KPFA Brian Edwards-Tiekert Supports US Supported 2014 Coup In Ukraine By His Silence

Brian Edwards-Tiekert Supports US Supported 2014 Coup In Ukraine By His Silence On 8/14/23 Program with IPS "Foreign Policy In Focus" Director John Feffer


John Feffer was the latest guest of US propagandist and KPFA news broadcaster Brian Edwards-Tiegert. Feffer supposedly an expert on Russia and the Ukraine talked about the overthrow of the Ukraine government of Viktor Yanukovych.
John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. In 2012-13, he was also an Open Society Fellow looking at the transformations that have taken place in Eastern Europe since 1989.
Edwards-Tiegert Feffer reported on the coup as if it was not financed, encouraged and organized by the US government. They mention the overthrow of the government and leave out the fact that US politicians like SenatorJohn McCain and US union leaders like AFT president Randi Weingarten went to Ukraine to join the protests and support the removal of an elected president. BET did not ask Feffer or mention the fact that the US was actively not only backing the coup. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland was exposed on tape talking about who she wanted in the new government which the US was already helping to put in place . BET is well aware of this fact but he has become a propgandist for the US government and wanted to put out the US government line that the US had nothing to do with the 2014 coup.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
In another example of BET's propaganda following up on CIA FBI propagandist Ian Masters, Edwards-Tiekert helped John Feffer make up a story about the US supported overthrow of the Yanukovych government.
More than $5 billion was spent by the CIA, National Endowment For Democracy, the NED supported AFL-CIO “Solidarity Center” to support and finance individuals and organizations supposedly for “democracy”. These organizations were active in supporting the overthrow of the government.
This program is another example of how the KPFA “Protectors” and managment of KPFA are pushing a pro-war agenda including more military aid to Ukraine and militarization of Asia.
If you go to the Institute For Policy Studies you will find that the contributors or funders are strangly blanked out.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/520788947/202013179349305541/full
It seems that the people now funding the IPS which Feffer works for are not transparent about who their funders are.
FPIF is edited by Peter Certo, the senior editorial manager of the Institute for Policy Studies. It is directed by John Feffer, an IPS associate fellow, playwright, and widely published expert on a broad array of foreign policy subjects.
We believe U.S. security and world stability are best advanced through a commitment to peace, justice, and environmental protection, as well as economic, political, and social rights. We advocate that diplomatic solutions, global cooperation, and grassroots participation guide foreign policy.
FPIF aims to amplify the voice of progressives and to build links with social movements in the U.S. and around the world. Through these connections, we advance and influence debate and discussion among academics, activists, policy-makers, and the general public.
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is a left-of-center think tank and advocacy group that is active on a variety of public policy issues. It operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with 2020 revenues totaling approximately $6.9 million. Since 2021, its executive director has been Tope Folarin. 1


IPS was established with initial seed money from the Stern Family Fund, which in turn owed much of its original endowment to the estate of Sears, Roebuck & Co. chairman Julius Rosenwald. Philip Stern, a grandson of Rosenwald, 42 served as president of the Stern Fund and was one of IPS’s original trustees. 43He personally contributed significant additional funding to IPS during the 1960s. Early funding also came from the merger with the Peace Research Institute and from other sources. 44 IPS bylaws specifically prohibited the institute or its fellows from accepting government funding. 45

The institute’s budget from 1963-1964 was just over $200,000 ($1.9 million in 2022 inflation-adjusted dollars), which grew to almost $500,000 ($4 million in 2022 dollars) by the end of the 1960s. Significant funders during the 1960s included the Ford Foundation, the D.J. Bernstein Foundation, the EDO Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Field Foundation. James P. Warburg, who served as one of the institute’s original trustees, gave IPS $400,000 in 1967 ($3.5 million in 2022 dollars). 46

Tax filings for 1971 47 and 1972 48 show gross receipts of $1,477,450 and $718,400, respectively ($10.8 million and $5.1 million in 2022 dollars). IPS faced a financial crisis in the mid-to-late 1970s, and by fiscal year 1977-1978 its budget had reached $1.5 million ($6.8 million in 2022 dollars) on projected income of just $833,800 ($3.8 million in 2022 dollars). 49 In the late 1970s, disgruntled IPS scholars formed a union in response to budgetary cutbacks and philosophical differences, ultimately settling with Barnet and Raskin for $470,000 ($1.9 million in 2022 dollars)—reported to be a third of IPS’s endowment—in order to leave and establish their own think tank. 50

By the 1970s, the Samuel Rubin Foundation was providing much of IPS’s funding—totaling millions by the mid-1980s. 51 Historian Brian S. Mueller wrote that it gave the institute over $300,000 in 1974-1975 ($1.7 million in 2022 dollars), 52 while an article in the Washington Post gave a figure of $450,000 for 1975 ($2.5 million in 2022 dollars). 53 Author S. Steven Powell wrote in 1987 that the foundation had been giving $400,000 to $500,000 annually to IPS. (Inflation adjusted, $500,000 in 1987 equaled $1.3 million in 2022.) 54

As recounted by Powell in his 1987 book Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, the Samuel Rubin Foundation was established by Russian émigré businessman Samuel Rubin, founder of the successful cosmetics company Faberge, Inc., which he had named after the famous family of Russian jewelers without their knowledge or permission. The Faberge family’s jewelry business had been expropriated during the Russian Revolution, though some family members were able to flee the Soviet Union during the 1920s and re-establish themselves in Paris. They did not learn of Rubin’s unauthorized use of their name until after World War II. 55

The Faberge family sued Rubin and obtained an injunction, but to avoid the extensive legal expenses that the latter was prepared to spend litigating the matter, the family agreed to settle in 1951—permitting Rubin to use their name in exchange for $25,000 ($285,000 in 2022 dollars). Powell wrote in Covert Cadre that some Faberge descendants became “justifiably upset that their stolen name was used to bankroll IPS and other left-wing causes,” particularly since some family members had fought against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. 56

Samuel Rubin died in 1978, with Raskin eulogizing him as one of those “who dare call themselves revolutionary.” His daughter Cora Weiss took over as president of the Rubin Foundation. Her husband Peter Weiss was the chair of IPS’s board of trustees. 57 An attorney by profession, Peter Weiss was a prominent member of the radical-left National Lawyers Guild, 58 and also served on the board of directors of the Center for Constitutional Rights for almost fifty years. 59

The institute’s revenue in fiscal year 1980 was $1,747,000, 60 and in fiscal year 1983 it was $1,630,107. 61 Its budget was approximately $2 million in 1986, with major funding that year coming from the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation. 62 (Inflation-adjusted, $2 million in 1986 was the equivalent of $5.4 million in 2022.)

In 1993, IPS reported receiving a three-year $650,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and operating on an annual budget of $1.5 million (or $3.1 million in 2022 dollars). 63

RELATIONSHIP WITH THE NEW LEFT

From the beginning, IPS was closely associated with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and with the New Left movement more broadly. In his 2021 book Democracy’s Think Tank: The Institute for Policy Studies and Progressive Foreign Policy, historian Brian S. Mueller wrote that “IPS epitomized the ideals of the New Left, especially those found in the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the manifesto of SDS.” A 1962 prospectus for IPS written by Marcus Raskin contained ideas similar to those found in the Port Huron Statement. 64 Founding IPS fellow Arthur Waskow joined SDS in 1963, and both he and Raskin served for a period as contributing editors for the radical New Left magazine Ramparts. 65

A number of prominent New Left figures were connected to IPS during the 1960s; former IPS trustee Garry Wills reportedly remarked that “wherever things were happening on the Left throughout the sixties, the Institute was bound to be represented by one or more of its Fellows.” 66 Tom Hayden, the primary author of the Port Huron Statement, asked about joining the institute in 1964. So did SDS national secretary Lee Webb in 1966. SDS presidents Todd Gitlin and Paul Potter also collaborated with IPS, and Raskin was invited to speak at SDS’s 1964 convention. 67 According to author S. Steven Powell, at least three members of the Weather Underground—a violent extremist SDS offshoot—were known to have been associated with IPS in some capacity, including Bill Ayers, who reportedly participated in an IPS seminar in 1969. 68

According to Waskow, IPS co-directors Raskin and Barnet were “more outside the new left” than many of their colleagues at the institute. Founding IPS trustee David Riesman criticized the New Left during the 1960s, 69 and was later reported to have resigned from the institute in part due to his belief that it was operating on a principle of “no enemies on the left.” 70 Despite this, IPS remained widely viewed as an outgrowth of the New Left movement. As early as 1966 the institute was being described as “the intellectual arsenal of the New Left,” 71 while an article in The Washington Post more than a decade later characterized it as “the first ‘respectable’ offspring of the New Left.” 72

War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land
Several agribusinesses, still largely controlled by oligarchs, have opened up to Western banks and investment funds — including prominent ones such as Kopernik, BNP, or Vanguard — who now control part of their shares. Most of the large landholders are substantially indebted to Western funds and institutions, notably the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank.

https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/war-theft-takeover-ukraine-agricultural-land?utm_campaign=Ukraine%20War%20%26%20Theft%20—%20Reporter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailjet

View of the wheat field during the harvesting season near Krasne village, Ukraine July 5, 2019 © FAO / Anatolii Stepanov

February 21, 2023
War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land, exposes the financial interests and the dynamics at play leading to further concentration of land and finance.

The total amount of land controlled by oligarchs, corrupt individuals, and large agribusinesses is over nine million hectares — exceeding 28 percent of Ukraine’s arable land. The largest landholders are a mix of Ukrainian oligarchs and foreign interests — mostly European and North American as well as the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia. Prominent US pension funds, foundations, and university endowments are invested through NCH Capital, a US-based private equity fund.

Several agribusinesses, still largely controlled by oligarchs, have opened up to Western banks and investment funds — including prominent ones such as Kopernik, BNP, or Vanguard — who now control part of their shares. Most of the large landholders are substantially indebted to Western funds and institutions, notably the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the World Bank.

Western financing to Ukraine in recent years has been tied to a drastic structural adjustment program that has required austerity and privatization measures, including the creation of a land market for the sale of agricultural land. President Zelenskyy put the land reform into law in 2020 against the will of the vast majority of the population who feared it would exacerbate corruption and reinforce control by powerful interests in the agricultural sector. Findings of the report concur with these concerns. While large landholders are securing massive financing from Western financial institutions, Ukrainian farmers — essential for ensuring domestic food supply — receive virtually no support. With the land market in place, amidst high economic stress and war, this difference of treatment will lead to more land consolidation by large agribusinesses.

The report also sounds the alarm that Ukraine’s crippling debt is being used as a leverage by the financial institutions to drive post-war reconstruction towards further privatization and liberalization reforms in several sectors, including agriculture.

The truth about corporations taking over Ukrainian agricultural lands
https://global.ilmanifesto.it/the-truth-about.../by
By Luca Celada
Published onJune 3, 2022
A text has recently spread on social media (including on the Facebook page of Il Giardiniere) alleging that “three large U.S. multinationals bought 17 million hectares of prime land from Zelensky.” Previously, rumors of such an alleged sale of “half of Ukraine to Monsanto, Cargill and Dupont” had been amplified across a small galaxy of various pro-conspiracy sites that in some versions also pinned the responsibility on the usual suspects, George Soros and global financial elites (including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and the Blackstone, BlackRock and Vanguard investment funds).
Behind the simplistic explanations with little supporting evidence, spun to support various agendas and drawing a long tail of outraged comments in their wake, there is actually an element of truth behind the rumors, connected to economic interests converging on Ukraine since well before the Russian invasion. For several years now, a series of reports by the Oakland Institute economic observatory have documented the macroeconomic interests that have made the former Soviet republic an object of intense contention since the fall of the USSR.
Post-Soviet Ukraine, with its 32 million arable hectares of rich and fertile black soil (known as “cernozëm”), has the equivalent of one-third of all existing agricultural land in the European Union. With the end of socialist collectivization, an unprecedented amount of “virgin” hectares have “come into play” to be put on the market, a potentially tasty morsel for banks and agribusiness multinationals.
It is, after all, the much-touted “breadbasket of Europe,” with an annual production of 64 million tons of grain and seeds, among the world’s largest producers of barley, wheat and sunflower oil (for the latter, Ukraine produces about 30 percent of the world total). Since the 1990s, the race has been on for businesses to get their hands on what Jeff Rowe, DuPont’s director for Europe, describes as “one of the fastest-growing agricultural markets in the world.”
“Ukraine had been hardest hit by … the “shock therapy” of capitalist restoration in Eastern Europe and Russia itself,” writes British economist Michael Roberts about this stage in the country’s history. Indeed, its economy has suffered: during the 30 years after independence, incomes and quality of life have remained below 1990 levels and poverty is rampant. Not for everyone, of course – the “conversion” to capitalism has followed the usual pattern: a class of oligarchs and a narrow elite have enriched themselves disproportionately by despoiling the public sector with the complicity of the political class.
This new nomenklatura is being courted by both Russia and the West with competing “assistance” packages with strings attached, aimed at keeping Ukraine in their respective spheres of influence. The tension between the opposing sides exerting economic influence has been the dynamic underlying the politics of independent Ukraine from the beginning, encapsulated in the clash/opposition between Yanukovich and Yushenko. According to Frédéric Mousseau, director of the Oakland Institute, the “geoeconomic” dispute over Ukraine represents the biggest clash between the two rival blocs since the Cold War.
With the events of Maidan in 2014, the Western camp prevailed, while Putin retaliated by taking Crimea and waging war in the Donbass. The developments marked the beginning of Ukraine’s “annexation” into the Euro-Atlantic economic sphere, described by Mousseau and Elisabeth Fraser in a 2014 report entitled The Corporate Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture, which gives an account of the redoubled push by Western financial institutions to “throw open the nation’s vast agricultural sector to foreign corporations.”
From the West came arms and money in the form of assistance packages from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. As usual, the cash was strongly tied to reforms that Ukraine was required to implement, all under the banner of fiscal restraint and austerity. Also according to Mousseau, the drive in Ukraine to privatize the land market is unprecedented in recent history. To limit unrestrained privatization, a moratorium on the sale of land to foreigners had been imposed in 2001. Since then, the repeal of this rule has been a main goal of Western institutions. As early as 2013, for instance, the World Bank provided an $89 million loan for the development of a deed and land title program needed for the commercialization of state-owned and cooperative land.
Furthermore, Western banks are imposing the optimization and consolidation of agribusinesses into large entities at the expense of small producers, who still constitute the majority in the country, with the goal of increasing “added value,” and, in the words of a 2019 World Bank paper, “accelerating private investment in agriculture.” The same report states that “a 30-percent productivity increase in agriculture could result in an additional 4.4 percent Ukrainian GDP growth in five years, and 12.5 percent growth over ten years.” It is safe to assume that the growth rates of private agricultural producers were expected to see far greater increases.
Despite the moratorium on land sales to foreigners, by 2016, ten multinational agricultural corporations had already come to control 2.8 million hectares of land. Today, some estimates speak of 3.4 million hectares in the hands of foreign companies and Ukrainian companies with foreign funds as shareholders. Other estimates are as high as 6 million hectares. The moratorium on sales, which the US State Department, IMF and World Bank had repeatedly called to be removed, was finally repealed by the Zelensky government in 2020, ahead of a final referendum on the issue scheduled for 2024. Furthermore, in January, a report by Usaid, the U.S. Agency for Assistance and Cooperation, lamented the absence of a reliable land market in the country that was limiting economic growth.
This despite the fact that an analysis by Open Democracy published in October revealed that ten private companies controlled 71 percent of the Ukrainian agricultural market, including, “in addition to the Ukrainian oligarchy, multinational corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Bunge, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, and the Chinese state-owned company COFCO.” According to the Oakland Institute’s latest report on the subject, the list now also includes multinational corporations such as Luxembourg-based Kernel, the US holding company NCH Capital, the Saudi-based Continental Farmers and the French AgroGenerations.
Among this long list, European companies particularly stand out, and the role of the EU is increasing, especially after the signing of the economic association agreement between Ukraine and the European Union that came into force in 2017. That agreement, denounced at the time by Russia as a backdoor to facilitating the entry of Western multinationals, includes the promotion of “modern agricultural production … including the use of biotechnologies,” an apparent opening towards GMO crops on Ukrainian (non-EU) fields. Furthermore, agribusiness development in Ukraine and Eastern Europe is part of the European Commission’s strategic plan to boost “protein crops” and reconvert production in those regions to mainly soybean, for which meeting current EU needs is still largely dependent on imports from Argentina and Brazil.
The war now seems likely to disrupt the current grand neoliberal project in the short term, mainly because of disruptions in the export supply chain. Another unknown concerns how Ukraine’s limitations in its current condition might affect Chinese distribution routes to Europe under China’s Belt & Road plan, to which the country had signed on. Nonetheless, in the context of a global geo-economic realignment for which the war promises to be a crucial turning point, Ukraine can be predicted to remain a major point of focus, albeit in the midst of severe global instability.