Articles recommended for Tuesday, January 22, 2019

• Talk Nation Radio: Dana Frank on What the U.S. Is Doing to Honduras. Dave Swanson interviews author Dana Frank of The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup.

And you wonder why so many Hondurans and their neighbors are fleeing north to survive.

• The Russian Pension Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost... by "The Saker" (Andrei Raevsky) from his blog.

The author provides us with many very interesting details of the current political scene in Russia as he tries to figure out the growing split in popularity between Putin's followers and those of Medvedev that he describes as a "fifth column" supported by Western capitalists. 

This descendant of White Russians (those who fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution) sets us straight about frequent US propaganda that testifies to the unpopularity of Pres. Vladimir Putin. He explains the current Russian political scene as one where the former members of the nomenklatura (Soviet bureaucracy) rose to form a political class after the dissolution of the Soviet government in the years around 1990. These former members connived to buy up shares of the former Soviet companies "for pennies on the dollar" to become rich, and they were aided by Western capitalists. They are still around today, and their leader is Dmitry Medvedev who has alternated with Putin in running the Russian government. 

The author concludes:

The political landscape in Russia is becoming more complicated, which is both good and bad. It is bad because Putin’s personal political credit suffers, however modestly for now, from his continuous inability to purge the Kremlin from the 5th columnists, but it is also good because if things get bad enough Putin will have no choice but to (finally!) get rid of at least the most notorious 5th columnists. But fundamentally the Russian people need to decide. Do they really want to live in a western-style capitalist society (with all the russophobic politics and the adoption of the terminally degenerate “culture” such a choice implies), or do they want a “social society” (to use Putin’s own words) – meaning a society in which social and economic justice and the good of the country are placed above corporate and personal profits.

You could say that this is a battle of greed vs ethics.

The future of Russia, and much of the world, will depend on the outcome of this battle.

• Report: U.S. Oil and Gas Expansion Threatens to Unleash Climate Pollution Equivalent to nearly 1,000 Coal Plants by David Turnbull from Oil Change International.