Putin Proposes Visa-Free Entry for International Athletes

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This summer, Russia will host the World University Games, in 2014, the Winter Olympics, and in 2018, the FIFA World Cup. In the coming five years, it’ll also play host to a number of world championships in individual sports. To make Russia more welcoming, President Putin proposed to grant visa-free entry to foreign athletes participating in these competitions. Mr Nikolai Dolgopolov, President of the Russian Federation of Sports Journalists, said, “The news makes me happy. All this paperwork and biometrics are so time-consuming and tedious! As a great sports fan, President Putin appreciates the importance of easy entry for international athletes. Russia’s getting a better image, and its consular officials, an easier workload”.

Remember, in 2008, Russia granted visa-free entry to some 60,000 Chelsea FC supporters who came to Moscow to watch the final match of the Champions League played between their team and Manchester United FC. Will the EU respond to such Russian measures by bringing forward visa-free travel between EU countries and Russia? We asked Dr Sergei Utkin of the Europe Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences about this, and he said, “Such expectations are unrealistic. True, we have a dialogue. At the same time, the EU countries would have difficulties in finding a common response to the latest easy-visas initiative by the Russian President. Coming to an agreement within the EU is a protracted and difficult matter”. In some of its recent pronouncements, the European Commission said it isn’t in a hurry to bring about visa-free travel between EU countries and Russia.

20 March 2013

Aleksei Lyakhov

Svetlana Kalmykova

Voice of Russia World Service

http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_03_20/Putin-proposes-visa-free-entry-for-international-athletes/

Editor’s Note:

One reason why the EU is dragging its feet is American pressure. In particular, the US Republican Party supports repressive police state measures that restricts the travel of American citizens abroad. For instance, the Bush fascists destroyed the most peaceful border in the world when it demanded that all Americans travelling to Canada must have passports. I travelled to Canada many times without a passport… that’s no longer possible due to the Department of Homeland Security Gestapo created by the Republican Party. There’s no threat of “terrorism” from Canada. Reflect on this… the Republicans claim that they want “smaller” government… well, they don’t want to dismantle such GOP-founded “American KGB” agencies as the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA (I had contact with the latter… they’re a Kafkaesque and Queen of Hearts madhouse). I think that makes them liars, no? Read and heed…

BMD 

23 December 2012. Sergei Yolkin’s World. Excuse Me; I Goofed Up!

Excuse Me; I Goofed Up!

Sergei Yolkin

2012

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Yolkin takes a not-so-subtle jab at American racism… “They all look alike to me”… and he turns it around on the Yanks. Good show!

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Shinzo Abe, Japan‘s incoming Prime Minister, spoke to reporters after a telephone conversation with the US President, but mistakenly named the wrong one. Instead of saying “Barack Obama”, he said “George W Bush”. Abe’s error is quite understandable… when he served as Prime Minister in 2006-07, George W Bush was the US president at the time.

18 December 2012

Sergei Yolkin

RIA-Novosti

http://ria.ru/caricature/20121218/915260429.html

Reproducing Dogmas and Stereotypes

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Twenty years ago, on 6 November 1992, newly-elected US President Bill Clinton phoned his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin. When asked what they talked about for 20 minutes, Clinton gave journalists an evasive answer, “We just talked about what he was doing, and I said I supported democratic and free market economics in Russia. We had no substantive conversations”. The Russian side was a bit more open… the Kremlin press service quoted Yeltsin as saying, “I think, Mr Clinton, that my warm and good relationship with George Bush won’t prevent our relations from being even better. The boldness in politics and firm rejection of old dogmas and stereotypes that you stand for, match well with the principles of our Russian-American relations”.

Yeltsin was probably being a little disingenuous in referring to his warm relations with Bush. During his presidency, Bush Sr clearly favoured then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachyov during his intense rivalry with the future Russian leader. It was only when it became clear that Gorbachyov lost his grip on power that the White House switched its backing to Yeltsin. Moscow pinned high hopes on Clinton… during his election campaign, he criticised Bush Sr for his reluctance to provide large-scale aid to Russia and promised to adopt an entirely new approach to the issue. It came as no surprise when, shortly after the election, one of Clinton’s associates, in Moscow on an unofficial visit, was essentially presented with an ultimatum… “Help us now, or else we’ll be in trouble and that’ll hurt you, too”.

That December, the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote sarcastically, “There’s a fearful symmetry in the pace at which President-elect Bill Clinton is assembling his administration and Russian President Boris Yeltsin is dismantling his. Just as the ‘new ideas’ people are being introduced in Little Rock, they’re being thrown out the door in Moscow”. Nonetheless, Clinton backed Russia, seeking to make its “democratic transformation” one of the crowning achievements of his presidency. This he failed to achieve. Clinton eventually became extremely disappointed in his “friend Boris”, and at the end of his term, he had to deal with Vladimir Putin, whom he saw as a symbol of the fact that Russia was heading in completely the wrong direction. However, Putin established a good personal relationship with George W Bush, underpinned from the very start by their mutual desire to open a new chapter in USA-Russia relations. However, at the interstate level, the dialogue ran into a complete dead end. Barack Obama revived it, but the limited agenda of “the reset” was fulfilled fairly quickly without delivering any qualitative shift.

During the last 20 years, relations between the two countries have come full circle. Mitt Romney’s description of Russia as the USA’s “Number One Geopolitical Foe” was the most striking statement made about Russia during the recent election campaign. Although even his supporters took this statement with a pinch of irony, nothing more meaningful was said about Russia. In parallel, Moscow decided to get rid of the legacy of the 1990s once and for all. On 1 October, Russia ended the activities of USAID, with whom it signed an agreement in 1992. It also curtailed the Nunn-Lugar programme, under which Washington funded the dismantling of Russia’s excessive nuclear warheads, obsolete missiles, and chemical weapons.

The same logic motivated both decisions… Russia will no longer sign agreements as a junior partner or accept foreign involvement in its domestic affairs. We’ll resolve our problems on our own, and you’ll have to deal with Russia as it is today and on an equal footing. However, the USA has almost no tradition of equal partnerships. There was a kind of partnership, albeit a very peculiar one, during the Cold War… nuclear parity. Rather than leading to cooperation, this prevented conflict, thus, ensuring equality. On all other issues, the USA builds its external relations on the basis of the master-slave principle. Moreover, any partner either needs to sign up to its idea of the socio-political order, or at least recognise it, and agree to help introduce it as quickly as possible. Modern Russia doesn’t intend to accept either of these conditions. Russian-American contacts are in for a radical overhaul.

Russia isn’t so aggressive as to justify a need for deterrence against it, which Romney clearly feels is necessary. Russia won’t expect aid from the USA, as had been the case in the past. Nor will it try to match American-established criteria of democracy. Russia remains an influential global power that one can’t ignore, despite George “Dubya” Bush’s attempts to do just that. However, its position in the world is too amorphous, and, above all, has the aim of retaining a free hand that’d allow it to build systemic relations. Moscow isn’t strong enough to hope for full equality. These are objective facts that don’t depend on who’s in the White House or the Kremlin.

The two countries must realise that they’ll never enjoy linear relations… they’ll neither be unequivocal foes or genuine allies. Nor will they be soulmates or ideological opposites. A desire to achieve full clarity, in whatever field, undermines all attempts to create a solid foundation for relations, whereas a willingness to be flexible on current issues makes it possible to achieve concrete results. In this context Russia, above all, needs to overcome its fixation on the humiliation of the recent past, and the USA must realise that the primacy of its values can’t be a prerequisite for cooperation in the 21st century.

No long-term agenda accommodates the potentially-crucial changes that lie ahead for both countries. Today’s agenda will take on new accents only when other issues come to the fore, such as the situation in Asia, the prospects of the commercial development of the Arctic, the reform of the nuclear non-proliferation system, etc. These issues require serious discussion, which, for now, nobody seems willing to conduct. To quote Yeltsin’s words from his conversation with Clinton 20 years ago, we need a “firm rejection of old dogmas and stereotypes”. If we don’t change anything, our relations will continue going round in concentric circles of cooling off, détente, and resets, whoever the US President is.

8 November 2012

Fyodor Lukyanov

RIA-Novosti

http://en.rian.ru/columnists/20121108/177270475.html

 

Texas Warned It’d Prosecute International Election Monitors

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Texas warned it’d prosecute election observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a global body that regularly monitors voting around the world, if they try to visit polling stations next month. In a letter to the director of election-monitoring at the OSCE, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the group’s views on the 6 November American elections were “legally irrelevant”. He warned that he wouldn’t allow OSCE observers, deployed for the presidential and other election races in two weeks’ time, to come within 100 feet (@30 metres) of a polling station in the famously no-nonsense state.

Writing to head of the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), Abbott said the European diplomat had “reportedly” met in April with groups challenging Texas electoral law. He said in a letter, posted on his office’s website that one of those groups, Project Vote, “is closely affiliated with ACORN, which collapsed in disgrace after its role in a widespread voter-registration fraud scheme was uncovered”. He cited a letter suggesting that the OSCE “identified Voter ID laws as a barrier to the right to vote”.

Abbott wrote, “The OSCE may be entitled to its opinions about Voter ID laws, but your opinion is legally irrelevant in the USA, where the Supreme Court has already determined that Voter ID laws are constitutional. If OSCE members want to learn more about our election processes so they can improve their own democratic systems, we welcome the opportunity to discuss the measures Texas has implemented” to protect electoral integrity. he pointed out that “groups and individuals from outside the USA aren’t allowed to influence or interfere with the election process in Texas. The OSCE’s representatives are not authorised by Texas law to enter a polling place. It may be a criminal offense for OSCE’s representatives to maintain a presence within 100 feet of a polling place’s entrance. Failure to comply with these requirements could subject the OSCE’s representatives to criminal prosecution for violating state law”.

The Vienna-based OSCE regularly monitors elections in its member states, many in the former Soviet bloc, some of which have struggled to meet international standards as fledgling democracies over the last two decades. It also sends observers to the USA, as a key member of the organisation. Meanwhile, Ambassador Janez Lenarčič, the Director of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), expressed his grave concern over the threat of criminal prosecution of OSCE/ODIHR election observers.

Lenarčič said that this threat, contained in an open letter from the Attorney General of Texas, is at odds with the established good cooperation between OSCE/ODIHR observers and state authorities across the USA, including in Texas, adding that it’s also contrary to the country’s obligations as an OSCE-participating state. The OSCE website reported that the ODIHR Director shared his concerns in a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Lenarčič said, “The threat of criminal sanctions against OSCE/ODIHR observers is unacceptable. The USA, like all countries in the OSCE, has an obligation to invite ODIHR observers to observe its elections”.

The ODIHR Director also emphasised that any concerns or reports that the election observers intended to influence or interfere with the election process were groundless. He underlined that OSCE/ODIHR election observers adhere to all national laws and regulations, as well as a strict code of conduct. Lenarčič said, “Our observers are required to remain strictly impartial and not to intervene in the voting process in any way. They’re in the USA to observe these elections, not to interfere in them”.

The ODIHR limited election observation mission for the 2012 American general election consists of a core team of 13 experts, from 10 OSCE-participating states, based in Washington DC, and 44 long-term observers deployed throughout the country. This is the sixth American election the Office has observed, without incident, since 2002. The OSCE notably raised questions about the 2000 presidential election won eventually by George W Bush, but only after prolonged legal and administrative wrangling which ended in the US Supreme Court.

25 October 2012

Voice of Russia World Service

http://voicerussia.com/2012_10_25/92363300/

Editor’s Note:

Texas has a particularly cruel, vicious, and nasty culture, as evidenced by its barbaric prison system and its juvenile love affair with guns. This goes back to the beginning of Anglo rule in Texas, which began as a slaveowner’s revolt against Mexican demands that they emancipate their slaves. Eastern Texas is well-suited for cotton monoculture, as anyone driving through the region can see. Slaveowners moved into these lands from the southern USA, bringing their “property” with them. At first, the Mexican authorities turned a blind eye to it all, but finally the Mexican government demanded that the owners free their slaves, and they refused. That was the genesis of the 1836 Texas Rebellion. It was no fight for liberty… it was a power-grab and land-grab by bloody-minded bastards who believed in “American Exceptionalism” (as does Willard Romney, by the way). Shades of Dr Johnson’s, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

That is, Texas Anglos have never lost their fear of a Mexican revanche, which has led to the twisted society that they created. This is equally true in Arizona, and somewhat true in New Mexico. In short, Anglo Texas is a snapshot of what the Germans wanted to do in Eastern Europe… and it may prove just as temporary, in historical terms. The Mexican population in Texas grows by the year, one reason for the increase being importation of wetbacks by greedy Republican businessmen. Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequence! Each wetback brought in by a money-grubbing Grand Olde Pervert brings the day of the Reconquista of Tejas closer. One day, the Anglo occupation of Tejas will just be a bad historical memory, like the German occupation of the Ukraine… however, for the present, Tejas groans under oppression. Heaven won’t be silent forever…

BMD