Rep. Walter Jones (R-North Carolina) became the first Republican to cosponsor the Protecting Our Democracy Act, which would create a 12-member committee to conduct an independent, bipartisan, 10-month investigation into the role Russia played in swaying the presidential election. WHERE IS FASO ON THIS????
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BlueInGreene.org 
Russia & US (U.S.) BY: JONATHAN PHILLIPS ©2017
We are in a time of chaos, disfigurement of our democracy and popular institutions with a remarkable and constant presence of Russian trolls haunting our comment boards in our media.
Are we alone? Hardly, the whole West has been under a similar assault. England’s Brexit was funded in part by Russian cutouts, and had a cheerleader/advocate in the U.S. in Donald Trump, a man with a remarkable aversion to saying anything critical of Russian autocrat, Vladimir Putin, while quick to impugn former presidents such as Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, or a war hero of his own party; Senator John McCain. France and Germany are in the middle of their own election cycles and they too are under a steady undermining assault of Psy-Ops and internet warfare from Russia, an assault with one goal or purpose in mind, to undermine NATO and the West and promote autocratic nationalists and xenophobes.
Russia’s primary objective is to create world conditions and particularly European market conditions that will boost the price of oil and natural gas, which consists of 91.2% of its export and domestic economic basis.
To put Russia’s economic condition into its appropriate perspective, consider that with oil and natural gas effective in 2016, Russia’s GDP ranks 12th overall in the world with 1.69% of the world’s GDP as counted in billions of the world’s GDP/PPP (http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gdp.php). If we subtract Russia’s petroleum and natural gas from its economic output, the waste, corruption and inefficiency of its economy is naked and apparent. Its GDP shrinks from $1,256.640,000,000 (1.25 Trillion $), to 111,662,000,000 ($112 Billion $). Put another way, from being placed 12th on the list between South Korea and Australia, it would fall to 58th on the list, between Hungary and Kuwait.
In terms of Per Capita income or GDP v. its landmass and expense budget, Russia would clearly be a fourth-world, bankrupt and crippled skeleton of a country without its energy resources. With oil prices at their current levels, Russia is barely scraping by. Its economy is stagnant, and Putin is desperate to shore up energy values. Russia was forced by NATO sanctions into joining the fold of OPEC nations in pretending to cooperate to set oil prices in order to dampen production and provide price supports, but this has always been a spotty endeavor.
There are frankly too many sources of plentiful energy in the world today to provide OPEC with the necessary leverage and discipline over market supply it would need to hold the rest of the world in its parasitic strangulation grip.
When Putin pushed into Crimea and triggered NATO sanctions against Russia, he stepped onto a landmine, which blew off Russia’s new-found prosperity. The sanctions were most effective with the participation of Saudi interests in undercutting oil profits to diminish Russian expansion threats and disruption in the Middle East for the Saudis and their allies, Kuwait, Qatar and the Emirates.
Russia’s aggression behind shoring up Russia’s puppet, President Bashar al-Assad, was an attempt to fight back against the lower energy prices brought about by the allies through the Saudis, OPEC and NATO sanctions. Putin sees` Assad’s downfall as the result of the same 2011 “Arab Spring” protests that Putin personally experienced in Russia’s attempt at bringing about a “Russia’s Snow Revolution” of 2011-2012. Consider the main points of protest that fomented this rebellion: political oppression and voter fraud. Both were directed against the regime of Vladimir Putin, and his response has been to revisit in his mind a ‘war in kind’ against who in the Russian model of paranoid projection is his opponent; the West.
Restoring the value of oil through sowing more mayhem in the Middle East by bombing Russia’s own ally, Syria, produced some of Putin’s secondary objective, destabilization of Turkey and Europe through mass migration of war refugees. But, it obtained none of Putin’s primary objective: moving energy prices significantly upward. In the world of pragmatic capital, the gambit of Putin’s Syria incursion came up way short of its tactical ambition. The primary reason was that Syria’s oil contribution though significant, does not move markets, and like Iraq has long been disrupted. So Russia’s move did not cause any significant market movement – it had already been ‘priced-in.’
In pragmatic terms two factors place a millstone around the neck of world oil prices: the large supply of crude from too many sources, with Iran setting production records as it comes back on line :
(http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/25/why-iran-is-a-problem-for-the-oil-market.html),
and:
the alternative petroleum-related energy market from the non-OPEC controlled sources for natural gas. Russia once enjoyed hegemony as one of the principal suppliers of natural gas to Western Europe, but explosive growth of alternative sources derived from fracking in U.s. and Africa, have nullified Russia’s advantage in this area for years.
Russia cannot shut down or disrupt the natural gas market as it is too diverse and had too many China backed contracts to disrupt on a worldwide basis, plus the U.S. is now in a position to export more aggressively. The remaining gambit is to disrupt Iranian oil on the world market, and that can only be efficiently accomplished through warfare. Strategically, this cannot be a war traced back to Russia. Ideally it is sourced through the United States and its associate in the Middle East region, Israel.
A war between the United States and Iran, so long as Russia can do it by proxy is the ideal strategic solution as it is a gambit pawn that will cut Europe off from one of its principle sources of quality petroleum at cheap prices and cause a disruptive and draining conflict in the Middle East that will engage the US and its allies Israel and Saudi Arabia on multiple fronts drawing down on U.S. military and capital.
This result would ideally leave Eastern Europe directly open for aggressive Russian diplomatic, economic, and military expansion while it is able to exercise leverage by promising to maintain its so-called “neutrality” toward the Iranian conflict, or even better, act as a ‘mediator,’ – a mediator like Iago was a ‘mediator’ for Othello.
The disruption to the world oil market prices in Europe would be threefold: first the removal of much of Iran’s output due to a certain embargo; second the disruption of the shipping routes that border on Iran’s waters; and thirdly from the diversion of petroleum to engage in the conflict with Iran and replace damaged oil resources there, and presumably elsewhere in the region susceptible to military strikes.
A war with Iran would also provide the perfect foil and cover for Agent Orange; Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon, his Rasputin. War is the perfect soil for those with aspirations to exerting authoritarian regimes, and a war with Iran has been an apparent agenda item with Trump for too long to be explained or accounted for in any other way. It is likely, from the perspective of Stephen Bannon, that a war with Mexico and Central America would be a desirable parallel pursuit, that would provide for what he mistakenly believes to be an ‘easy target,’ one that would feed a red meat base of aggression in Texas and Arizona and support a nationwide repression against Hispanics as well as Muslims.
No policies or actions implemented by Trump, however inconsistent they have been since he assumed office, have been outwardly or inferentially at odds with the objectives and potentials outlined above. In fact, working backwards from the seeming random chaos unleashed by Trumps seemingly haphazard pronouncements, nothing could better explain them than, “what is in Russia/Putin’s best strategic interests.” The result of a war with Mexico, would encourage a hemispheric war that would engulf and preoccupy the Americas and likely disrupt resource competition from Venezuela and Brazil as well as Mexico in world export markets. It would encourage China to further tighten its grip on Asia, and ‘secure its region,’ and it would allow Russia to have its way with Europe, territorially and economically as hyper-inflated energy prices would again support an expanding Russian economy while badly damaging the European Union.
These scenarios are obviously constructed from a perspective that is only concerned with Russian economic and territorial perspectives. Due to contracts entered with Russia by Exxon-Mobile there is great contiguity with one of the world’s largest and most powerful energy multi-national corporations, whose chairman incidentally now represents the U.S. as its Secretary of State. This analysis is provided as an exercise in answering the question, “Why?” Why would it be in Vladimir Putin’s self-interests for Russia to take what is apparently a highly antagonistic approach to undermining democracies in the United States and Europe. The answer lies in his political, economic and individual survival. It is a game of life and death.