The Pillaging of Russia
The accusation that Putin has a connection to Trump, so widely
repeated now by the corporate media and the Democrats with whom they
coordinate, is nothing new. It also came up in the primaries. Republican
political operatives and the neoconservative intelligentsia, unable to
understand the threat or accept the repudiation of their failed policies,
claimed that Trump’s rise was somehow aided by Russia, and that his online
supporters were “Kremlin-funded trolls.”
This last charge is repeated even now. And Hillary Clinton makes
dark hints about “celebrations in the Kremlin” if Trump were to win. His
prudence and restraint in wanting to avoid war with Russia are presented as
“evidence” that he is “Putin’s agent” by the same reckless political and
foreign-policy establishment that has brought one humiliation after another to
the United States over the past three decades.
There’s more than just
jingoistic hysteria behind the many accusations that Trump is “Putin’s agent.”
In a poetic way, this is true. The international interests that financially
wrecked Russia in the ’90s are doing the same to the United States now. Putin
stopped them in Russia and Trump is promising to stop them in America. They
recognize Trump as the enemy and slander in the only style they know—the
paranoid style.
“The international interests that financially
wrecked Russia in the ’90s are doing the same to the United States now.”
Trump was once blamed for
praising Putin’s performance. But he was right. Pensions, salaries, GDP, and
the value of gold reserves in Russia have risen greatly since 1999—in some
cases tenfold or more. This was while both inflation and the debt-to-GDP ratio
declined by orders of magnitude. The rise in living standard under Putin is
reflected in longer life expectancy: It had dropped to a third-world level
during the 1990s, to around 55–57, and has now risen back up to 70 by most
measures. Birthrates have normalized and recently overtaken the United States.
Visit Moscow and you will see infrastructure, buildings, and development that
are more impressive than those found in any American city—though the same could
be said, of course, for many other countries now.
By contrast, Russians remember the liberal and globalist
experiment of the ’90s as a time of great suffering. The early death of
literally millions of people from economic deprivation, the utter ruin of many
of Russia’s formerly world-class industries: This is the legacy of economic
liberalization in Russia. How did it happen?
In short, “entrepreneurs” would run fraudulently acquired businesses
into the ground, fire-sale the assets internationally, and move abroad with the
profits. This is globalism in its purest form, without the slogans and
boosterism. American economists, academics, and businessmen played an important
part in all of this. Marc Rich—a fugitive later pardoned by Bill Clinton—was,
for example, “the largest trader of Russia’s oil and aluminum on a spot basis,”
according to Steve Sailer, who has documented the “rape of Russia” in some
detail. George Soros was a large investor in these ventures, which provided the
international market with financial backing, and cover for the oligarchs’
robbery of their own people. This was done especially under Boris Jordan’s CS
First Boston bank and later Renaissance Capital, Moscow “investment banks”
staffed by Soros associates.
Even more important was a group
of Harvard and MIT economists who advised and assisted the Russian government
in the reforms. These are men still involved in public life in the United
States: current vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Stanley Fischer,
Jeffrey Sachs, Jonathan Hay, Andrei Shleifer, and Larry Summers, who was later
Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton. As late as 1998, months
before Russia defaulted, Fischer claimed that the Yeltsin regime had
to be praised for following the advice of this group. Using the rhetoric of
liberalization and globalism, American academics and financiers played a key
role in the pillaging of Russia.
Russian politics and media in
the 1990s served only one purpose: to make room for this pillaging, and to
prevent all popular or legal obstacles to its happening as fast as possible. Russian
media was only “free” in the perverse sense that it served entirely the private
interests of men like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Boris Jordan.
They owned TV stations, newspapers, and magazines, and news was edited to
facilitate and cover up their criminal enterprise and their control of puppet
politicians, like the besotted Yeltsin. Many journalists during that time lost
their lives when they tried to expose corruption. The Western journalists and
politicians who cry crocodile tears now over Putin’s supposed crimes had
nothing to say then.
This all sounds and feels familiar.
If Putin really is responsible for the DNC leaks, he has done a great service
to journalism and to America. The emails reveal what was widely known but
previously dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”: The American political system as
it now exists is rigged by party apparatchiks in thrall to corporate donors and
lobbyists. These same few financiers own most of the media outlets, which
coordinate with the marionette political class to promote an oligarch-approved
narrative. The entire edifice of American government and media of our time
serves here the same purpose that the controlled
government and media of Russia served in the 1990s.
Several recent studies have documented the catastrophic decline in
the life expectancy and living standard of the white working class in the
United States. But this has exactly the same causes as the great suffering
experienced by the Russians in the ’90s, and in many cases it is the same
people and corporations who are profiting by it. The offshoring of America’s
industries and jobs, the devastation of American manufacturing and most kinds
of engineering, the massive national debt are, in their beginnings, the same
process of national destruction that began in Russia in the 1990s, but to which
Putin put a stop in the 2000s.
Hillary Clinton, like Jeb
Bush, is not running for president. With the exception of Trump and maybe
Sanders, all other candidates this year were running for the analogue of
Yeltsin’s position in the Russia of the ’90s. That is, a puppet who will give a
rubber stamp to a few oligarchs to extract as much wealth as possible in
America’s hour of decline and prepare for themselves a refuge abroad. Mass
immigration, reckless wars, and the various international trade deals proposed
are the principal policies by which this is to be done. “Diversity,” “the
global economy,” and other such platitudes are the rhetoric meant to hypnotize
the people to their own dispossession. And the same international vampires who
raped Russia and who hate Putin for stopping their schemes are now shaking with
fear that an American can stop them at home.
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