Rohatyn/Shultz "Bloomberg" Story Breaks In Russia Through LaRouche Articles
March 18, 2008 -- The specter of a Michael Bloomberg candidacy for U.S. President, sponsored by Wall Street circles around Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz to impose a Mussolini model of fascism on the United States, was absent from Russian media discussion up through last month.
Many Russian commentators remained fixated on Sen. Hillary Clinton as an enemy image, associated with -- so they would claim -- an inevitable return of Balkans war orchestrator Richard Holbrooke as Secretary of State. Over the past three weeks, the circulation of Russian translations of an article by Lyndon LaRouche, and one by Jeffrey Steinberg of EIR weekly, have sharply changed the landscape.
In his "Reply to General [Leonid] Ivashov: A World Situation In Collapse!" (EIR, Feb. 8), LaRouche responded to the well-known Russian officer's own article, in which Ivashov had expressed doubt that any leadership in the USA existed, that could put the country through Rooseveltian bankruptcy reorganization. Ivashov suggested that other nations should work on a joint solution to the global systemic economic collapse, without the United States. LaRouche spelled out the worldwide disaster that a USA, collapsing into a deep breakdown and fascist forms of rule, would represent, and identified the "Bloomberg" scenario as the top choice of "the London-steered Shultz cabal." Steinberg's "Drive Escalates To Impose `Mussolini' Bloomberg Option," in EIR of Feb. 22, spelled out the scenario's implementation, to date. Both articles appeared in Russian during the last week in February.
The articles have been read by hundreds of people on the LaRouche movement's Russian website alone, and thousands more in the many locations where they were reposted. LaRouche's reply to General Ivashov appeared in full on the site of the Anti-Globalist Resistance, the Ukrainian analytical site Strateger.net, and in dozens of forums, blogs, and other web portals. Steinberg's warning about the Bloomberg option was showcased by the popular Eurasia-oriented Polyarnaya Zvezda (Pole Star) web publication, based in Yekaterinburg.
Beyond the circulation of the articles, as such, they precipitated a series of Russian commentaries that are important both for breaking the blackout of a threatened fascist turn in the United States, and for rekindling discussion of historical Russian-American cooperation, as against Russian-British enmity, which had peaked last year during the Kremlin's campaign to revive key policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Andrei Kobyakov, chief editor of the RPMonitor.ru analytical site, co-authored with Alexander Rublyov a March 2 article titled "The Jackboot Candidate." "In all periods," they wrote, "the financial oligarchy has resorted to force during times of crisis. So it was in Germany in the 1930s, when the money-bags supported the Nazis. They helped Mussolini in Italy, Pétain's Vichy regime in France, etc." Even a slight hint that a Democratic Party candidate's program, whether it were Clinton's or Obama's, might contain "even a partial return to Rooseveltian principles of anti-crisis policy" is enough to turn the upper-echelon financiers against them, wrote Kobyakov and Rublyov. McCain being a weak candidate, "the question arises of another, more serious and powerful alternative. This could be the current Mayor of New York, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg," and nobody should take as final Bloomberg's demurrals about a candidacy, they concluded.
Also on RPMonitor.ru, in a two-part series beginning Feb. 28, the writer Maxim Kalashnikov presented a detailed summary of the Steinberg article, titled "A Mussolini-Pinochet Hybrid" and illustrated with Bloomberg's portrait. Quoting Steinberg directly, Kalashnikov brought in elements from current Russian realities, comparing the deindustrialization of Moscow in the 1990s to what Rohatyn did to New York City under Big MAC, two decades earlier. To counter the prospect of a "neo-feudal future," Kalashnikov called for serious deliberation on making Vladimir Putin's perspective of "Innovation to Save the Nation," into a fully elaborated, effective policy.
A more in-depth discussion of the current moment in history then appeared in Politichesky Zhurnal (Politjournal.ru) on March 11, by Denga Khalidov, vice-president of General Ivashov's own Academy of Geopolitical Problems: "Charming Grave-Diggers: Obama and Rohatyn Want To Bury Democracy in the USA." This essay explored "the complex history of American democracy and the growing influence of the European banking oligarchy on U.S. politics and finance." Not all of the treatment of U.S. 19th-century history in Khalidov's version is valid, but certain essentials are. Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, and Kennedy fell as victims of the financial oligarchy, he wrote, and the "moment of truth for the USA was the Civil War between North and South in the mid-19th century, which was provoked by international bankers from England and France, and their `agents of influence' inside the United States." He noted the strategic importance of the Russian-American alliance against those forces, during the Civil War.
Citing Samuel Huntington's "Crisis in Democracy" paper, written for the Trilateral Commission, Khalidov said that the financial oligarchy is looking for dictatorial solutions "now, when one financial bubble after another is popping on the New York markets." He then went into the prospect of "the charismatic multi-billionaire Bloomberg" stepping forward as "savior of the nation." Identifying this as the Rohatyn-Shultz project, Khalidov gave Russian readers a link to the LaRouche PAC website for the documentation. He identified the Rohatyn-Shultz group as an offshoot of European Synarchism. They are pushing the dictatorial model, said Khalidov, because otherwise "the specter of Roosevelt is hanging over America, since the problems, though an order of magnitude greater, are essentially the same."
For more on Felix Rohatyn and George Shultz, the reader can turn their attention to the new LPAC documentary on the front page of the website.
