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| 7/15/1996 cover |
“Last June [1998], in a piece titled “Let Russia Default,” this writer noted the obvious. Awash in debts, running a huge deficit, Russia should be allowed to default; and not one more U.S. tax dollar should be put at risk by the IMF trying to hide Russia’s bankruptcy.
Russia’s chief financial officer, Venianin Sokolov was quoted in that column as conceding that all the IMF billions pumped into his country had been lost, wasted, or stolen “at the highest levels” of what he called an “entirely corrupt regime.”
Yet the IMF handed Russia another $4.8 billion in July. What happened to it? According to Sergei Dubinin, Russian central bank governor, every last dime of that $4.8 billion was spent propping up the Russian ruble, which Moscow, last week, cut loose and let fall.
Within days, the ruble fell 30% against the dollar, 40% against the German mark. Again, Russia’s people have been robbed. Again, U.S. taxpayers will have to make good idiot loans of the IMF.
Friends, this is coming close to indictable criminal fraud.
Yet, according to the Financial Times of August 20, “the IMF is expected to disburse the second tranche of its $11.2 billion loan in September to replenish the central banks reserves and control the slide in the ruble.” If Congress allows this loan to go forward, and shovels out the $18 billion demanded by Clinton for the IMF, it must be considered a moral accomplice to the looting of America.
Russia has now admitted it cannot pay its foreign debts, and demanded that short-term bond holders accept long-term paper at 30% of face value. Panicked investors are fleeing Russia and every Third World market. Stocks are plummeting and billions of dollars of equity are being wiped out daily. Since mid-July, the U.S. market has probably given up a trillion dollars in value.
Who is responsible for the global disaster that began in Asia?
Last week, on CNN’s “Moneyline,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, nailed the villain. Said Dr. Friedman, the IMF “is largely responsible for the Asian crisis.”
Instead of letting Mexico default in 1994, and Goldman Sachs takes its hit, the IMF rushed in to bail out Mexico City and its New York creditors.
That bailout sent a message: The risks of investing billions in emerging markets are minimal. Huge sums poured into these markets. It is those investments that, today, are being wiped out. To stanch the blood-letting, the IMF, since last summer, has put taxpayers at risk for $130 billion in loans to Asia and Russia, most of which we will never see again.
Yet, as Friedman says, it is not the Mexican people, or Russian people, or Thai people, who are aided by the IMF. “We speak about the IMF bailing out…Thailand; the IMF isn’t bailing out Thailand. It isn’t bailing out the poor people in Thailand now suffering from the recession they’re in. It’s bailing out the bankers in New York and in London, and Berlin who made loans to Thailand.” Exactly.
It is time for a Congressional investigation that might well be titled: Who Lost Russia? Its focus should be on who got — and who stole — the scores of billions of dollars in Western loans sunk into Russia since 1991, because it surely was not the people of Russia who are destitute and far worse off than in 1991.
According to the Nation magazine (“The Harvard Boys Do Russia“) Russia’s disaster is the work of three elements. First are the so-called “reformers” like Anatoly Chubais whom the New York Times says “may be the most despised man in Russia.”Second is Harvard’s Institute for International Development which Clinton’s men put in charge of US aid to Russia. Third is the U.S. Treasury.
The “privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market,” writes Janine Wedel in Nation, “helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and Russia’s wealth.”
Moscow’s mayor recently “singled out Harvard for the harm inflicted on the economy by its advisers who encouraged Chubais’ misguided approach to privatization and monetarism.”
In 1991 Russia was pro-American and on the road to freedom. Today, this nation, with thousands of nuclear weapons, is a basket case seething with anti-Americanism and ripe for an explosion.
Meanwhile, Russia’s tycoon capitalists romp on the Riviera; and the geniuses at Harvard, Treasury and the IMF who presided over this debacle have never been called to account. This must be done; but first let’s take Friedman’s advice — and abolish the IMF.”
…………………………..Yet the IMF handed Russia another $4.8 billion in July. What happened to it? According to Sergei Dubinin, Russian central bank governor, every last dime of that $4.8 billion was spent propping up the Russian ruble, which Moscow, last week, cut loose and let fall.
Within days, the ruble fell 30% against the dollar, 40% against the German mark. Again, Russia’s people have been robbed. Again, U.S. taxpayers will have to make good idiot loans of the IMF.
Friends, this is coming close to indictable criminal fraud.
Yet, according to the Financial Times of August 20, “the IMF is expected to disburse the second tranche of its $11.2 billion loan in September to replenish the central banks reserves and control the slide in the ruble.” If Congress allows this loan to go forward, and shovels out the $18 billion demanded by Clinton for the IMF, it must be considered a moral accomplice to the looting of America.
Russia has now admitted it cannot pay its foreign debts, and demanded that short-term bond holders accept long-term paper at 30% of face value. Panicked investors are fleeing Russia and every Third World market. Stocks are plummeting and billions of dollars of equity are being wiped out daily. Since mid-July, the U.S. market has probably given up a trillion dollars in value.
Who is responsible for the global disaster that began in Asia?
Last week, on CNN’s “Moneyline,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, nailed the villain. Said Dr. Friedman, the IMF “is largely responsible for the Asian crisis.”
Instead of letting Mexico default in 1994, and Goldman Sachs takes its hit, the IMF rushed in to bail out Mexico City and its New York creditors.
That bailout sent a message: The risks of investing billions in emerging markets are minimal. Huge sums poured into these markets. It is those investments that, today, are being wiped out. To stanch the blood-letting, the IMF, since last summer, has put taxpayers at risk for $130 billion in loans to Asia and Russia, most of which we will never see again.
Yet, as Friedman says, it is not the Mexican people, or Russian people, or Thai people, who are aided by the IMF. “We speak about the IMF bailing out…Thailand; the IMF isn’t bailing out Thailand. It isn’t bailing out the poor people in Thailand now suffering from the recession they’re in. It’s bailing out the bankers in New York and in London, and Berlin who made loans to Thailand.” Exactly.
It is time for a Congressional investigation that might well be titled: Who Lost Russia? Its focus should be on who got — and who stole — the scores of billions of dollars in Western loans sunk into Russia since 1991, because it surely was not the people of Russia who are destitute and far worse off than in 1991.
According to the Nation magazine (“The Harvard Boys Do Russia“) Russia’s disaster is the work of three elements. First are the so-called “reformers” like Anatoly Chubais whom the New York Times says “may be the most despised man in Russia.”Second is Harvard’s Institute for International Development which Clinton’s men put in charge of US aid to Russia. Third is the U.S. Treasury.
The “privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market,” writes Janine Wedel in Nation, “helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and Russia’s wealth.”
Moscow’s mayor recently “singled out Harvard for the harm inflicted on the economy by its advisers who encouraged Chubais’ misguided approach to privatization and monetarism.”
In 1991 Russia was pro-American and on the road to freedom. Today, this nation, with thousands of nuclear weapons, is a basket case seething with anti-Americanism and ripe for an explosion.
Meanwhile, Russia’s tycoon capitalists romp on the Riviera; and the geniuses at Harvard, Treasury and the IMF who presided over this debacle have never been called to account. This must be done; but first let’s take Friedman’s advice — and abolish the IMF.”
Added: US proudly interfered in Russia’s 1996 presidential election to re-elect Yeltsin: “The Americans were “vital,” says Mikhail Margolev, who coordinated the Yeltsin account at Video International…. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s campaign.”
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| 7/15/1996 cover |
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Added: How US elites plundered Russia in the 1990s: May 14, 1998, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,“ The Nation, Janine R. Wedel
“The [GAO] audit team concluded, for example, that the U.S. government exercised “favoritism” toward Harvard, but this conclusion and the supporting documentation were removed from the final report.…The very people who were supposed to be the trustees of the system not only undercut the aid program’s stated goal of building independent institutions but replicated the Soviet practice of skimming assets to benefit the nomenklatura….
After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.
The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais’s drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he “may be the most despised man in Russia.”
Essential to the implementation of Chubais’s policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the prestige of Harvard’s name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D. officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.’s role in Russian privatization, and its suspected misuse of taxpayers’ funds….
…………………………
Added: After Soviet breakup in Dec. 1991, US elites thought Russia belonged to them:
“In the years following the end of the Soviet Union, the idea that Russia was “ours to lose” gained wide currency in American foreign policy circles. …The idea that Russia is an enemy culture in addition to a geopolitical adversary has since gained wide purchase among American media and political elites. As one prominent commentator put it: “Russia has been targeting the American right.”…Our [US] “culture war” approach to foreign policy has only intensified since then. The failure of this project has contributed significantly to the present animus towards Russia and continues to hinder more reasonable diplomatic relations.”
May 2018, “The Cold War Culture War,” James Carden, American Affairs Journal (“Carden served as an advisor to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the State Department in 2011–12”)
………………………..
Added: How US elites plundered Russia in the 1990s: May 14, 1998, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,“ The Nation, Janine R. Wedel
“The [GAO] audit team concluded, for example, that the U.S. government exercised “favoritism” toward Harvard, but this conclusion and the supporting documentation were removed from the final report.…The very people who were supposed to be the trustees of the system not only undercut the aid program’s stated goal of building independent institutions but replicated the Soviet practice of skimming assets to benefit the nomenklatura….
After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.
The architect of privatization was former First Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments. Chubais’s drastic and corrupt stewardship made him extremely unpopular. According to The New York Times, he “may be the most despised man in Russia.”
Essential to the implementation of Chubais’s policies was the enthusiastic support of the Clinton Administration and its key representative for economic assistance in Moscow, the Harvard Institute for International Development. Using the prestige of Harvard’s name and connections in the Administration, H.I.I.D. officials acquired virtual carte blanche over the U.S. economic aid program to Russia, with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved. With this access and their close alliance with Chubais and his circle, they allegedly profited on the side. Yet few Americans are aware of H.I.I.D.’s role in Russian privatization, and its suspected misuse of taxpayers’ funds….
…………………………
Added: After Soviet breakup in Dec. 1991, US elites thought Russia belonged to them:
“In the years following the end of the Soviet Union, the idea that Russia was “ours to lose” gained wide currency in American foreign policy circles. …The idea that Russia is an enemy culture in addition to a geopolitical adversary has since gained wide purchase among American media and political elites. As one prominent commentator put it: “Russia has been targeting the American right.”…Our [US] “culture war” approach to foreign policy has only intensified since then. The failure of this project has contributed significantly to the present animus towards Russia and continues to hinder more reasonable diplomatic relations.”
May 2018, “The Cold War Culture War,” James Carden, American Affairs Journal (“Carden served as an advisor to the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission at the State Department in 2011–12”)
………………………..
Added: “One reason why Yeltsin was the West’s darling—while Mr. Putin is the target of virulent attacks–was that his policies perfectly suited the Western agenda for Russia, a superpower-turned economic and military weakling, a subservient client state and a source of cheap energy and minerals.
By contrast, Russia’s resurgence under Mr. Putin is seen as upsetting
the global balance of power and threatening the U.S. unipolar model.”
………………
3/20/2008, “Why the West loved Yeltsin and hates Putin,“ thehindu.com, Vladimir Radyuhin
……………..
“One reason why Yeltsin was the West’s darling—while Mr. Putin is the target of virulent attacks–was that his policies perfectly suited the Western agenda for Russia, a superpower-turned economic and military weakling, a subservient client state
and a source of cheap energy and minerals. By contrast, Russia’s
resurgence under Mr. Putin is seen as upsetting the global balance of
power and threatening the U.S. unipolar model….[Link, Yeltsin Time cover, “Yanks to the Rescue,” 7/15/1996]
In Russia, Yeltsin is associated with plunging the country into chaos, reducing a majority of Russians to abject poverty and awarding the country’s oil, gas and other mineral riches to a handful of rapacious oligarchs, who plundered Russia and played Kremlin powerbrokers. The West lauded him as the “father of Russian democracy” who buried communism. Yeltsin remained “Friend Boris” to the West even after he sent tanks to blast his political opponents from Parliament in 1993. In Russia, he faced impeachment charges for this and other “crimes against the nation.”… Mr. Putin’s “controlled democracy” involves centralisation of power, government control over most electronic and some printed media, and Kremlin-supervised grooming of political parties. This policy helped to curb the chaos of the 1990s and bring about political stability that has underpinned economic growth.
In Russia, Yeltsin is associated with plunging the country into chaos, reducing a majority of Russians to abject poverty and awarding the country’s oil, gas and other mineral riches to a handful of rapacious oligarchs, who plundered Russia and played Kremlin powerbrokers. The West lauded him as the “father of Russian democracy” who buried communism. Yeltsin remained “Friend Boris” to the West even after he sent tanks to blast his political opponents from Parliament in 1993. In Russia, he faced impeachment charges for this and other “crimes against the nation.”… Mr. Putin’s “controlled democracy” involves centralisation of power, government control over most electronic and some printed media, and Kremlin-supervised grooming of political parties. This policy helped to curb the chaos of the 1990s and bring about political stability that has underpinned economic growth.
At the same time, the communist-era restrictions on personal freedoms are gone. Russians can choose where to live, what books to read and how much money to earn. They are free to marry foreigners and emigrate. They love travelling abroad, fondly drive Fords, Mercedes and Toyotas, and shop for Western goods in the crowded malls lining the streets of Russian cities.
The West has denied Mr. Putin’s Russia any democratic credential because it “challenges the prerogative of the dominant democratic powers, in practice the U.S., to judge what is and what is not democratic,” says Russia expert Vlad Sobell of the Daiwa Institute of Research.
According to the petrified “ideological orthodoxy” of the West, “modern democracy was incubated predominantly in the Anglo-Saxon culture and, following the defeat of totalitarian empires in the 20th century, it was spread by the victorious powers throughout Western Europe and Japan,” and more recently in the former Soviet Union and also initially in Yeltsin’s Russia.
The rise of new Russia has undermined America’s self-arrogated right to decide what is good and what is evil, to award marks for good or bad behaviour, and to impose “democratic transformation” on other nations, either by war as in Iraq, or through “colour revolutions” as in Georgia and Ukraine.
If Mr. Putin’s Russia is accepted as an emerging democracy, rather than as a successor to the “evil empire,” it will be difficult to justify the new containment policy the U.S. has set in train, surrounding Russia with a ring of military bases and missile interceptors. Nor would one be able to easily dismiss Moscow’s criticism of the aggressive and arrogant U.S. behaviour across the world.
As Mr. Putin asked in his famous Munich speech, if Russia could carry out a peaceful transition from the Soviet regime to democracy, why should other countries be bombed at every opportunity for want of democracy? Hence the Herculean effort of Western opinion-makers to paint everything Mr. Putin does in evil colours.
The U.S. State Department’s annual report on human rights in 2007 mounted the harshest attack yet on the state of freedom in Russia, while the U.S. Freedom House listed it as one of the several “energy-rich dictatorships.” Republican presidential candidate John McCain has accused Mr. Putin of “trying to restore the old Russian empire,” and “perpetuating himself in power” by installing his “puppet” Dmitry Medvedev in the Kremlin.
In sticking labels on Russian leaders, the West outrageously ignores the opinion of the Russian people. Russians showed what they thought of Yeltsin’s legacy when they voted out of Parliament twice in recent years the liberal parties that had supported his policies in the 1990s. They demonstrated their support for Mr. Putin’s policies when they triumphantly re-elected him for a second term in 2004 and when they overwhelmingly voted for Mr. Medvedev in March 2008.
Mr. Putin bluntly told the West that its criticism of his policies would not induce his successor to strike a softer posture in foreign policy. “I am long accustomed to the label by which it is difficult to work with a former KGB agent,” Mr. Putin said at a recent press conference. “Dmitry Medvedev will be free from having to prove his liberal views. But he is no less a Russian nationalist than me, in the good sense of the word, and I do not think our partners will find it easier to deal with him.”
For his part, Mr. Medvedev, while pledging that “freedom in all its manifestations — personal freedom, economic freedom and, finally, freedom of expression” — would be “at the core of our politics,” said democratic values would be adopted in line with Russia’s “national tradition.””
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