Hermann
February 12, 2022

​Almost 525 years ago to the day, Girolamo Savonarola, the severe Dominican priest who was briefly dictator of Florence, directed that the Florentine population participate in a ritual burning of objects that the religious authorities associated with sin—cosmetics, mirrors, clothing, art, musical instruments, playing cards and books. The great Renaissance artist, Sandro Botticelli, even threw more than a hundred of his magnificent masterpieces onto the pyre, which burned for several days in the huge public square, the Piazza della Signoria.
 
While this was nothing new—the Siennese down the road invented book burnings years before, the Florentine manifestation was by far the biggest ever. Word of it spread far and wide. Overall, the Pope in Rome was not pleased with Savonarola and determined that he had to go. A year later, he did, hanged on a cross and burnt alive on the very spot where the bonfire had taken place.
 
There have been numerous other instances of book burning. Typically, they take place under authoritarian regimes that want to suppress dissent and opposing points of view.
 
Moving ahead almost 450 years, another short-lived dictator, Adolf Hitler, staged his own bonfires in Berlin and 33 other German cities, burning thousands of “degenerate” books that offended his and Nazi sensibilities. Among the precious works condemned to the flames were books by Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein. The Nazis accompanied these grotesqueries with pomp, including parades and marching bands. In the first such episode, on May 10, 1933, more than 25,000 books met a fiery fate.
 
The American Library Association reports that in fall 2021, it received an 'unprecedented' 330 reports of book challenges, each of which could include multiple books. Right-wing groups spurred on by social media, are pushing challenges to school and public libraries, targeting mainly books about race, gender and sexuality. Amazingly, even such American classics as To Kill a Mockingbird are on the list that these extremists want banned. In one Tennessee County, the popular children’s book, Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning, fact-based, Animal Farm-like story about the Holocaust, has been removed from the curriculum by the local school board. A Tennessee legislator is advocating that “both sides” of the Holocaust be taught in classrooms. This conjures up disturbing memories of Donald Trump proclaiming that “there were very fine people, on both sides” at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Trump’s assertion of a moral equivalence between a vile hate group and decent, law-abiding Americans marks a low point in the presidency and our history. Note: Maus hit #1 on Amazon this month.
 
Historically, it has always been a small step from book banning to book burning. The danger in “deplatforming” classic works that school children should be able to learn from and discuss appears to be the hard right’s latest attempt to subvert democracy and replace it with authoritarian rule. While they follow in lockstep with both Savonarola’s and Hitler’s playbooks, they may want to consider what happened to both “role models.”
 
Dick Hermann
February 4, 2022