Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered stark opening remarks before meeting with top defense officials and representatives of the Russian military/industrial complex in the annual review session. The meeting, which took place on Tuesday in Sochi, coincided with the announcement that the Russian defense budget for next year will be $49 billion, with $35 billion earmarked directly for Russian armed forces. By comparison, the US defense budget is 10-15 TIMES bigger; and two new US weapons programs — the F-35 new stealth fighter plane and the replacement ballistic missile-carrying submarines — are each more expensive than the entire Russian defense budget.

Putin focused his opening remarks on the threat to Russia posed by the US and allied global missile defense program. Putin said early in his remarks:

Putin noted that Washington persistently claimed that the ABM deployments were related to the danger from Iran, but the deployments continue even after the P5+1 deal. He concluded:

The fact that Putin did not elaborate on “the ensuing consequences” in no way watered down his direct message: Obama, like Bush and Cheney before him, is driving the world rapidly towards thermonuclear confrontation. Putin made clear that Russia is already preparing for such a confrontation by the very work that was the subject of the special annual session he was addressing.

Putin explained:

Putin noted, in concluding his opening remarks, that Russia has been working for the past three years on developing “a number of promising armament systems capable of performing combat missions in conditions of an anti-missile defense system in depth,” noting the combat units have begun receiving such new weapons systems this year already.

Not everyone in the US and the West has missed the point. Stephen Blank, a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council recently wrote an article titled, “The West Underestimates Putin at Its Peril.” He began,

Julian Borger writing in the Guardian Nov. 10, brought the issue directly back to US nuclear weapons provocations against Moscow. Borger reported on recent warnings by former US Joint Chief of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. James Cartwright, who stated that the modernization of the US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, the B-61 12, makes that weapon “usable,” and this poses a grave danger of a slide into thermonuclear war. Cartwright told PBS “If I can drive down the yield, drive down, therefore the likelihood of fallout, etc., does that make it more usable in the eyes of some — some President or national security decision-making process? And the answer is, it likely could be more usable.” Borger noted, “The great thing about nuclear weapons was that their use was supposed to be unthinkable, and they were therefore a deterrent to contemplation of a new world war. Once they become ‘thinkable’ we are in a different, and much more dangerous, universe.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the opening of a conference of defense ministry and military industrial leaders in Sochi on Tuesday, and warned, in pointed language, that President Barack Obama’s policies are driving the world towards thermonuclear extinction in the very near term. In effect, Putin offered the most air-tight argument for why the President of the United States must be removed from office now.

Putin made clear that the US has been lying about the reasons for building a global missile defense system, since Iran has now signed the P5+1 deal, renouncing nuclear weapons. The goal of the US and allied global ABM was always to alter the global military balance in favor of a US first-strike thermonuclear strike against Russia. Russia, for its part, is not having anything of it; building new weapons systems, some of which are already in the field, to offset any ABM advantage that the US might obtain.

This is the same Barack Obama whose signature foreign policy “success” has been the drone mass-kill program, under which an unknown number of innocent civilians have been killed, only to be posthumously classified as “enemies killed in action,” or, more simply, as “collateral damage.” In discussion with colleagues from his Policy Committee on Wednesday, Lyndon LaRouche drew a clear line in the sand between genuine human beings and monsters, like Obama, who have no capacity for agape, and thus lack the human emotional qualities that distinguish man from beast. LaRouche noted that California Governor Jerry Brown has the same character as Obama, completely removed from any concept of agape.

Even if thermonuclear Armageddon can be avoided in the near-term, Obama’s seven years in office, following eight years of Bush-Cheney, have seen a total disintegration of the conditions of life for the vast majority of Americans. The latest atrocity is the massive jump in cocaine production in Colombia, which will soon, inevitably, take the form of a flood of cheap cocaine entering the United States. This is on top of the already epidemic jump in heroin addiction and addiction to pharmaceutical pain-killers. The American people are being targeted in a new and vicious British Opium War. The case of Colombia is exemplary; where President Santos, a Tony Blair protege and Obama ally, has openly promoted drug legalization, has shut down the coca eradication programs, and is now in the final phase of negotiating a narco-peace with the notorious narco-terrorist FARC.

The President of the Boston Federal Reserve Bank has also come out this week with dire warnings of a blow-out of the commercial real estate bubble, noting that the situation today is more grave than in September 2007, when the housing and commercial real estate bubble first blew; leading to the September 2008 meltdown and the QE bail-out that followed.

The real conditions of life for the vast majority of Americans — thermonuclear war dangers aside — have been destroyed over the past 15 years of Bush and Obama. Europe is in even worse shape, with leading nations, like Germany and France in hopeless collapse, and Britain already in a total economic breakdown. While the trans-Atlantic region goes from bad to worse, and leading British circles plot war as the way out of their dilemma, the situation in Asia and Eurasia is qualitatively different, with China, Russia and India leading the effort to chart a new path for genuine global cooperation and scientific revolution to benefit all of mankind.

The opportunity to launch such a “new paradigm for mankind” is at hand, and the vital first step is the oust Obama and shut down Wall Street, to begin the process of recovery and healing in the United States.