Gati për luftë”, NATO 300 mijë forca në përballjen me Rusinë

[Vinjol]

NATO po përgatit për luftë me Rusinë mbi 300 mijë ushtarë. Lajmi bëhet i ditur nga mediat britanike që citojnë përfaqësuesin e përhershëm të Britanisë së Madhe pranë NATO-s, Adam Tomson.

Shkak janë bërë tensionet e larta të kohëve të fundit me Moskën, çka kanë shtuar rrezikun e shpërthimit të një konflikti të armatosur.

Sipas tij, ngritja e kësaj force do të bëhet brenda tre muajsh dhe do të jetë e gatshme për tu dërguar në zonat ku mund të shpërthejë konflikti i mundshëm me ushtrinë ruse, kryesisht në shtetet e Europës Lindore.

Trupat janë grumbulluar nga të 28 vendet anëtare të aleancës veri-atlantike.

Sekretari i Përgjithshëm i NATO-s, Jens Stoltemberg tha për mediat britanike se kohët e fundit është vënë re se Rusia është bërë mjaft aktive në shumë fusha, veçanërisht me propagandën e saj në disa vende europiane anëtare të Aleancës. Ndaj dhe NATO po reagon me përforcimet më të mëdha, që prej luftës së ftohtë.

Pjesë e planit për vënien në gatishmëri për luftë të 300 mijë trupave është edhe dërgimi i 4 mijë ushtarëve në Lituani, Letoni, Poloni e Estoni brenda 2017-ës. Marrëdhëniet mes perëndimit dhe Rusisë janë tensionuar që pas aneksimit të Krimesë nga Rusia dhe konfliktit sirian./ tvklan.al

[arbereshi_niko]

Ne nje interviste te nje gazete lokale Parlamentní listy, gjenerali çek Hynek Blaško ka folur per nje mundesi lufte midis Rusise dhe Natos duke e shpjeguar me nje barsalete.
Gazetaret i rikujtojne gjeneralit qe armatimet e Natos, bashke me ato te shkaterrimit masiv, gjenden gjithmone e me afer kufirit rus.
Nje nga keta pyet nese na duhet te presim te ndodhe se shpejti kjo katastrofe ne rast nje konflikti midis Aleances Atllantike dhe Rusise.
Gjenerali pergjigjet me nje barsalete. Ai thote: “Ne internet qarkullon nje barsalete. Obama dhe gjeneralet e tij debatojne ne Pentagon dhe nuk bien dakort kur eshte me mire te sulmohet Rusia.
Ne fund fare marrin dhe pyesin francezet, qe u pergjigjen; “nuk e dime, por sigurisht jo ne dimer. Do te shkoje e do te kthehet keq fare”.
Me pas kane pyetur gjermanet, qe pergjigjen keshtu; “ nuk e dime. Por sigurisht jo ne vere. E kemi provuar”. E ç’te bejne ? marrin e pyesin kinezet:
Kur duhet sulmuar Rusia? Kinezet u pergjigjen “ne kete moment preçiz! Rusia ka filluar ndertimin e gazdotit ( gaz-sjellesit )”Power of Siberia”, “Turkish Stream”, kozmodromin “Vostochny”,
uren per ne Krimea dhe se shpejti duan te modernizojne rajonet e Lindjes se Larget, atyre u duhet te ndertojne impjante te reja per Boterorin dhe per kampionatin boteror te Atletikes,
ka edhe nje plan per zhvillimin e rajonit arktik… mire pra, tani shpejt ata kane nevoje per nje numer te madh roberish per realizimin e ketyre veprave…!” – tha Blaško
pastaj duke shtuar vepren e humoristit dhe shkrimtarit Jaroslav Hašek “Ushtari i mire Sc'vèik".
Gazetaret me pas e pyeten ne rast te nje “lufte konvencjonale me Rusine”, do te perseriteshin disa nga ngjarjet e Luftes se Pare Boterore: “shume dezertore, krijimi i shume legjoneve, etj.”
“Une dhe kapo i distrektit kemi thene gjithmone: patriotizmi, ndjenja e detyres dhe shpirti i sakrifices, keto jane arme te verteta ne lufte!.


Ps: Rusia eshte e vetmja qe nuk do lufte, ndersa vendet e Natos duhet te harxhojne shuma te majme per te fryre barqet ne Washinton.
Pershendetje

[jarigas]

Sa budallalleqe.....Nato nuk egziston me si nje trup i vetem...Turqia eshte lavire e vjeter..Franca po ashtu...Britania eshte e lidhur me SHBA..SHBA jane te pafuqishem qekur kryemyftiu Husein Obama e çarmatosi..Italia s'ka fuqi as te ndaloje lunderzat e ISIS.it.....Trump do ti jape te shtymen ketij organizmi pa koke e pa krye....prandaj, llogje koti!!

[mesia4ever]

Kur duhet sulmuar Rusia? Kinezet u pergjigjen “ne kete moment preçiz! Rusia ka filluar ndertimin e gazdotit ( gaz-sjellesit )”Power of Siberia”, “Turkish Stream”, kozmodromin “Vostochny”,
uren per ne Krimea dhe se shpejti duan te modernizojne rajonet e Lindjes se Larget, atyre u duhet te ndertojne impjante te reja per Boterorin dhe per kampionatin boteror te Atletikes,
ka edhe nje plan per zhvillimin e rajonit arktik… mire pra, tani shpejt ata kane nevoje per nje numer te madh roberish per realizimin e ketyre veprave…!” – tha Blaško
pastaj duke shtuar vepren e humoristit dhe shkrimtarit Jaroslav Hašek “Ushtari i mire Sc'vèik".
Gazetaret me pas e pyeten ne rast te nje “lufte konvencjonale me Rusine”, do te perseriteshin disa nga ngjarjet e Luftes se Pare Boterore: “shume dezertore, krijimi i shume legjoneve, etj.”
“Une dhe kapo i distrektit kemi thene gjithmone: patriotizmi, ndjenja e detyres dhe shpirti i sakrifices, keto jane arme te verteta ne lufte!.

Ne nje situate hipotetike ku Rusia hyn ne lufte me ShBA-te dhe perdoren armet berthamore Rusia e peson me shume. ShBA-te mund te bejne shume here me shume deme ne territorin rus sesa qe ushtria ruse do te mund te bente ne ShBA. ShBA ka sistemin anti raketor me te avancuarin sot ne bote dhe asnje shtet tjeter nuk e ka. Poashtu ka sistemin me te mire ushtarak ne gjurmimin e nendeteseve.
Lufte konvencionale me Rusine nuk mund te kete pervec nese Rusia lufton me taktiken e luftes qe eshte duke e zhvilluar kunder Ukraines. Por kjo taktike nuk do t'i funksiononte kunder nje anetari te NATO-s sepse do ta humbte brenda nates.

[HFTengineer]

Ne nje situate hipotetike ku Rusia hyn ne lufte me ShBA-te dhe perdoren armet berthamore Rusia e peson me shume. ShBA-te mund te bejne shume here me shume deme ne territorin rus sesa qe ushtria ruse do te mund te bente ne ShBA. ShBA ka sistemin anti raketor me te avancuarin sot ne bote dhe asnje shtet tjeter nuk e ka. Poashtu ka sistemin me te mire ushtarak ne gjurmimin e nendeteseve.
Lufte konvencionale me Rusine nuk mund te kete pervec nese Rusia lufton me taktiken e luftes qe eshte duke e zhvilluar kunder Ukraines. Por kjo taktike nuk do t'i funksiononte kunder nje anetari te NATO-s sepse do ta humbte brenda nates.

Ti plako jo vbetem ske haberin eknomik po edhe gjeopolitik lexon ca artikuj propgandiste neoconservative ku amerika eshte hero dhe bota nuk ka investuar ne fushen ushtarake . Nuk eshte bota e luftes se dytete botre, duhet te cohesh nga gjumi, bota sot eshte globaliste pra ekonomite jane te lidhura dhe ekonomi te lidhura jo vetem me kinen dhe boten dhe anasjeltas. Nje lufte me rusine do e conte evropen per lesh e para dhe amerikenne nje livel te pa pare. Nqs nuk e ke haberin amerika akoma nuk e ma marre veten ekonomikisht dhe ka mundsi dhe shumne eknomiste flasin per krize tjeter financjare. E dyta eshte problemi qe i hap rrug kines per lufte sepse thyen shume marvesheje dhe spese cenimeve do i behen . Kina ehste dhe armik i Rusise prsh ne disa pika ekonomike si dhe ortak ne pika gjeografike/politike. Jane pjes E BRICS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS
Amerika eshte ortak eknomik me kinen por gjegrafikisht dhe ushtarakisht armik. Pra po te futet kina ne ekuacjon punet do ikin per lesh.

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the...would-be-17210

E treta duhet lte lexosh pak per rindertimin e rusise dhe sa ka investuar kina ne fushen ushtarake kto 20 vite.


http://freebeacon.com/national-secur...-capabilities/

http://www.e-ir.info/2016/06/25/new-...ato-responses/


Sa per bombat berthamore e di pse u qujat lufte e ftohte ca do kish nodhur nqs ishte luft direkt?


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual...ed_destruction

Fut dhe faktin qe rusia e ka rrit numrin dhe te investuar ne teknollogjin berthamore .


http://time.com/4280169/russia-nuclear-security-summit/


http://freebeacon.com/national-secur...uclear-treaty/


http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...s-back-on.html


Kshque boll fole gomarrliqe dhe sidomos kur nuk jeton ne amerike dhe sprekesh po te filloj nje lufte drejt per drjet dhe nuk e ke haberin e implikimeve.

[mesia4ever]

Edhe ti nuk dallon nga disa myslimane, ateiste e ortodokse, argumentin kryesor e ke ofendimin e njerezve.
Sistemi oligarkik ka ardhur me Putinin por edhe Jelcini ishte nje m.., mbronte Milloshevicin edhe pse ushtria e tij vriste gra e femije gjate luftes ne Kosove, Rusia ishte dhe eshte totalisht e korruptuar pa kurrfare morali njerezor. Putini ka kapur pushtetin dhe deri ne vdekje nuk e leshon karriken, kjo per ty eshte gje e mire. Ku ki pa 1 njeri me qen president per 40 vite deri ne vdekje perpos ne vendet diktatoriale. Tani mbeshtet nje rregjim qe bombardon spitalet me te semure bile edhe vet i bombardon. Kush e lavderon kete, perpos nje budalla, e ti je i tille, budallalleku nuk eshte monopol vetem i myslimaneve por zgjerohet dita dites ne tipa si ti.

[arbereshi_niko]

Edhe ti nuk dallon nga disa myslimane, ateiste e ortodokse, argumentin kryesor e ke ofendimin e njerezve.
Sistemi oligarkik ka ardhur me Putinin ...... Putini ka kapur pushtetin dhe deri ne vdekje nuk e leshon karriken...
Ku ki pa 1 njeri me qen president per 40 vite deri ne vdekje perpos ne vendet diktatoriale.

Gjithesesi nuk me je drejtuar mua, une me pare se te pergjigjem do te uroj "mire se ardhjen" , gjithashtu "ngushellime" per Clinton-nen... :-)
Ti shume e deshiroje te vinte ne pushtet ajo qe do te provonte forcen me Putin...
Por ja qe amerikanet e kuptuan qe nuk eshte armiku i tyre Vladimir Putin, por izis dhe daesh apo al-nusra qe ti
( mos te rriten veshet pasi me "TI" dmth ata si ti... ) dhe Clinton i quani " opozite e moderuar ".
Ja pra nga vjen edhe diskutimi i shtrembur qe ke per Putin, jo pse Kosova keshtu e bombat ne Alepo ashtu, jo Ukraina apo Krimea,
jo Putin diktator qe ka uzurpuar "kolltukun" e presidentit per 40 vjet , jo terci e verci...............
Angela Merkel nga data 22 nentor 2005 deri me sot eshte ne menyre te vazhdueshme kopo e padiskutueshme e Gjermanise...
Pse nuk e akuzon ti qe njeh politiken dhe etiketon te tjeret si diktatore? pastaj ajo dje hodhi edhe nje here kandidaturen per te katerten here konsekutive ne krye te Gjermanise,
po as’kujt nuk i vajti ne mend ta akuzoje si diktatore!
Putin ka hipur ne fuqi me 31 dhjetor te 1999 pra vetem 12 ore perpara vitit 2000 e kjo vazhdoi per dy mandate 7 maj 2008, pasi nuk lejohet ne Rusi me shume,
keshtu ne daten 7 maj te 2012 ai u rizgjodh perseri si president deri me sot, gezon mbi 89% te elektoratit rus dhe nuk i behet vone kujt se ç’flasim neve ne forumin shqiptar…,
pasi tifozllekun tone ketu nuk e konsideron njeri.
Pra po te vihej ne diskutim ky uzurpim i postit presidencjal, Putin nuk eshte as me pak e as me shume
“uzurpues” se sa koleget e tjere ne Evrope. Pasi flitet per pak me shume se 11 vjet si per Putin ashtu edhe per Merkel,
ku kjo e fundit me te drejte kerkon te katertin mandat si kanceljere, pse jo?
Por Putin eshte per ty diktator, kriminel, misherimi i te keqes, armiku i njerezimit, edhe nofka nga me te ndryshmet,
por i nderuar mesia4ever, ai ben interesat e vendit te tij, ta kishim neve nje si ky Putin.
Putin mund ta akuzosh per ç’fare te duash ti e une bashke, por qe po ta kishim edhe neve nje “putin”
gjerat do te shkonin me mire per gjithe kombin tone… , ta garantoj ! Shqiptaret do te kishin me shume peshe ne Rrajon!
Ate e kane zgjedhur mbi 80 % e popullit rus, ku sondazhet luhaten sipas rrethanave historike, momentet e ndryshme qe jetojme, lufta ne Lindjen e Mesme dhe ajo civile ne Ukrahine,
ose Krimea (sot Rusi )ku 97 % e popullsise votoi per bashkim me Rusine dhe ku 98% per Putin.
Tani edhe Clinton-ja ( ajo e preferuara jote ) e urrente bash si ti, kete Vladimir Vladimiroviç-in …
por ja qe kohet ndryshojne dhe ku i dihet ndoshta edhe ti me kohen…, do te ndryshosh.
Sidoqofte nuk pi fare uje se si e mendon, por mos ler nam duke folur per çart kunder…, pasi Putin nuk te degjon…!
Ja kalofsh mire dhe mos e merr si personale, pasi diskutohet pikerisht se kemi ide te ndryshme dhe te kunderta, por pa hiperbolizuar dhe deformuar gjerat.
Pershendetje

[HFTengineer]

Let ti marrim cdo gje qe the :

Edhe ti nuk dallon nga disa myslimane, ateiste e ortodokse, argumentin kryesor e ke ofendimin e njerezve.
.

Une te kam partqit fakte mbas faketve .
Cfare mund ti thuash ne njeriu qe i anashkalon dhe nuk lexon cdo fakt, vadshon te riperserise te njejtin thenje por duke perseritur pa prova per te munduar ta bej te vertete, dhe nuk sjell asnje kunder fakt qer ti mohoj apo provoj dicka pervec nje injorantiu qe vashdon te flas pa fakte dhe te bej ekspertin kur se ka haberin ?


Pastaj jame une qe bej smire kundrejt ortodoxve, musilimane ateiste etj etj?
Apo kjo squhet.


E di ca eshte cerry picking?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking


Argument nga repeticjoni?
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/...-by-Repetition

[HFTengineer]

Putini ka kapur pushtetin dhe deri ne vdekje nuk e leshon karriken, kjo per ty eshte gje e mire. Ku ki pa 1 njeri me qen president per 40 vite deri ne vdekje perpos ne vendet diktatoriale. .

Ja te shofim me fakte mqense na ke sjell shum fakte per te vertetuar cthe sa shume leke kan investuar kta ne amerike per ta hudh

Kjo ehste e shekputur nga isreal shamir si ***** riot u mundiua te hidhte putinin qe qe e paguar qe nga kta ktej:



Anti-Putin protests took place during and directly after the presidential campaign. The most notorious protest was the ***** Riot performance on 21 February, and subsequent trial.[111] An estimated 8,000–20,000 protesters gathered in Moscow on 6 May,[112][113] when eighty people were injured in confrontations with police,[114] and 450 were arrested, with another 120 arrests taking place the following day.[115] A counter-protest of Putin supporters occurred which culminated into a gathering of an estimated 130,000 supporters at the Luzhniki Stadium, Russia's largest stadium. Some of the attendees stated that they had been paid to come, were forced to come by their employers, or were misled into believing that they were going to attend a folk festival instead.[116][117][118][119][120] T


http://www.israelshamir.net/English/...iot-London.htm



I received a letter from the Arts Editor of the Morning Star asking for my permission to re-publish my popular essay on the ***** Riot:

Dear Mr Shamir

I'm the arts editor of the Morning Star newspaper (see
www.morningstaronline.co.uk) and we'd like to reprint an edited version of
your ***** Riot article.
Would you please grant permission? Unfortunately, we run on a shoestring so
we're unable to pay a fee but I hope you will agree as it will bring your
challenging piece to a wider readership.
I'd be grateful for a swift response as we have a possible slot free in next
Saturday's publication.

With very best wishes

Clifford Cocker
Arts editor
Morning Star newspaper


I gave my permission immediately, and they published it – and took it down in a few hours under pressure of the Jewish Lobby.

The Lobby had a good reason to object. In this article, I wrote:

“For much milder anti-Jewish hate talk, European countries customarily sentence offenders to two-to-five years of prison for the first offence. The Russians applied hate crime laws to offenders against Christian faith, and this is probably a Russian novelty. The Russians proved that they care for Christ as much as the French care for Auschwitz, and this shocked the Europeans who apparently thought ‘hate laws’ may be applied only to protect Jews and gays. The Western governments call for more freedom for the anti-Christian Russians, while denying it for holocaust revisionists in their midst.”

Actually, the Jewish angle to the PR affair is more than that: though I did not find it necessary to mention in my article, the most outspoken PR supporters and enemies of the Church in Russia, such as Viktor Shenderovich, Igor Eidman, Marat Gelman, Xenia Sobchak, Alexey Venediktov happen to be of Jewish origin. None of them is a practicing Jew, but they apparently inherited their hatred to the Church from their forefathers.

Surely, there are many non-Jews who hate the Church, and there are many descendants of Jews who came to Christ and are saved, but still the correlation can’t be denied. The British Jewish ‘tribal or kosher’ Marxists provide their support, for, in words of Gilad Atzmon, “Jewish Marxism is very different from Marxism or socialism in general. While Marxism is a universal paradigm, Jewish Marxism is basically a crude utilisation of ‘Marxist-like’ terminology for the Jewish tribal cause.” Indeed they were on the watch; they applied pressure to the Morning Star, and the British Communists surrendered immediately.

They did not care that the attacks proceeded from Harry’s Place, the dirtiest Zionist leftist blog in Britain, viciously anti-Muslim, positioned against Iran and Syria, violently anti-Russian, and surely anti-Shamir. Harry’s Place described me as “antisemite/Holocaust denier/Assange collaborator/Lukashenko enabler/all-around slimeball Israel Shamir”. I think of using it as my signature in future J.

They apologised to the readers in the following language:

A NUMBER of you have raised concerns over the decision to reprint an article by Israel Shamir on the Russian band ***** Riot that appeared in the weekend’s Morning Star.
The paper would like to reassure readers that the piece was syndicated from Counterpunch in good faith without knowledge of the author’s background.
We would like to reiterate the paper’s commitment to publishing writers who reflect and remain steadfastly committed to the values of anti-racism, anti-fascism, international solidarity and social justice that the paper has campaigned for ever since its establishment.
It remains guided by those goals and will seek in future, wherever possible, to establish the full biography of writers before publishing their work.
In the meantime the Morning Star would like to distance itself from the opinions of the author of the piece, which do not reflect our position or those of the wider movement.
We apologise wholeheartedly for any distress caused.

So many code-words to mask their weak knees. If they can’t stand up to a few Jewish Marxists, how can they stand up to real big capitalist enemies?

But I do not want to end on such a determinist note, condemning the Reds and condemning the Jews. Despite all correlations, people are free to think and to act. We have free will. Some of the strongest voices against the PR outrage were Reds and Jews, or rather Russian leftists of www.left.ru, some of Jewish origin and some not, all strongly anti-Zionist (they even translated and published Israel Shahak). Here are excepts from one of their texts, by Valentin Zorin. It explains well the position of the Russian anti-imperialist Left which should eventually influence the Western anti-imperialist Left and Right.

Pussies Rioting against Independent Russia, by Valentin Zorin (excepts)
“…Not only their name (***** Riot) is in English. They talk as if they translate from English. They use language of an Americanised native who thinks and speaks the colonisers’ language. Russia is definitely not a colony of the Anglo-American Empire, at least it is not a colony yet, but already we have colonised natives in droves, for colonisation is not a single event but a lasting process…
The PR belong to bourgeois radical left adapted for the colonised nations. Their roots are to be found in the early period of the Cold War, when the US decided to use leftist ideology to fight communism. Feminism, beatniks, sexual liberation, even civil rights movement were sponsored by American state agencies and by private interests. They developed gender studies, imported French post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida, and eventually exported into colonised cultures.
For what reason? Just guess, which soldier would fight better for Russia, one who believes in “God, King and Motherland” or one who thinks that all these ideas (always excepting post-modernism and post-structuralism) are just deliberate illusions created by the authorities? Or make it easier: what would rather wear Russian marines under their battledress in face-to-face combat, a cross or a politically correct and gender-adjusted image?
I know, after asking this question, I’ll be forever banned from entering the Kingdom of the Leftist Heaven. A French maître of post-something would sarcastically smirk, and ultra-conservatives would applaud, to my chagrin. But this question allows to divine the meaning of the PR affair, for the meaning is not in our hands, nor it is in hands of Putin, neither of the Church. The Imperial Masters of Discourse rule what is the meaning, while we can only understand it – or not. All Western newspapers made it clear: “Putin versus PR; Putin persecutes the PR, PR against Putin”. It was repeated by the colonial media in Russia, by practically everybody of importance excepting such dyed-in-the-wool fogies as yours truly.
Who made the PR so successful and famous, who secured their place in history? Putin did. Putin is our alpha and omega. Please do not beat me! It is not my doing, it is them, the Pussies! They did not ask the Virgin to banish private property, dope traders, human traffickers, oligarchs, bankers, police, Sixth fleet or anything else. They asked her to remove a small unseemly guy named Putin from the Kremlin. Even if the Pussies were mistaken, the State Department, Madonna, Mme Clinton and Mme Merkel, the NY Times and the Guardian could not be wrong. They all know that behind Putin there is a force that sets limit to Imperial omnipotence and to the Masters’ monopoly on the meaning of things.
Without Putin, i.e. without independent Russia blocking the road of the Western Empire to full spectrum dominance, nobody would notice the Pussies, or us, or even our biggest oligarchs. It is unpleasant to hear, but we would become a remote province of the Empire, fit for business or pleasure but of no political importance. We would become eating and TV-watching nothingness. A small garrison of imperial troopers would suffice to control us. But despite all Imperial efforts, Putin still sits in the Kremlin.
What is the secret of his political longevity? Cruel repressions? But if so, where are the martyrs? The only possibly political prisoner is the oligarch Khodorkovsky. The second best, Udaltsov, never rated for more than 15 days of detention. So perhaps the secret is – the silent support of masses that do not agree to Nothingness?
There are many reasons to be disgusted by the Church, as she consecrates capitalist violence. But if masses need it as “the heart of heartless world” in order to survive, let it be. It is good. And if masses silently support Putin, because there is no other force able to withstand the assault of the Empire and of Nothingness, let it be. It is good.

And here a letter of an English reader reacting on the Morning Star decision:



From Elisha Traven:

I don't agree with everything you write as I'm not always sure where you are coming from. But writers like you need to be read over a period of time and not continually picked up and criticised. If you don't like what the cook has prepared then don't shout at him. There is no point. Just leave the restaurant and find a place where the food and wine and beer and clientele suit you. Let each writer be himself is my motto. There are some who could do with being shot but where would this all end?

I was amazed to read in today's Morning Star that an article by you which they had published on Saturday was not to their reader's liking. They apologised to their readers and distanced themselves from the views you expressed. Apparently they had lifted the article from Counterpunch and had no idea who you were. Who do they think they're kidding? They are either truly ignorant in regard to you which beggars belief. It is just not a creditable defence. This newspaper is heavily involved in the campaign for Palestinian rights. They would know the names of every single child in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank such is their knowledge of the situation out there.

You know what I mean. I have read extremely detailed news articles published by the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign in their magazine. If I am reading such a magazine then so are they. We get continued reports from Palestine delivered to packed meetings here which are held all over the country. Organised by every tom, dick, and harry socialist party. They know you alright. They couldn't fail to know you because of your strong support for the Palestinians. I'm not sure what is going on at the Morning Star. They don't normally listen to their readers. They preach the gospel according to Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. You take it as it comes. Delivered to the readers from on high.

I didn't realise you were living in Moscow. I know what you are saying about the Russian press is true since I have read it over a period of time through various sources. Translated or already available in English. Like Moscow Times. They are running an orchestrated campaign against the Russian state. It is not like the so called liberal newspapers in Britain and America. They are connected up to the street protest gangs and were delighted when large numbers of people demonstrated last December and in March. Not only were the people being egged on to cause a breakdown of social order by well known Russian newspapers but radio stations such as Echo Moscow were part of that criminal conspiracy too. I call it a criminal conspiracy because that's what it looks like to me. I found the article you wrote about the PR hooligan girls. The Morning Star has removed Saturday's digital edition of the paper from its site altogether. Even though that breaks the subscription agreement which is that they allow you to read the Morning Star's previous digital editions of the paper. I think this is every edition for the past two weeks or it might even be for a month. I agree with you about PR.
Elijah Traven,
Hull
East Riding of Yorkshire
PS George Galloway of the Respect Party is MP for Bradford West which is in south Yorkshire. He is well known for his strong support of the Palestinian people. I'm sure you know of him. I salute you, Israel Shamir, for your love of Russia and defence of their elected president. You are a true and loyal servant of social democracy and the rule of law.





http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...nd-*****-riot/

hristmas is a wonderful time at the Paris city centre church of La Madeleine. The magnificent vaulted ceilings echo to the sounds of baroque organ music and the choir rehearsing for the famous Christmas Eve concerts. But mainly it is a haven where generations of devout Catholics sit, pray and re-charge their spiritual batteries.

Then last December 20 it became the scene of an obscenity. A young woman, naked to the waist apart from a blue veil, marched to the altar and proceeded to enact an “abortion” using a calf’s liver as a foetus. Then while screaming pro-abortion slogans she proceeded to urinate on the altar. After striking defiant poses for photographers she walked calmly back out.

Radical feminist street outrage group Femen had struck again and were duly rewarded with a flood of fawning international TV, print and online coverage. Six years after they were launched in Kiev, Femen have become the one of the most fashionable brands in radical politics with guaranteed coverage for their lurid antics and an endless stream of pretty young women willing to make spectacles of themselves for the cameras.

The toxic combination of narcissism, weaponised female rage and bare breasts has made them media darlings. They now have chapters in nine cities across the world including Rio, London, Frankfurt, Paris and Tel Aviv.

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Their hallmarks are slogans spray-painted on bare breasts and floral garlands. They’ve embraced many trendy causes from gay marriage to cis-gender rights and have even protested outside the Davos summit, Euro Cup 12 soccer tournament and even mosques but there is no doubting their main targets — Russia, and the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.



Some of the scenes of their desecrations defy belief as in Argentina last year where Femen-inspired women, snarled, spat and then had sex in front of devout men defending a church from vandalism. Last month another topless group ran screaming around St Peter’s Square in Rome apparently violating themselves with crucifixes before they were bundled away by the police.

So who are Femen and who is paying for them? Who is pulling the strings behind these obscene, marionettes? And why are their offensive actions treated with kid-gloves in a Europe so hyper-vigilant about “hate crimes”? These are among the many questions that surround them.

Femen were launched by a group of Kiev University students campaigning against sex tourism in 2008 and quickly got attention. But as their topless fame grew, the nagging questions increased. How are they able to rent such nice flats in Kiev? How do the girls make a living? The Italian magazine IL Foglio did its own investigation and uncovered some tantalising facts.

Every activist in Kiev gets about one thousand euros per month, the salary of the leaders is 2,500 euros (note that an average salary in Kiev is about 500 euros). In Europe, spending is even higher, and the girls from FEMEN receive €1,000 a day,” the Italian newspaper wrote. (Aug. 20, 2013)

Il Foglio identified an American Jewish businessman called Jed Sunden as a key funder of Femen. Sunden is an enigma himself because of his puzzling business success. After majoring in history at Macalester College in Minnesota, Sunden ended up working in 1993, “sort of by chance,” on a privately funded research project compiling a register of Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine.

Less than two years later, he decided to set up his own English-language newspaper, the Kiev Post. “I was just a poor kid from Brooklyn with a dime and a dream,” he says of himself at the time. Knowing nothing about the publishing business and having a limited knowledge of journalism, Sunden relied heavily on two experienced Jewish journalists, Igor Greenwald and Brian Bonner.

The dream of an English language newspaper in an emerging former Soviet satellite, has brought many experienced publishers to disaster. But Sunden’s paper not only survived, it thrived. He seemed able to effortlessly summon up advertising from airlines and huge corporations such as Coca Cola and Phillip Morris that eluded much bigger independent English-language circulation papers in Poland, Czech Republic and elsewhere.

His magic touch aside, he has been described in his own paper thus: “”He is a libertarian who believes in low taxes and minimal government regulation, in free speech and in free markets. He also takes a critical view of Kremlin political leaders and the threats they pose for Ukraine’s newfound independence.”

Said Femen founder Anne Hutsol: “Jed was the very first influential person who noticed us, helped us with all the resources he had, gave use some useful advice, generously donated and said we were special. Jed was the very first person who helped us in promoting the organization and creating our website.”

Sunden has always refused to say how much he gave to Femen or give precise details why he is doing it. “I confirm that I do give money to Femen,” Sunden said. “I will not state the amount. After meeting with Anna Hutsol, I was impressed with her ideas and have been a supporter. I believe Anna is a young, independent voice in Ukraine. While I do not agree with all of her positions, I believe it is important to give her, and groups like hers, support.” However he appears to have dropped his support since 2011 when Femen switched its focus from the Catholic Church and began protesting against sexism at the soccer’s Euro cup.

But Sunden is not the only person backing Femen. Behind every strong, independent-minded girl pop group there are usually a lot of men pulling the strings. It was true for the Spice Girls, whose “Girl Power” slogan was invented by marketing men. and it is true for Femen for whom the Simon Cowell/Svengali role appeared, at one point, to belong to a staunch Ukrainian nationalist called Viktor Syvatski.

All this emerged during the screening of a documentary about Femen when Syvatski was revealed to be giving these strong independent women, orders. Like Jed Sunden, his main political agenda seems to be keeping the Russian bear at bay.

The Australian film maker Kitty Green revealed “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls. He hand-picked the prettiest girls because the prettiest girls sell more papers. The prettiest girls get on the front page. … That became their image, that became the way they sold the brand,” she says. “He is Femen. … He is quite horrible with the girls. He would scream at them and call them bitches.”

The documentary records a phone call between Victor and an activist called Inna. Victor is instructing his topless subordinate on how they will protest the 2012 Euro Cup, held in Ukraine. The conversation is as follows:

Viktor: Well done. Ok, Inna, just between you and me, I’m putting you in charge of tomorrow’s protest. I can’t come and get Alexandra ready, you have to do it. The most important thing is to make sure Alexandra is ready. Also, if the police get close, then beat them with those sticks.

Inna — Just beat them?

Viktor — Beat them on the backs. Don’t be scared. Those idiots won’t do anything. Alexandra, explain it all to her in detail. Tell her that, ****, you know, we gave her $200 to get her here. Explain that. Be strong with her. Explain that after the last fucking protest disaster, if she doesn’t perform then she won’t be invited back. She can go **** herself. And we won’t give her money for her ticket back. Be very strong with her. Very strong. And don’t let Anna talk to her. Alexandra will be dressed as a dictator. On her back, we should write, ‘Create History Together,’ in English.

Inna — Got it. What should we chant?

EURO CUP = KGB? Something very simple and translatable. EURO CUP = KGB. Or KGB 2012? Write these down.

And then last year Syvastki seriously overstepped the mark when he organised a Femen barracking which embarrassed Vladimir Putin at a Hanover trade fair. Bearing the slogan “**** the dictator” the women had to be dragged away.

Now Syvatski appears to be in fear of his life and is seeking asylum in the West after being beaten up and nearly kidnapped by “mystery men.” He no longer has anything to do with Femen, apparently.

For the Ukrainian authorities the last straw came when a Femen activist sawed down a huge cross in a Kiev park in 2012 in support of the jailed Russian punk rock group ***** Riot. The cross was a memorial to the victims of the Cheka and NKVD in the thirties and outraged Ukrainians demanded a criminal prosecution.

Finally facing serious criminal charges, the Femen skipped town and set up in Paris where they have plush city centre offices and a “training centre” for their groups across the world. Who is funding them now is a mystery. They certainly seem to have a sympathetic ear in Paris and applications for welfare benefits were said to be fast tracked.

Femen were inspired by another radical feminist group called ***** Riot who first came to fame when they desecrated Christ the Savior, Moscow’s largest cathedral, with an obscene punk prayer performance aimed at the Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin. Three organisers were jailed in 2012.

Like Femen, the key ***** Riot motivating force seems to be a demented hatred of Christianity in general and the Orthodox Church in particular. But It was the writer Israel Shamir who first pointed out that ***** Riot’s prominent supporters from the Russian arts and media are overwhelmingly Jewish.

These include satirist and cartoonist Viktor Shenderovich, sociologist Igor Eidman, art gallery owner Marat Gelman, socialite and TV presenter Xenia Sobchak and TV station owner Alexey Venediktov.

***** Riot’s cause has also been aggressively taken up by a leading anti-Putin opposition group called the Union of Solidarity with Political Prisoners which is led by another two high-profile Jews, Garry Kasparov and Boris Nemtsov.

And yet another Jewish promoter and thought-leader, Alek D. Epstein, has celebrated them in a publication called “Art on the barricades: ‘***** Riot’, the ‘Bus Exhibit’ and the protest art-activism.”

“None of them is a practicing Jew,” wrote Shamir “but they apparently inherited their hatred to the Church from their forefathers.” Russian allegations that both feminist groups are effectively Jewish sock-puppets have been met with the usual spluttering outrage.

All of which has moved Israel Shamir to make the acid comment. “Russians proved that they care for Christ as much as the French care for Auschwitz, and this shocked the Europeans who apparently thought ‘hate laws’ may be applied only to protect Jews and gays. The Western governments call for more freedom for the anti-Christian Russians, while denying it for holocaust revisionists in their midst.”

***** Riot is also supported — in a circuitous route — by the Soros-funded National Endowment for Democracy. Could it also be that support of groups like ***** Riot is part of a parallel Jewish strategy of debasement and corruption of Christian morality? As Professor Nathan Abrams in jewishquarterly.org /issuearchive/articled325.html?articleid=38 (now a hijacked site) wrote, the very prominent Jewish involvement in porn was a result of the “atavistic hatred of Christian authority” and a desire to “weaken the dominant Christian culture.” Is it so much of a stretch to view Jewish support of these groups as part of the same agenda?

If Femen has learned anything from ***** Riot, it is to keep its source of funding hidden. But not all is well with Femen. Recently there has been mutiny in the ranks when Tunisian activist Amina Sboui quit the group after her questions about funding went unanswered. “I don’t know how the movement is financed. I asked … several times, but I didn’t get a clear answer. I don’t want to be in a movement supported by suspect money. What if it is financed by Israel? I want to know.”

The group were also attacked by their former Brazilian organiser in a dispute about allegedly mis-spent funds. The Brazilian woman, Sara Winter, said that Femen was not what it claimed to be. “Femen Ukraine works as a company or a marketing agency. It is not a social movement. They may have had real good intentions in the past, but nowadays it is entirely corrupted.”

She released a damning email chat in which the Ukrainian leader Inna Shevchenko complained about the sub-par appearance of the Brazilian girls. “(The protest) in the embassy was not sexy because the panties were too tight and the girls appeared to be fat. Be aware of that”, warned the Ukrainian to the Brazilian. (source Opera Mundi)

So has Femen slipped the bonds with their puppet masters? Or are they and ***** Riot both part of elaborate NATO psy-ops operations to destabilize Russia and at the same time further a Jewish agenda of weakening the hold of the church? Throughout the Cold War Western intelligence agencies funded an unlikely assortment of radical arts and feminist movements ranging from modern jazz, the New York intellectuals, experiments in LSD to the pop art of Jackson Pollock and Situationist street pranks that were said to have inspired the Paris riots of 1968.

One of the most interesting is the recruitment of Jewish feminist firebrand Gloria Steinem who helped pioneer feminist street demos in the bra-burning sixties. It is now known that she worked for the CIA via a string of Agency funded organisations, to promote left-liberal chic in opposition to the Soviet Union. Steinem helped create magazines, attended Communist-sponsored youth festivals in Europe, published a newspaper, reported on other participants, and helped to provoke riots.

At any rate, the questions will continue to be asked. In particular, why, after so many obscene actions do the Femen girls still seem to have free pass in the media to stir up hatred? In England recently a man was jailed for more than a year for throwing bacon at a mosque after the killing of soldier Lee Rigby. The Femen women rarely get more than a slap on the wrist or a fine, and they face no movement restrictions or travel impediments.

So is the notion that the unhinged viragos of Femen is Western/ Jewish sock-puppet subversive so ridiculous? No more so than the idea that the CIA-backed the LSD experiments of Timothy Leary or supported the Modern Art movement of Jackson Pollock.

[HFTengineer]

Vashdimi tek votat :


Putin with Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel in March 2008
On 14 March 2004, Putin was elected to the presidency for a second term, receiving 71% of the vote.[75] The Beslan school hostage crisis took place in September 2004, in which hundreds died. Many in the Russian press and in the international media warned that the death of 130 hostages in the special forces' rescue operation during the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis would severely damage President Putin's popularity. However, shortly after the siege had ended, the Russian president enjoyed record public approval ratings – 83% of Russians declared themselves satisfied with Putin and his handling of the siege.[83]

In 2005, the National Priority Projects were launched to improve Russia's health care, education, housing and agriculture.[84][85]




The 2012 Russian presidential election was held on 4 March 2012.[1] There were five officially-registered candidates: four representatives of registered parties and one independent. The election was for a new, extended term of six years.

At the United Russia Congress in Moscow on 24 September 2011, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev proposed that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin stand for the Presidency in 2012; an offer which Putin accepted. Putin immediately offered Medvedev to stand on the United Russia ticket in the parliamentary elections in December and becoming Prime Minister of Russia at the end of his presidential term.[2]

All independents had to register by 15 December, and candidates nominated by parties had to register by 18 January. The final list was announced on 29 January. On 2 March, outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev addressed the nation on the national television channels about the following presidential election. He invited the citizens of Russia to vote in the election to be held on 4 March 2012.[3]

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin received 63.64% of the vote with almost 100% of the votes counted.[4][5] With this election, Putin secured a record third term in the Kremlin.[6]

Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe observers assessed the voting on the election day positively overall, but assessed the vote count negatively in almost one-third of polling stations due to procedural irregularities.[7] The next presidential election will be in 2018.[

[HFTengineer]

Dalim tek olgarket qe po na thua si u formuan dhe nga erdhen :






http://www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics...rd_mafia.shtml


A interesting rogues’ gallery of international financial criminals with high academic degrees who got their education in Harvard (Harvard mafia in a broad sense) owes its existence to the dissolution of the USSR and subsequent financial crisis. The level of corruption and rent seeking behaviors of those individuals is really breathtaking. The term "mafia" is not rhetorical overshoot: they are mafia in a very precise meaning of this word: the mafia at its core is about one thing -- money (see also Russian board game Mafia). Like in a typical Mafioso family there is an ethnic core and a hierarchy, with higher-ranking members making decisions that trickle down to the other members of the family. And its policies are always about oppression, arrogance, greed, self-enrichment, power and hegemony above and against all others.

The story of Andrei Shleifer in Russia is a classic story of "academic extortion": betrayal of trust and academic principles by Harvard professor of economics (probably not without the influence of his wife, hedge fund manager Nancy Zimmerman, longtime friend of Larry Summers). While the guy was just a pawn in a big game, the issues of criminality of economists (and some universities economics departments ;-) and relevance of RICO statute against such offences is a much bigger issue.

Under RICO, a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering. Those found guilty of racketeering can be fined up to $25,000 and/or sentenced to 20 years in prison per racketeering count. In addition, the racketeer must forfeit all ill-gotten gains and interest in any business gained through a pattern of "racketeering activity." RICO also permits a private individual harmed by the actions of such an enterprise to file a civil suit; if successful, the individual can collect treble damages.

... ... ...

On March 29, 1989, financier Michael Milken was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and fraud relating to an investigation into insider trading and other offenses. Milken was accused of using a wide-ranging network of contacts to manipulate stock and bond prices. It was one of the first occasions that a RICO indictment was brought against an individual with no ties to organized crime. Milken pled guilty to six lesser offenses rather than face spending the rest of his life in prison.

There is a disturbingly deep analogy between Harvard University (which had been benevolently charged with just breach of contract by the US government) and Michel Milken activities. Separately Shleifer and an associate, Jonathan Hay, were charged with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Later he was stripped of honorary title "Whipple V.N. Jones Professor of Economics" due to ethics violation, but he managed to preserve his position at the university due to Summers protection (Larry Summers A Suicidal Choice - Mark Ames).

How close were Larry Summers and Andrei Schleifer? According to former Boston Globe economics correspondent David Warsh, Summers and Schleifer “were among each other’s best friends,” and Summers taught Schleifer “as an undergraduate, sent him on to MIT for his PhD, took him along on an advisory mission to Lithuania in 1990, and in 1991, shepherded his return to Harvard as full professor, where he was regarded, after Martin Feldstein and Summers, as the leader of the next generation.”

The furor about Andrei Shleifer shadow dealings in Russia contributed to the ouster of Summers from the Harvard presidency. It also exposed sad fact that neoclassic economics represents a dangerous sect which if not exactly mafia is pretty much borderline phenomenon. Somewhat similar with Lysenkoism

Academic Mafiosi as a Social Class

The cynical view is that "Rape of Russia" was a Mafiosi style operation, which was conducted using s Trojan horses special class of Mafiosi, academic economics. This might well have been the intent (in best "disaster capitalism" style of thinking). Instead of helping post-Soviet nations develop self-reliant economies, writes Marshall Auerback,

“the West has viewed them as economic oysters to be broken up to indebt them in order to extract interest charges and capital gains, leaving them empty shells.”

Corruption and local oligarchy were natural allies of this process which was, in essence, the process of Latin-Americanization of post Soviet space. And off-shore safe heavens were the tool. They partially failed in Russia as some of the most notorious deals of this periods (especially in mineral recourses and oil areas) were reversed in 2000-2008, but were quite successful in Ukraine, Georgia, Latvia and several other post Soviet republics. The external debt of those is just staggering. As Professor Michael Hudson noted:

It may be time to look once again at what Larry Summers and his Rubinomics gang did in Russia in the mid-1990s and to Third World countries during his tenure as World Bank economist to see what kind of future is being planned for the U.S. economy over the next few years.

Throughout the Soviet Union the neoliberal model established “equilibrium” in a way that involved demographic collapse: shortening life spans, lower birth rates, alcoholism and drug abuse, psychological depression, suicides, bad health, unemployment and homelessness for the elderly (the neoliberal mode of Social Security reform).

Here is one apt comment about the real nature of economic professors from Harvard and other nice places from the comments to post Economists Fall Back Into Neoclassical Stupor …( naked capitalism. January 18, 2011):

Hugh:

I echo lambert’s and scraping by’s sentiments. The economics profession is not about an analysis of our economy that can make reasonable predictions about it. Economics and economists are enablers of the con and validators of kleptocracy. They say the many must make do with less and do not say that the result of this policy will be the few will have more.

These are not innocent, unworldly types tied to outdated and obsolete ideas. They are abettors and apologists for the greatest economic crimes in human history. We should call and treat them for what they are: criminals. Kleptocracy is not a some time thing. It is not a label you apply occasionally. Kleptocracy is a system. The looters can’t function without corrupt politicians, a complacent propagandizing media, or complicit enabling academics. With kleptocracy, there is no middle ground. You either stand with the looters or their victims. I think this is the critical choice we all must make.

Another pretty telling quote ( from brilliant satire Blacklisted Economics Professor Found Dead NC Publishes His Last Letter « naked capitalism):

Q: Is it really plausible that economists threaten top banks that in the absence of some kind of payoff, they will change the theories they teach in a direction that is less favorable to the banks?

A: There are certainly cases in history of the following sequence:

a. Economist E espouses views that are less favorable to certain special interest groups S. Doing so threatens the ability of S to extract rent from the public.
b. Later, E changes his view, thereby withdrawing the prior threat.
c. Still later, E is paid large amounts of money by representatives of S in exchange for services that do not appear particularly onerous.

For example, let E = Larry Summers and let S = the financial services industry. In 1989 E was (a) a supporter of the Tobin tax, which threatened to reduce the rent extracted by S. This threat was apparently later withdrawn (b), and in 2008 E was paid $5.2 million (c) in exchange for working at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw (an element of S) for one day a week.

However, it is naturally more difficult to witness the negotiations in which specific threats were appeased with specific future payouts. This is a problem that also bedevils Public Choice theory, in which it is likewise difficult to show exactly how a particular politician is remunerated in exchange for threatening businesses with anti-business legislation. The theory assures us that such negotiations occur, although they are difficult to observe directly. Perhaps further theoretical advances will help us to close this gap.

Q: Isn’t it offensive to assume that economists, for motives of personal gain, shade their theoretical allegiances in the directions preferred by powerful interest groups?

A: How could it ever be offensive to assume that a person acts rationally in pursuit of maximizing his or her own utility? I’m afraid I don’t understand this question.

Academic Mafiosi as Byproduct and Simultaneously Enablers of Neoliberalism

Disappearance of a formidable opponent of unrestricted looting of developing countries that USSR formally represented on the the world scene essentially released all moral stops and considerations both inside the USA and outside. The triumph of neoliberalism

And former USSR republics were the first victims of new super-aggressive neoliberal "new normal". Despite crocodile tears about corruption, our world is being reshaped, in sinister fashion, by wide open capital markets and an international banking network that exists to launder hundreds of billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains stolen by government officials and oligarchs in "weaker" countries. In other words, corruption is an immanent feature and principal tool of neoliberalism in developing countries and xUSSR area.

In a broad sense the term Harvard mafia means corrupt (mostly neoclassical and supply side) academic economists which enjoy revolving door with government and get most of the income from the financial services industry. There are multiple documented examples when their activity was pretty close to activities regulated by RICO statute. Recent film of Charles Ferguson Inside Job is nice illustration of behavior of those predators in academic clothing
In a narrow sense Harvard mafia is the team of (mainly) neoclassical economists and "experts" who disastrously advised the Russian government on conversion of centrally managed "command economy" to more Western model in the 1990s. While Harvard mafia is probably the most notorious in its like to the economic rape of Russia, Chicago University economic school probably played a similar role for the USA. In this sense we can speak about Chicago economists mafia as well (what a surprise ;-)
Under pretext of showing the Russians how to convert command type economy to neoliberal model, and how to controls corruption, the gang-style rape of the country was inflicted on its unsuspecting citizens with poverty raising from 2% to 40% of the population. World have witnessed Russia losing half of its total output, plunging it into a depression deeper than the U.S. Great Depression. Please read Anne Williamson’s testimony. Here is one quote:

From the perspective of the many millions of her children, Mother Russia in late 1991 was like an old woman, skirts yanked above her waist, who had been abandoned flat on her back at a muddy crossroads, the object of others’ scorn, greed and unseemly curiosity. It is the Russian people who kept their wits about them, helped her to her feet, dusted her off, straightened her clothing, righted her head scarf and it is they who can restore her dignity – not Boris Yeltsin, not Anatole Chubais, not Boris Berezovsky nor any of the other aspirants to power. And it is the Russian people – their abilities, efforts and dreams – which comprise the Russian economy, not those of Vladimir Potanin or Viktor Chernomyrdin or Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Vladimir Gusinsky. And that is where we should have placed our bet – on the Russian people – and our stake should have been the decency, the common sense and abilities of our own citizens realized not through multilateral lending but through the use of tax credits for direct investment in the Russian economy and the training of Russian workers on 6-month to one year stints at the U.S. offices of American firms in conjunction with the elimination of U.S. tariffs on Russian goods.

The collapse of the USSR was by-and-large caused by internal problems and betrayal of nomenklatura which quickly understood that new neoliberal regime is more profitable for them that command-style economy (although role of financed by West wave of nationalism and West imposed technological isolation should not be underestimated). BTW this myth that Reagan administration won the Cold War is still current.

Economic rape of post USSR economic space was by design not by accident

After the dissolution of the USA, there was a vacuum of ideology in Russia and it was successfully filled with Harvard promoted neoliberalism and associated neo-classical economics. This was a powerful fifths column, oriented on helping the West to extract as much wealth from Russia as possible was created. The USA essentially forced Russians into so called shock therapy using Harvard academic mafia (plan was authored by Jeffrey Sachs who was lecturer at Harvard and implemented by Larry Summers protégé, Russian émigré Shleifer and several other Harvard academic brats with a couple of British poodles to make the gang international) and internal compradors in Yelstin government as fifth column. As a result poverty level jumped from 2% to 40%. Everything that can be stolen, was stolen by implementation of rapid privatization policy. During the heydays of corrupt Yeltsin regime implementation of shock therapy GDP dropped 50%. Suicide rate doubled, life expectancy for males dropped below 60 years (12,8% death rate increase), homeless children which were unknown in the USSR became mass feature of new social order.

The key seller of shock therapy was about Harvard Mafiosi, Professor Jeffrey Sachs who was a prominent neoliberal who because his role in destruction of Russian economics, contributed to immense sufferings in Bolivia, Chili, Poland and several other countries.

Instead of something like Marshall plan, a merciless ands unlawful grab of capital and national resources was successfully implemented in less then five year period after the dissolution. This was an amazingly greedy and short-sited policy by Clinton administration. To rephrase Talleyrand, it was worse then a crime, it was a blunder. As Otto von Bismarck advised long ago:

Do not expect that once taken advantage of Russia's weakness, you will receive dividends forever. Russian always come for their money. And when they come - do not rely on the Jesuit agreement you signed, you are supposed to justify. They are not worth the paper it is written. Therefore, with the Russian stands or play fair, or no play.

Let's hope that the USA will be protected by Providence from the consequences of this blunder because as Otto von Bismarck suggested "There is a providence to that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America". Otherwise, the level of anger felt by wide strata of Russian people (almost everybody outside of fifth column) can materialize into something really tragic. In Russian history, a generation that has taken a beating is often followed by a generation that deals one. In a way Putin is already a certain punishment, but the possibility of coming to power a real Russian nationalist instead of "resource nationalist" is not out the realm of possibilities ;-)

There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/au...ypLke5VpwQb.99
Now Professor Jeffrey Sachs repainted himself from a sharky promoted of "shock therapy" into the Director of The Earth Institute, Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. Here is an apt comment about this member of Harvard mafia ( NYT, 2009)

Arsen Azizyan

I grew up cold and hungry in the former Soviet republic of Armenia during the shock therapy years of the 90′s; my grandfather was one of the 3 million who died prematurely during those days (incorrect medication and power outages did him in).

I would very much like to tie Mr. Jeffrey Sachs to a chair and slowly force-feed him every worthless page of every idiotic policy paper he’s ever written. I believe that would justly mirror the diet that I had to subsist on for a number of years during my childhood and adolescence.

He still insists that Yeltsin, rather than his American advisors, was responsible for the fact that the privatization policy amounted in practice to the theft by a handful of favored apparatchiks of the industries previously ran – in its own inimitably corrupt fashion – by the state. As former World Bank economist David Ellerman noted it was the speed of the privatization which made such an outcome inevitable stating that

“Only the mixture of American triumphalism and academic arrogance could have produced such a lethal dose of gall.”

Janine R. Wedel in The Harvard Boys Do Russia (The Nation, May 14, 1998) wrote the following about extremely damaging for the USA (in a long run) and Russia (forever) policies Harvard mafia pursued:

"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.

At the recent U.S.-Russian Investment Symposium at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, made what might have seemed to many an impolite reference to his hosts. After castigating Chubais and his monetarist policies, Luzhkov, according to a report of the event, "singled out Harvard for the harm inflicted on the Russian economy by its advisers, who encouraged Chubais's misguided approach to privatization and monetarism." Luzhkov was referring to H.I.I.D. Chubais, who was delegated vast powers over the economy by Boris Yeltsin, was ousted in Yeltsin's March purge, but in May he was given an immensely lucrative post as head of Unified Energy System, the country's electricity monopoly.

Some of the main actors with Harvard's Russia project have yet to face a reckoning, but this may change if a current investigation by the U.S. government results in prosecutions. The activities of H.I.I.D. in Russia provide some cautionary lessons on abuse of trust by supposedly disinterested foreign advisers, on U.S. arrogance and on the entire policy of support for a single Russian group of so-called reformers. The H.I.I.D. story is a familiar one in the ongoing saga of U.S. foreign policy disasters created by those said to be our "best and brightest." Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia's economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of "shock therapy" to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock--not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent--than therapy.

One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside ...

I.I.D. had supporters high in the Administration. One was Lawrence Summers, himself a former Harvard economics professor, whom Clinton named Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993. Summers, now Deputy Treasury Secretary, had longstanding ties to the principals of Harvard's project in Russia and its later project in Ukraine. Summers hired a Harvard Ph.D., David Lipton (who had been vice president of Jeffrey D. Sachs and Associates, a consulting firm), to be Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. After Summers was promoted to Deputy Secretary, Lipton moved into Summers's old job, assuming "broad responsibility" for all aspects of international economic policy development. Lipton co-wrote numerous papers with Sachs and served with him on consulting missions in Poland and Russia. "Jeff and David always came [to Russia] together," said a Russian representative at the International Monetary Fund. "They were like an inseparable couple." Sachs, who was named director of H.I.I.D. in 1995, lobbied for and received U.S.A.I.D. grants for the institute to work in Ukraine in 1996 and 1997 ...

Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born emigre and already a tenured professor of economics at Harvard in his early 30s, became director of H.I.I.D.'s Russia project. Shleifer was also a protege of Summers, with whom he received at least one foundation grant ...

Another Harvard player was a former World Bank consultant named Jonathan Hay, a Rhodes scholar who had attended Moscow's Pushkin Institute for Russian Language. In 1991, while still at Harvard Law School, he had become a senior legal adviser to the G.K.I., the Russian state's new privatization committee; the following year he was made H.I.I.D.'s general director in Moscow. The youthful Hay assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece ...

With help from his H.I.I.D. advisers and other Westerners, Chubais and his cronies set up a network of aid-funded "private" organizations that enabled them to bypass legitimate government agencies and circumvent the new parliament of the Russian Federation, the Duma.

Through this network, two of Chubais's associates, Maxim Boycko (who co-wrote Privatizing Russia with Shleifer) and Dmitry Vasiliev, oversaw almost a third of a billion dollars in aid money and millions more in loans from international financial institutions ...

The device of setting up private organizations backed by the power of the Yeltsin government and maintaining close ties to H.I.I.D. was a way of insuring deniability. Shleifer, Hay and other Harvard principals, all U.S. citizens, were "Russian" when convenient. Hay, for example, served alternately and sometimes simultaneously as aid contractor, manager of other contractors and representative of the Russian government ... Against the backdrop of Russia's Klondike capitalism, which they were helping create and Chubais and his team were supposedly regulating, the H.I.I.D. advisers exploited their intimate ties with Chubais and the government and were allegedly able to conduct business activities for their own enrichment. According to sources close to the U.S. government's investigation, Hay used his influence, as well as U.S.A.I.D.-financed resources, to help his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hebert, set up a mutual fund, Pallada Asset Management, in Russia ... After Pallada was set up, Hebert, Hay, Shleifer and Vasiliev looked for ways to continue their activities as aid funds dwindled. Using I.L.B.E. resources and funding, they established a private consulting firm with taxpayer money. One of the firm's first clients was Shleifer's wife, Nancy Zimmerman, who operated a Boston-based hedge fund that traded heavily in Russian bonds.

According to Russian registration documents, Zimmerman's company set up a Russian firm with Sergei Shishkin, the I.L.B.E. chief, as general director. Corporate documents on file in Moscow showed that the address and phone number of the company and the I.L.B.E. were the same. Then there is the First Russian Specialized Depository, which holds the records and assets of mutual fund investors. This institution, funded by a World Bank loan, also worked to the benefit of Hay, Vasiliev, Hebert and another associate, Julia Zagachin. According to sources close to the U.S. government's investigation, Zagachin, an American married to a Russian, was selected to run the depository even though she lacked the required capital ...

Anne Williamson, a journalist who specializes in Soviet and Russian affairs, details these and other conflicts of interest between H.I.I.D.'s advisers and their supposed clients--the Russian people--in her forthcoming book, How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy. For example, in 1995, in Chubais-organized insider auctions of prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares, the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university's endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros were the only foreign entities allowed to participate. H.M.C. and Soros became significant shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia's second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose reserves exceed those of Mobil. H.M.C. and Soros also invested in Russia's high-yielding, I.M.F.-subsidized domestic bond market.

Even more dubious, according to Williamson, was Soros's July 1997 purchase of 24 percent of Sviazinvest, the telecommunications giant, in partnership with Uneximbank's Vladimir Potanin. It was later learned that shortly before this purchase Soros had tided over Yeltsin's government with a backdoor loan of hundreds of millions of dollars while the government was awaiting proceeds of a Eurobond issue; the loan now appears to have been used by Uneximbank to purchase Norilsk Nickel in August 1997. According to Williamson, the U.S. assistance program in Russia was rife with such conflicts of interest involving H.I.I.D. advisers and their U.S.A.I.D.-funded Chubais allies, H.M.C. managers, favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates working in Russia's nascent markets ...

Despite exposure of this corruption in the Russian media (and, far more hesitantly, in the U.S. media), the H.I.I.D.-Chubais clique remained until recently the major instrument of U.S. economic aid policy to Russia. It even used the high-level Gore-Chernomyrdin Commission, which helped orchestrate the cooperation of U.S.-Russian oil deals and the Mir space station. The commission's now-defunct Capital Markets Forum was chaired on the Russian side by Chubais and Vasiliev, and on the U.S. side by S.E.C. chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

Andrei Shleifer was named special coordinator to all four of the Capital Markets Forum's working subgroups. Hebert, Hay's girlfriend, served on two of the subgroups, as did the C.E.O.s of Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and other powerful Wall Street investment houses. When The Nation contacted the S.E.C. for information about Capital Markets, we were told to call Shleifer for comment. Shleifer, who is under investigation by U.S.A.I.D.'s inspector general for misuse of funds, declined to be interviewed for this article. A U.S. Treasury spokesman said Shleifer and Hebert were appointed to Capital Markets by the Chubais group--specifically, according to other sources, by Dmitry Vasiliev."

Several problems with Harvard academic advisors behavior during Russian privatization program were outlined by Adil Rustomjee (Yale University) in the letter to Johnson’s Russia List :

From: Arustomjee@aol.com (Adil Rustomjee)
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 13:18:14 EDT
Subject: Role of foreign advisers in the Russian Privatization Program.

From: Adil Rustomjee, Yale University, 135 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Email: adil.rustomjee@yale.edu

Dear David,

Many thanks for your superb news service. Johnson's Russia List is fast becoming an excellent resource for those who work, who have worked on, or who just share a fascination with that disturbing country. I am writing this letter to humbly suggest a research topic that should be of great interest to JRLs readers. It is a subject that deserves better treatment than that received to date. The topic itself is the exact role of foreign advisers in the Russian Privatization Program.

It is a marvelous tale waiting to be plainly told. The Russian Privatization Program, despite its subsequent vilification, ranks as one of the great experiments at social engineering in the twentieth century. It attempted an authoritative allocation of property rights - and consequently of power - within society on a scale never attempted before. It is therefore a very significant historical process, more significant in the long reach of events than even Stalin's collectivization campaigns of the 1930s. It deserves its own Robert Conquest.

The process itself went through two distinct phases - the voucher phase, and what for want of a better word, we call the "loans for shares" phase. It is the "loans for shares" phase of the program that has attracted the most attention, primarily because of its spectacular abuse by Russia's oligarchs. The real story is in the first voucher stage of the process and the dubious principles it was based on.

The entire voucher program was a product of foreign economic advice. Consider the basic timeline. The Soviet Union itself was dissolved in December 1991. In June 1992, the crucial document governing the voucher privatization effort came out - the State Privatization Program. This seminal document outlined the basic concepts behind the voucher phase of the program. It also rationalized what became a state sponsored giveaway of Russia's national patrimony to the country's managers. The implementation of the State Privatization Program document took a little over two years. By June 1994, Anatoly Chubias , Russia's privatization chief, was announcing the end of the voucher program. In a scant two years, Russia had gone from a communist country with no private sector, to a country with a private sector - that on paper at least - was larger than Italy's !!! Such progress could never have been possible without substantial foreign economic advice. It is a commonplace that privatization is essentially a "learning by doing" process.

Russia could never have gone through a learning curve in such a short time span. Its reformers basically rubberstamped a scheme conceived by Western economists in the crucial 6 month period between December 1991 and June 1992.

Yet despite this, the precise story of the economists behind the entire effort has not been told. Good attempts have been made by Janine Wedel and Anne Williamson - and I will discuss them later - but from a technical standpoint, the story has yet to be told well.

Who were these advisors and what did they achieve? Three groups of actors may be identified - academic economists, bureaucrats from the World Bank, and Western consulting firms. A close examination of the interaction between these three groups itself will offer interesting insights into the birth and dissemination of ideas. For the major ideas behind the Russian program came from a group of academics - many associated with Harvard. These ideas were picked up in the early years and became established "transition economics" orthodoxy at the World Bank. The substantial implementation of the basic ideas was carried out by consulting firms like the Big Six working (often) on USAID contracts.

This is as it should be. Academia is usually the source of the most original thinking on economics. International bureaucrats - particularly those associated with the World Bank - are surprisingly timid and cautious people. They are institutionally incapable of boldness - and great audacity was called for in the Russia of 1992.

Was this boldness misplaced? I believe it was. A rational examination of the process will, I suspect, lead to a damning indictment of Russia's foreign advisors. They created desolation and called it reform. The defining feature of the program was based on remarkably dubious ideas. Foremost among these was the belief that privatization was a series of payoffs - or bribes, as one of its leading advocates, Harvard's Andrei Shleifer, called it - to various " stakeholders" in the program. Given an uncertain legal environment and some
appropriation of state assets by these stakeholders, - euphemistically referred to as "spontaneous privatization" - , better to legalize what was believed to be a trough feeding frenzy. This was the program's dominant idea.

There is little empirical evidence from the early years about the exact extent of " spontaneous privatization". Anecdotal evidence abounds, especially from many near - hysterical accounts of the early 90s but the actual empirical evidence is slender. The decisions to sell a great nation's patrimony - a one shot historical phenomenon with irreversible long range implications - were basically conceived within a six month time frame by a bunch of frightened foreigners, using dubious assumptions, with little basis in empirical understanding. Astonishing.

The actual privatization was accomplished through basically giving away large segments of Russian assets - and consequently cash flows - to these stakeholders. The most notable insider stakeholders - the managers - ended up the biggest winners. They ended up owning most of Russian industry. This august group, more often than not, makes the Marx Brothers seem like models of German efficiency. For a variety of reasons, insider-owned firms are very inefficient, and indeed a long list of papers from the Bank - Fund complex testifies to this. Consequently, Russia is today reaping the whirlwind of its privatization policy. The long delayed supply-side response of the economy, that is supposed to be led by these insider-owned firms, simply refuses to happen.

To round out this stupidity ( and to make it theoretically neater), the advisors had to deal with the problem of insider ownership. They dealt with it in time honored economist fashion - they assumed it away. This was done by trotting out that most venerable of economic propositions - something called the Coase Theorem. In a series of seminal papers written at Chicago in the thirties, Ronald Coase reached a blindingly obvious conclusion on property rights. He proved that the initial allocation - or misallocation - of property rights would not matter as long as those rights could be traded till they found their highest valued end use. In other words, the advisors told the Russians, "Sure, we're making second-best or third-best policy choices on privatization , but hey guys, it doesn't matter. Through the magic of Coase, even if we misallocated the rights, they'll trade up to their highest valued end user, and we'll all live happily ever after ". Consequently, nothing mattered except getting the assets away from the government (depoliticization) and into the "private sector", thereby allowing
the Coase Theorem to work its magic.

The Russians believed this nonsense. The problems with using Coase as a rationale were commonsensical : too much monopoly power in the Russian economy and the fact that Coase himself never had anything remotely resembling Russia in mind, when he formulated the theorem. More crucially, capital markets which would be needed to trade property rights to their highest valued end use, were nonexistent or nascent, and continue to be so. One marvels at the Russians' own capacity for advice of this nature. My comfort is philosophical : It has often been said of the Russians, that they exhibit in extreme form, certain universal characteristics of the human condition.

Perhaps this tendency to extremes applies to their propensity for social engineering too.

In response to critiques of their advice, the foreign advisors resort to a "burden of proof " defense. In other words, they say, " What a pity it's a mess and had to be this way, but you'll have to prove it could have been otherwise". It is this "proving otherwise" that is a key issue. " Proving otherwise" would require a person with substantial economic expertise. Unfortunately most of the critiques of the advisors in Russia have come from people outside the economics community, which on Russia is quite tight knit.

Janine Wedel and Anne Williamson have made good first attempts . But given the enormity of the catastrophe in Russia that the advice has wrought, the definitive account will have to be from a person with some economic stature.

Who were these people anyway ? They include, Wedel and Williamson point out, Andrei Shleifer a Harvard economics professor, Jonathan Hay a freshly minted Harvard Law graduate, and Makim Boycko who was their man in Moscow. Shleifer, a Russian emigrant who remains a tenured professor at Harvard, must have possessed the great advantage of speaking native Russian. In December 1991, Shleifer on a World Bank consultancy authored a paper titled Privatization in Russia - First Steps. It is, I believe, the first systematic attempt at outlining the program's defining feature - privatization as a series of payoffs (or bribes as he called it) to key stakeholders in the process.

Later explications of the basic idea may be found in articles he co-authored with Robert Vishny on the process. Both the unpublished document and later articles remarkably parallel the basic philosophy of the State Privatization Program of June 1992.

A sense of moral outrage over the effects of their policies - while a great temptation - has to be avoided at all costs. This is especially difficult when one considers that the principal protagonists - Andrei Shleifer and Jonathan Hay - are under investigation for alleged insider trading and conflicts of interest in Russia. [ GAO and USAID having found that they "abused the trust of the US government " etc ]. The temptation might therefore be to focus on that entire shabby episode as Wedel and Williamson have done ( in part, but only in part). There is no need for this. The charges are unproven. Besides the amounts Shleifer and Hay are accused of improperly dealing in, are a pittance, compared to the wholesale thievery their ideas sanctioned. The real story is in the voucher scheme they designed and implemented. Told coldly, rationally, and solely concerned with the truth, it will still be a great story. Behind the story after all, loom the long shadows of the millions of Russians whose lives were effected by these disastrous policies. They deserve the truth.

Will the story be told with integrity. I am afraid not. There are too many reputations and too much credibility at stake. The usual candidate would be someone of stature in academia. This is not really an option. The old Kremlinologists have been largely rendered irrelevant by the pace of events and are struggling to retool themselves. The younger economists who work on Russia, who have access to the data and hands-on experience, are the least likely candidates given the devastating outcomes of the policies they advocated. Self serving rationalizations with little intellectual integrity are all that can be expected from this group. Witness for example, Anders Aslunds' comic absurdity "How Russia became a Market Economy". If Russia is a market economy, then I, sir, am a monkey's uncle ! Finally it would be too much to expect the protagonists themselves - Shleifer and his collaborators - to say " We were wrong, terribly wrong". An old man named Robert McNamara looking back on his life, said that about a war that ended twenty five years back, and look at the condemnation that brought him. It would be too much to expect Shleifer and the others - all reportedly in their late thirties and early forties - to make such an admission.

The World Bank is another candidate, but they will distort the tale. The Bank's division that does such studies - the Operations Evaluation Department - will use the standard bureaucratic boiler plate it excels at. Besides the Bank itself picked up the substantial ideas and policies from the Harvard group, and has its own credibility at stake. While some hand wringing can be expected, so can a less than zealous concern for the truth. Besides, even if it is honest, the drama of the story will be lost in the telling.

... ... ...

The reasons of such a behavior by Andrei Shleifer and other players "on the ground" probably run deeper. As Stefan Lemieszewski noted in his letter to Johnson's Russia List:

The failure of these IMF/World Bank/State/Treasury programs should not come as a surprise. Economists such as Michel Chossudovsky (University of Ottawa) go further and suggest that they are by design. In his book, "The Globalization of Poverty: Impacts of IMF and World Bank Reforms" Chossudovsky writes:

"The IMF-Yeltsin reforms constitute an instrument of "Thirdworldisation"; they are a carbon copy of the structural adjustment programme imposed on debtor countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, advisor to the Russian government, had applied in Russia the same 'macro-economic surgery' as in Bolivia where he was economic advisor to the MNR government in 1985.

The IMF-World Bank programme adopted in the name of democracy constitutes a coherent programme of impoverishment of large sectors of the population.

It was designed (in theory) to 'stabilize' the economy, yet consumer prices in 1992 increased by more than one hundred times (9,900 per cent) as a direct result of the "anti-inflationary programme". As in Third World 'stabilization programme', the inflationary process was largely engineered through the 'dollarization' of domestic prices and the collapse of the national currency. The 'price liberalization programme' did not, however, resolve (as proposed by the IMF) the distorted structure of relative prices which existed under the Soviet system."

In Ukraine and some other republics the magnitude of collapse was even greater and all middle class was essentially wiped out. Many emigrated. Also a lot of assets were simply stolen by western companies for cents on the dollar (disaster capitalism in action; some of most blatant cases were reversed under Putin, but not much). Bush II administration was busy with reelections and Clinton administration never viewed Russia as a partner only as a body on the ground to kick with a boot with impunity. As President Richard Nixon pointed out a major aid package could stop the economic free fall and help anchor Russia in the West for years to come.

In this respect the Clinton administration’s greatest failure was its decision to take advantage of Russia’s weakness. And the fact that they used puppets like Jeffrey Sachs to take advantage of the Russia situation produced a long term damage to the US strategic interests in the region. Here is a relevant quote from Foreign Affairs article “Losing Russia”:

BEHIND THE facade of friendship, Clinton administration officials expected the Kremlin to accept the United States’ definition of Russia’s national interests. They believed that Moscow’s preferences could be safely ignored if they did not align with Washington’s goals. Russia had a ruined economy and a collapsing military, and it acted like a defeated country in many ways. Unlike other European colonial empires that had withdrawn from former possessions, Moscow made no effort to negotiate for the protection of its economic and security interests in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet states on its way out. Inside Russia, meanwhile, Yeltsin’s radical reformers often welcomed IMF and U.S. pressure as justification for the harsh and hugely unpopular monetary policies they had advocated on their own.

Soon, however, even Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev–known in Russia as Mr. Yes for accommodating the West–became frustrated with the Clinton administration’s tough love. As he told Talbott, who served as ambassador at large to the newly independent states from 1993 to 1994, “It’s bad enough having you people tell us what you’re going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders.”

But such pleas fell on deaf ears in Washington, where this arrogant approach was becoming increasingly popular. Talbott and his aides referred to it as the spinach treatment: a paternalistic Uncle Sam fed Russian leaders policies that Washington deemed healthy, no matter how unappetizing these policies seemed in Moscow.

As Talbott adviser Victoria Nuland put it, “The more you tell them it’s good for them, the more they gag.” By sending the message that Russia should not have an independent foreign policy — or even an independent domestic one — the Clinton administration generated much resentment. This neocolonial approach went hand in hand with IMF recommendations that most economists now agree were ill suited to Russia and so painful for the population that they could never have been implemented democratically. However, Yeltsin’s radical reformers were only too happy to impose them without popular consent.

Here is the Shleifer part of the story although it is important to realize that he was just a puppet, low level criminal (No. 6 card or "shesterka" : lowest member of a gang in Russian slang) in the biggest looting of the century, looting that exceeds performed by Hitler armies in 40th. (Harry R. Lewis Larry Summers, Robert Rubin Will The Harvard Shadow Elite Bankrupt The University And The Country):

In 1992, Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard professor and a close friend of Summers since Shleifer's college days at Harvard, became head of a Harvard project that directed U.S. government money for the development of the Russian economy. Tens of millions of dollars in noncompetitive U.S. contracts flowed to Harvard for Shleifer's Russian work, and his team directed the distribution of hundreds of millions more. Through the mid-1990s, complaints accumulated in Washington about self-dealing and improper investing by the Harvard team, and by mid-1997, the Harvard contracts had been canceled and the FBI had taken up the case. For two years it was before a federal grand jury.

In September, 2000, the government sued Harvard, Shleifer, and others, claiming that Shleifer was lining his own pockets and those of his wife, hedge fund manager Nancy Zimmerman -- formerly a vice president at Goldman Sachs under Rubin.

Soon after, when Summers became a candidate for the Harvard presidency, Shleifer lobbied hard for him in Cambridge. Rubin assured the Fellows that the abrasiveness Summers had exhibited at Treasury was a thing of the past. They named him president--in spite of what was already known about his enabling role in the malodorous Russian affair, and the implausibility of a personality metamorphosis.

Summers did not recluse himself from the lawsuit until more than three months after his selection as president, and even then used his influence to protect Shleifer. The Fellows--including Rubin, whom Summers added to the Corporation--fought the case for years, spending upwards of $10M on lawyers. But in 2005 a federal judge found Shleifer to have conspired to defraud the government and held Harvard liable as well. To settle the civil claims, Shleifer paid the government $2M and Harvard paid $26.5M; Zimmerman's company had already paid $1.5M. Shleifer denied all wrongdoing, and Harvard disclosed nothing about any response of its own--a departure from its handling of misconduct by faculty farther from the center of power.

Summers remained close to Shleifer, yet claimed in a February 2006 faculty meeting to know too little about the scandal to have formed an opinion about it. This prevarication brought a gasp from the assembled faculty and solidified faculty opposition to the Summers presidency.

Rubin is now gone from his leadership role and his board membership at Citigroup, hauling away $126M from a firm that was $65B poorer than when he joined it, with 75,000 fewer jobs. But he remains on the Harvard board, in spite of the financial meltdowns at both Citigroup and Harvard and his poor oversight of the problematic president he persuaded Harvard to hire.

The Rubin network remains alive and well in the White House, including not just Summers but several other Rubin protégés. Among the strangest of these power loops is that the well-connected Nancy Zimmerman has turned up as a member of Summers's economic policy brain trust.

It's pretty funny that in 1993 Andrei Shleifer co-authored a paper about corruption":

Abstract
This paper presents two propositions about corruption. First, the structure of government institutions and of the political process are very important determinants of the level of corruption. In particular, weak governments that do not control their agencies experience very high corruption levels. Second, the illegality of corruption and the need for secrecy make it much more distortionary and costly than its sister activity, taxation. These results may explain why, in some less developed countries, corruption is so high and so costly to development.

Copyright 1993, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Compare this paper with the assessment of his own behavior in the article "On Post-Modern Corruption"(Economic Principals):

It is against this background that a seemingly unrelated matter, the Andrei Shleifer case, should be considered. Readers are all too familiar with the details of how a 31-year-old Russian expatriate, swiftly risen to eminence as a Harvard University economics professor, was put in charge in 1992 of a huge US government-financed, Harvard-administered mission to advise the Russian government of Boris Yeltsin on how to establish a market economy of their own -- until he was discovered in 1996 to be lining his own pockets, and those of his wife, his deputy and the deputy's girlfriend. At that point the mission collapsed.

Four years later, the US Attorney in Boston sued. Four years after that, Shleifer was found to have committed fraud and Harvard University to have breached its contract. Each was ordered to repay the government.

Perhaps the Shleifer story is no big deal, and not the symbol of post-modern corruption having spread to universities that I think it is. Yet there are similarities to the Congressional situation, I believe. The case against Shleifer case was a civil complaint, not a criminal charge. Cunningham was elected, Shleifer was hired. Each helped himself to some good old-fashioned graft, and each was found by a court to have done (in the words of the San Diego prosecutor) "the worst thing an Éofficial can do -- he enriched himself through his position and violated the trust of those who put him there."

And just as the tactics of the House leadership are more alarming than the conduct of the lowly Cunningham, so the determination of Harvard's administrators to defend Shleifer for nine long years is more astounding than what Shleifer actually did. He was young and inexperienced. They had all the advice and time in the world. His culpability has been established. Theirs has barely been addressed.

Here is some information about the events form Wikipedia article Andrei Shleifer:

Controversy

Under the False Claims Act, the US government sued Harvard, Shleifer, Shleifer's wife, Shleifer's assistant Jonathan Hay, and Hay's girlfriend (now his wife) Elizabeth Hebert, because these individuals bought Russian stocks and GKOs while they were working on the country's privatization, which potentially contravened Harvard's contract with USAID. In 2001, a federal judge dismissed all charges against Zimmerman and Hebert.[4] In June 2004, a federal judge ruled that Harvard had violated the contract but was not liable for treble damages, but that Shleifer and Hay might be held liable for treble damages (up to $105 million) if found guilty by a jury [2].

In June 2005, Harvard and Shleifer announced that they had reached a tentative settlement with the US government. On August 3 of the same year, Harvard University, Shleifer and the Justice department reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million dollars worth of damages, though he did not admit any wrong doing. A firm owned by his wife previously had paid $1.5 million in an out of court settlement.

Because Harvard University paid most of the damages and allowed Shleifer to retain his faculty position, the settlement provoked allegations of favoritism on the part of Harvard's outgoing president Lawrence Summers, who is Shleifer's close friend and mentor. Shleifer's conduct was reviewed by Harvard's internal ethics committee. In October 2006, at the close of that review, Shleifer released a statement making it clear that he remains on Harvard's faculty. However, according to the Boston Globe, he has been stripped of his honorary title of Whipple V. N. Jones Professor of Economics[3].

Shleifer's involvement in Russia was investigated by David McClintick, a Harvard alumnus and journalist for Institutional Investor Magazine. His 30-page January 2006 article claims to show that "economics professor Andrei Shleifer, in the mid-1990s, led a Harvard advisory program in Russia that collapsed in disgrace." The article drew considerable criticism among Shleifer's colleagues, collaborators, close friends, and students. According to the Harvard Crimson[4], the university's daily newspaper, Shleifer's colleague and economics professor Edward Glaeser said that the Institutional Investor article "is a potent piece of hate creation—not quite 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' but it's in that camp." But Glaeser later apologized for his statement[5].

Larry Summers was not only defender but also the handler of Andrei Shleifer

Prominent role of Larry Summers in Andrei Shleifer affair shed very negative light on this very controversial figure. Positioning him as a key figured in Clinton administration intended to destroy the xUSSR republic economies, especially economics of Russia. And that role perfectly alight with his general political role in Clinton administration and after that. The role of enforcer of neoliberal social order. Role of Larry Summers in adopting "shock therapy" and Yeltsin privatization of state assets still needs to be investigated. But it is perfectly consistent with his track record. Among key "mis-achievements" of Bubble Boy Larry:

A prominent role in repealing of Glass-Steagall
The bill that ultimately repealed the Act was introduced in the Senate by Phil Gramm (Republican of Texas) and in the House of Representatives by Iowa) in 1999. The bills were passed by Republican majorities on party lines by a 54-44 vote in the Senate[12] and by a 343-86 vote in the House of Representatives[13]. After passing both the Senate and House the bill was moved to a conference committee to work out the differences between the Senate and House versions. The final bill resolving the differences was passed in the Senate 90-8 (1 not voting) and in the House: 362-57 (15 not voting). [These margins of passage, if repeated, would have been well over the two-thirds needed to overcome any veto, had the President returned the bill to Congress without his signature.] The legislation was signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 12, 1999. [14]

The banking industry had been seeking the repeal of Glass-Steagall since at least the 1980s. In 1987 the Congressional Research Service prepared a report which explored the case for preserving Glass-Steagall and the case against preserving the act.[7]

A prominent role in killing attempt of derivatives regulation by Brooksley Born. Summers "led the opposition" against Brooksley Born, a Clinton appointee became the head of the CFTC in 1996 and refused to accept the industry's stance. "In late 1997 and early 1998, she said the emperor has no clothes," says Greenberger. "She said that derivatives are futures contracts and that the CFTC had jurisdiction." In the 2003 interview, Ms. Born reveals that it was Wendy Gramm who single handedly made OTC derivatives possible by adopting a regulatory exemption as "virtually the last act as CFTC chair." This article from Stanford Magazine details the dirty tricks used by Three Marketers (Summers, Rubin and Greenspan) in blocking her regulatory efforts of the derivatives market whatsoever on a very simple ground that the financial industry and its lobbyists were objecting:
As chairperson of the CFTC, Born advocated reining in the huge and growing market for financial derivatives. . . . One type of derivative—known as a credit-default swap—has been a key contributor to the economy’s recent unraveling. . .

Back in the 1990s, however, Born’s proposal stirred an almost visceral response from other regulators in the Clinton administration, as well as members of Congress and lobbyists. . . . But even the modest proposal got a vituperative response. The dozen or so large banks that wrote most of the OTC derivative contracts saw the move as a threat to a major profit center. Greenspan and his deregulation-minded brain trust saw no need to upset the status quo. The sheer act of contemplating regulation, they maintained, would cause widespread chaos in markets around the world.

Born recalls taking a phone call from Lawrence Summers, then Rubin’s top deputy at the Treasury Department, complaining about the proposal, and mentioning that he was taking heat from industry lobbyists. . . . The debate came to a head April 21, 1998. In a Treasury Department meeting of a presidential working group that included Born and the other top regulators, Greenspan and Rubin took turns attempting to change her mind. Rubin took the lead, she recalls.

“I was told by the secretary of the treasury that the CFTC had no jurisdiction, and for that reason and that reason alone, we should not go forward,” Born says. . . . “It seemed totally inexplicable to me,” Born says of the seeming disinterest her counterparts showed in how the markets were operating. “It was as though the other financial regulators were saying, ‘We don’t want to know.’”

She formally launched the proposal on May 7, and within hours, Greenspan, Rubin and Levitt issued a joint statement condemning Born and the CFTC, expressing “grave concern about this action and its possible consequences.” They announced a plan to ask for legislation to stop the CFTC in its tracks.

As Bob C noted in his comment to As Obama Taps Larry Summers, Recalling Summer's Days as a Regulation Foe Mother Jones "One thing to keep in mind about Summers and Rubin's position on regulating derivatives is the timing: in July of 1998 when Summers testified, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management, had not yet failed. That would happen 3 months later, when it became clear that a substantial part of LTCM's problem was that it had massive side bets in derivative instruments that when it could not cover these bets, caused massive dislocations and threats to the global banking system (which had invested heavily in LTCM, thinking it was run by "geniuses"--see Roger Lowenstein's great book, "When Genius Failed".) I think Summers and Rubin might have had a different view on the regulation of derivatives after the LTCM catastrophe."

Serving as a lobbyist of hedge funds with "former government official" statute.
The NY Times claimed that Summers was doing consulting work for Taconic Capital while president of Harvard which does seems problematic
He continued cashing in his former government official status in DE Shaw.
"Money for Influence" The Washington Post, April 4, 2009:
Lawrence H. Summers, one of President Obama's top economic advisers, collected roughly $5.2 million in compensation from hedge fund D.E. Shaw over the past year and was paid more than $2.7 million in speaking fees by several troubled Wall Street firms and other organizations. . . . Fees ranged from $45,000 for a Nov. 12 Merrill Lynch appearance to $135,000 for an April 16 visit to Goldman Sachs, according to his disclosure form.

Attempt to shield from prosecution his friend from Harvard Mafia, professor Andrei Shleifer
Summers also flopped on Enron. As Alex Gibney has recently noted elsewhere he was a "Technocrat surfer boy, thrilled with freedom, getting a good ride."
Pushing for capital gains tax cuts during is stint in the Clinton administration...
Using his political influence for revenge:
The Most Misunderstood Man in America, by Michael Hirsh, Newsweek:

...Even in the contentious world of economics, [Joe Stiglitz] is considered somewhat prickly. And while he may be a Nobel laureate, in Washington he's seen as just another economic critic—and not always a welcome one. Few Americans recognize his name... Yet Stiglitz's work is cited by more economists than anyone else's in the world... And when he goes abroad—to Europe, Asia, and Latin America—he is received like a superstar, a modern-day oracle. ...

... ... ...

... Stiglitz's defenders say one possible explanation for his outsider status in Washington is his ongoing rivalry with Summers. ... Since the early '90s, when Summers was a senior Treasury official and Stiglitz was on the Council of Economic Advisers, the two have engaged in fierce policy debates. The first fight was over the Clinton administration's efforts to pry open emerging financial markets, such as South Korea's. Stiglitz argued there wasn't good evidence that liberalizing poorly regulated Third World markets would make any one more prosperous; Summers wanted them open to U.S. firms.

The differences between them grew bitter in the late 1990s, when Stiglitz was chief economist for the World Bank and took issue with the way Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Summers, who was then deputy secretary, were handling the Asian "contagion" financial collapse. After World Bank president James Wolfensohn declined to reappoint him in 1999, Stiglitz became convinced that Summers was behind the slight. Summers denies this...

Opium for the masses: Neoclassical economics role under neoliberalism as equivalent of the role of Catholic Church under feudalism

Some use the term “neo-feudalism” to characterize operation of the USA and "friends" in xUSSR space but they are essentially neocolonialism. When open brutal used of military force for conquering nations was substitutes by financial instruments. But neoliberalism definitely use neo-feudal methods, and that includes usage of neoclassic economics in the USA. Here I mean use of neoclassic economic as a new religion that justify and "bless" neoliberal social order. Essentially the same role that Catholic church played for classic feudalism. It serves as "An opium for the masses", if we use slightly overdone Marx quote ;-)

While related to economic rape of Russia, Shleifer's story has a wider meaning as an apt symbol of "post-modern" corruption at universities and especially in Harvard where students were actively indoctrinated in pseudoscientific theories which constitute a theoretical framework of casino capitalism serving simultaneously as the role of ideology which is not that far from the role of Marxism in the USSR. Here is Anna Willamson view (The Rape of Russia, Testimony of Anne Williamson Before the House Banking Committee)

From the perspective of the many millions of her children, Mother Russia in late 1991 was like an old woman, skirts yanked above her waist, who had been abandoned flat on her back at a muddy crossroads, the object of others' scorn, greed and unseemly curiosity. It is the Russian people who kept their wits about them, helped her to her feet, dusted her off, straightened her clothing, righted her head scarf and it is they who can restore her dignity - not Boris Yeltsin, not Anatole Chubais, not Boris Berezovsky nor any of the other aspirants to power. And it is the Russian people - their abilities, efforts and dreams - which comprise the Russian economy, not those of Vladimir Potanin or Viktor Chernomyrdin or Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Vladimir Gusinsky. And that is where we should have placed our bet - on the Russian people - and our stake should have been the decency, the common sense and abilities of our own citizens realized not through multilateral lending but through the use of tax credits for direct investment in the Russian economy and the training of Russian workers on 6-month to one year stints at the U.S. offices of American firms in conjunction with the elimination of U.S. tariffs on Russian goods.
Russia is a fabled land, home to a unique and provocative thousand year-old culture, and a country rich in the resources the world needs whose people had the courage and resilience to defeat this century’s greatest war machine, Hitler’s invading Wehrmacht. Yet, thanks to Boris Yeltsin’s thirst for power and megalomaniacal inadequacy, Russia has become the latest victim of American expediency and of a culturally hollow and economically predatory globalism. Consequently, Americans, who thought their money was helping a stricken land, have been dishonored; and the Russian people who trusted us are now in debt twice what they were in 1991 and rightly feel themselves betrayed.

The worst of it was that some pretty good ideas - private property, sound money, minimal government, the inviolability of contract and public accountability - that have delivered to the West’s citizenry the most prosperity and the most liberty in world history, and might have done the same for the Russians, were twisted into perverse constructions and only then exported via a Harvard-connected cabal of Clinton administration appointees who funded - without competition - their allies at Harvard University courtesy the public purse. Joining the US-directed effort were the usual legions of overpaid IMF/World Bank advisers whose lending terror continues to encircle the globe.

As reader with nickname DownSouth commented on Naked Capitalism blog (Obama Administration “Nothing to See Here” on Foreclosure Crisis « naked capitalism), historically one of the most powerful forces that supported feudalism in Europe were Catholic and Orthodox churches: the feudal order was upheld by the Church’s priestly class allied with European royalty.

In the modern USA something similar can be said about the relations of the neoclassical economists and bankers. It wasn’t meant to be this way, either with the priests of old or the priests of new. As Robert H. Nelson points out in Economics as Religion,

…Samuelson followed the Roman Catholic model. The members of the economics profession, and other scientific and professional elites, would be motivated by the higher considerations of a priesthood, as compared with businesspeople and other ordinary citizens in the commercial realm. There would be no popular votes held for the scientific leaders of society. Samuelson acknowledged the practical necessity to allow wide rein for the pursuit of self-interest in the marketplace. However, the professional economists and other scientific managers of the progressive state would function according to the ethical standard of the Roman Catholic priesthood. They would reject the commercial motive of self-interest and instead act in their professional and public capacity to serve the common good—-“the public interest”—-of all of society.

In Darwin’s Cathedral David Sloan Wilson made the observation that all major churches seem to have a “life cycle.”

Religious denominations range from huge established churches that encompass most of the population to tiny sects that reject the larger churches as corrupt and regard themselves as keepers of the original faith. The huge established churches begin as sects, grow into churches, give rise to offspring sects, and then mysteriously fall into senility, to be replaced by their own offspring sects. I would just add that it seems like theology follows function in this life cycle.

For instance, as Wilson points out, the early Christian church, while it was still a small sect, had “a policy of extreme altruism and forgiveness toward the downtrodden” and “a policy of unyielding opposition” toward the main Jewish religious institutions, which it perceived to be in league with the Roman Empire. As the Christian church matured and became the established church, however, it became part and parcel of the power structure, championing it and defending it against the downtrodden. What began as a small sect with a theology based upon knowledge and moral authority morphed into a church whose theology was all about defending wealth and power.

[HFTengineer]

Vashdojme me faktet per eknomine ne vitete e yelsin dhe si u formuan oligarket :


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin


oris Nikolayevich Yeltsin (/ˈjɛltsɪn/;[2] Russian: Бори́с Никола́евич Е́льцин, Boris Nikolajevič Jeljcin; IPA: [bɐˈrʲis nʲɪkɐˈlaɪvʲɪtɕ ˈjelʲtsɨn] ( listen); 1 February 1931 – 23 April 2007) was a Soviet and Russian politician and the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999. Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. During the late 1980s, Yeltsin had been a member of the Politburo, and in late 1987 tendered a letter of resignation in protest. No one had resigned from the Politburo before. This act branded Yeltsin as a rebel and led to his rise in popularity as an anti-establishment figure.

On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet. On 12 June 1991 he was elected by popular vote to the newly created post of President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), at that time one of the 15 constituent republics of the Soviet Union. Upon the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union on 25 December 1991, after which the RSFSR became the sovereign state of the Russian Federation, Yeltsin remained in office as president. He was reelected in the 1996 election, where critics widely claimed pervasive corruption; in the second round he defeated Gennady Zyuganov from the revived Communist Party by a margin of 13.7% (54.4% to 40.7%), despite the margin having been only 3.% during the first round. However, Yeltsin never recovered his early popularity after a series of economic and political crises in Russia in the 1990s.

He vowed to transform Russia's socialist economy into a capitalist market economy and implemented economic shock therapy, price liberalization and nationwide privatization. Due to the sudden total economic shift, a majority of the national property and wealth fell into the hands of a small number of oligarchs.[3] The well-off millionaire and billionaire oligarchs likened themselves to 19th century robber barons. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin's democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market.[4]

Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Within a few years of his presidency, many of Yeltsin's initial supporters had started to criticize his leadership, and Vice President Alexander Rutskoy even denounced the reforms as "economic genocide".[5]

Ongoing confrontations with the Supreme Soviet climaxed in the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis in which Yeltsin illegally ordered the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet parliament, which as a result attempted to remove him from office. In October 1993, troops loyal to Yeltsin stopped an armed uprising outside of the parliament building, leading to a number of deaths.[6] Yeltsin then scrapped the existing Russian constitution, banned political opposition and deepened his efforts to transform the economy. On 31 December 1999, under enormous internal pressure, Yeltsin announced his resignation, leaving the presidency in the hands of his chosen successor, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Yeltsin left office widely unpopular with the Russian population.[7]





Just days after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin resolved to embark on a program of radical economic reform. Unlike Gorbachev's reforms, which sought to expand democracy in the socialist system, the new regime aimed to completely dismantle socialism and fully implement capitalism—converting the world's largest command economy into a free-market one. During early discussions of this transition, Yeltsin's advisers debated issues of speed and sequencing, with an apparent division between those favoring a rapid approach and those favoring a gradual or slower approach.

On 2 January 1992, Yeltsin, acting as his own prime minister, ordered the liberalization of foreign trade, prices, and currency. At the same time, Yeltsin followed a policy of 'macroeconomic stabilization,' a harsh austerity regime designed to control inflation. Under Yeltsin's stabilization program, interest rates were raised to extremely high levels to tighten money and restrict credit. To bring state spending and revenues into balance, Yeltsin raised new taxes heavily, cut back sharply on government subsidies to industry and construction, and made steep cuts to state welfare spending.

In early 1992, prices skyrocketed throughout Russia, and a deep credit crunch shut down many industries and brought about a protracted depression. The reforms devastated the living standards of much of the population, especially the groups dependent on Soviet-era state subsidies and welfare entitlement programs.[34] Through the 1990s, Russia's GDP fell by 50 percent, vast sectors of the economy were wiped out, inequality and unemployment grew dramatically, while incomes fell. Hyperinflation, caused by the Central Bank of Russia's loose monetary policy, wiped out a lot of personal savings, and tens of millions of Russians were plunged into poverty.[35][36]

Some economists argue that in the 1990s Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression.[34] Russian commentators and even some Western economists, such as Marshall Goldman, widely blamed Yeltsin's economic program for the country's disastrous economic performance in the 1990s. Many politicians began to quickly distance themselves from the program. In February 1992, Russia's vice president, Alexander Rutskoy denounced the Yeltsin program as "economic genocide."[37] By 1993 conflict over the reform direction escalated between Yeltsin on the one side, and the opposition to radical economic reform in Russia's parliament on the other.






Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had undergone a radical transformation, moving from a centrally planned economy to a globally integrated market economy. Corrupt and haphazard privatization processes turned over major state-owned firms to politically connected "oligarchs", which has left equity ownership highly concentrated.

Yeltsin's program of radical, market-oriented reform came to be known as a "shock therapy". It was based on the recommendations of the IMF and a group of top American economists, including Larry Summers.[54][55] The result was disastrous, with real GDP falling by more than 40% by 1999, hyperinflation which wiped out personal savings, crime and destitution spreading rapidly.[56][57]

The majority of state enterprises were privatized amid great controversy and subsequently came to be owned by insiders[58] for far less than they were worth.[54] For example, the director of a factory during the Soviet regime would often become the owner of the same enterprise. Under the government's cover, outrageous financial manipulations were performed that enriched a narrow group of individuals at key positions of business and government.[59] Many of them promptly invested their newfound wealth abroad producing an enormous capital flight.[60]

Difficulties in collecting government revenues amid the collapsing economy and a dependence on short-term borrowing to finance budget deficits led to the 1998 Russian financial crisis.

In the 1990s Russia was "the largest borrower" from the International Monetary Fund with loans totaling $20 billion. The IMF was the subject of criticism for lending so much as Russia introduced little of the reforms promised for the money and a large part of these funds could have been "diverted from their intended pu

[HFTengineer]

Vashdojm msi u formuan oligarkjet dhe ne kohen e kujt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia


Privatization took place on a much wider scale in the early 1990s, when the government of Russia deliberately set a goal to sell its assets to the Russian public. Upon the Soviet Union's collapse, the new government was forced to manage the huge and inefficient state enterprise sector inherited from the Soviet economy. Privatization was carried out by the State Committee for State Property Management of the Russian Federation under Chubais with the primary goal being to transform the formerly state-owned enterprises into profit-seeking businesses, which would not be dependent on government subsidies for their survival. To distribute property quickly and to win over popular support, the reformers decided to rely mostly on the mechanism of free voucher privatization, which was earlier implemented in Czechoslovakia. The Russian government believed that the open sale of state-owned assets, as opposed to the voucher program, would have likely resulted in the further concentration of ownership among the Russian mafia and the nomenklatura, which they sought to avoid. Nevertheless, contrary to the government's expectations, insiders managed to acquire control over most of the assets, which remained largely dependent on government support for years to come. From 1992 to 1994, ownership of 15,000 firms was transferred from state control via the voucher program.[14]

Thus, although several of the initial objectives had not been fully achieved by the end of the vouchers program, a great deal of assets did fall into private ownership remarkably quickly and worked to provide some basis for market competition. Voucher privatization took place between 1992-1994 and roughly 98 percent of the population participated. The vouchers, each corresponding to a share in the national wealth, were distributed equally among the population, including minors. They could be exchanged for shares in the enterprises to be privatized. Because most people were not well-informed about the nature of the program or were very poor, they were quick to sell their vouchers for money, unprepared or unwilling to invest.[citation needed] Most vouchers—and, hence, most shares—wound up being acquired by the management of the enterprises. Although Russia's initial privatization legislation attracted widespread popular support given its promise to distribute the national wealth among the general public and ordinary employees of the privatized enterprises, eventually the public felt deceived.[15]

Oil sector[edit]
Privatization of the oil sector was regulated by presidential decree №1403 approved on November 17, 1992. Vertically integrated companies were created by joining some oil-producing enterprises and refineries into open-stock companies. Starting in 1994 many former state oil companies were privatized. This privatization has been partial because the federal government has obtained ownership positions in several companies and has also retained full control over the transport of oil onto lucrative world markets.[16]

Loans for shares (1995–1996)


Yeltsin ahead of the 1996 presidential election
In 1995, facing severe fiscal deficit and in desperate need of funds for the 1996 presidential elections, the government of Boris Yeltsin adopted a "loans-for-share" scheme proposed by banker Vladimir Potanin and endorsed by Anatoly Chubais, then a deputy prime minister, whereby some of the largest state industrial assets (including state-owned shares in Norilsk Nickel, Yukos, Lukoil, Sibneft, Surgutneftegas, Novolipetsk Steel, and Mechel) were leased through auctions for money lent by commercial banks to the government. The auctions were rigged and lacked competition, being largely controlled by favored insiders with political connections or used for the benefit of the commercial banks themselves.[17] As neither the loans nor the leased enterprises were returned in time, this effectively became a form of selling, or privatizing, state assets at very low prices.

"[T]he reforms of the 1990s were mainly the work of the advisers brought in under then president Boris Yeltsin. Fearing that the population might soon have a change of heart and turn its back on reform, Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, the chief Russian architects of the process, decided to accelerate it, selling off state resources and enterprises at little or no charge. Not long into the process, ownership of some of Russia's most valuable resources was auctioned off by oligarch-owned banks under a scheme called "Loans for Shares." Although they were supposedly acting on behalf of the state, the bank auctioneers rigged the process-and in almost every case ended up as the successful bidders. This was how Khodorkovsky got a 78 percent share of ownership in Yukos, worth about $5 billion, for a mere $310 million, and how Boris Berezovsky got Sibneft, another oil giant, worth $3 billion, for about $100 million. [...] [T]he government was generally unable to exercise much control. Since the state was very weak, these "new Russians" paid little or no taxes on their purchases."

[HFTengineer]

Yeltsinian oligarchs[edit]
By the end of the Soviet era in 1991 and during Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, many Russian businessmen imported or smuggled goods such as personal computers and jeans into the country and sold them, often on the black market, for a hefty profit.


Anatoly Chubais, the man most credited[by whom?] with the Yeltsin-era privatization that led to the growth of the oligarchs.
During the 1990s, once Boris Yeltsin (President of Russia from 1991) took office, the oligarchs emerged as well-connected entrepreneurs who started from nearly nothing and became rich through participation in the market via connections to the corrupt, but elected, government of Russia during the state's transition to a market-based economy. The so-called voucher-privatization program enabled a handful of young men to become billionaires, specifically by arbitraging the vast difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities (e.g. gas, oil) and the prices prevailing on the world market. Because they stashed billions of dollars in private Swiss bank accounts rather than investing in the Russian economy, they were dubbed[by whom?] "kleptocrats".[2] These oligarchs became extremely unpopular with the Russian public, and are commonly thought[by whom?] of as the cause of much of the turmoil that plagued the country following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Guardian described the oligarchs as "about as popular with your average Russian as a man idly burning bundles of £50s outside an orphanage".[3][4]

Post-Soviet business oligarchs include relatives or close associates of government officials, even government officials themselves, as well as criminal bosses who achieved vast wealth by acquiring state assets very cheaply (or for free) during the privatization process controlled by the Yeltsin government of 1991-1999.[citation needed] Specific accusations of corruption are often leveled[by whom?] at Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, two of the "Young Reformers" chiefly responsible for Russian privatization in the early 1990s.[citation needed] According to David Satter, author of Darkness at Dawn, "what drove the process was not the determination to create a system based on universal values but rather the will to introduce a system of private ownership, which, in the absence of law, opened the way for the criminal pursuit of money and power".[citation needed] In some cases, outright criminal groups - in order to avoid attention - assign front-men to serve as executives and/or "legal" owners of the companies they control.

Although the majority of oligarchs were not formally connected with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there are allegations[by whom?] that they were promoted (at least initially) by the communist apparatchiks, with strong connections to Soviet power structures and access to the monetary funds of the Communist Party. Official Russian media usually depict oligarchs as the enemies of "communist forces". The latter is a stereotype that describes political power that wants to restore Soviet-style communism in Russia.

During Yeltsin's presidency (1991-1999) oligarchs became increasingly influential in Russian politics; they played a significant role in financing the re-election of Yeltsin in 1996. With insider information about financial decisions of the government, oligarchs could easily increase their wealth even further. The 1998 Russian financial crisis hit some of the oligarchs hard, however, and those whose holdings were still based mainly on banking lost much of their fortunes.

The most influential and exposed oligarchs from the Yeltsin era include Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky, Pyotr Aven, Vladimir Vinogradov and Vitaly Malkin.[5][6][7] They formed what became known as Semibankirschina (or seven bankers), a small group of business moguls with a great influence on Boris Yeltsin and his political environment. Together they controlled from 50% to 70% of all Russian finances between 1996 and 2000.

Potanin, Malkin and Fridman are the only ones on the list to have retained their influence in the Putin era (1999- ). Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky and Gusinsky "have been purged by the Kremlin", according to The Guardian.[8]






Vashdojme me deal qe dha putini



mid-September, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced plans for a radical overhaul of his country's political system, with the goal of centralizing power in the Kremlin. Acting in the wake of the hostage crisis in Beslan, during which Chechen separatists killed hundreds of children, Putin claimed that his power grab was necessary to help Russia win its own war on terrorism. Whatever his motivations, the move represents a major step backward for Russian democracy.

Putin's recent actions may be the most drastic of his tenure so far, but they were hardly the first signs of his willingness to deploy the power of the Russian state for his own purposes. A year earlier, he had Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the oil group Yukos and one of the world's richest men, arrested and thrown in jail on charges of fraud and tax evasion-a move widely interpreted as a declaration of war against the so-called oligarchs, who have amassed phenomenal wealth and power since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. A key question now is whether Khodorkovsky's arrest is the forerunner of what will happen to many of his business colleagues.

The Khodorkovsky affair has been a shock for those who had come to believe in the "new Russia." During the previous dozen years, Russians had rejected the Communist Party and the Soviet Union's command economy. To the applause of most of the outside world, Russian and foreign economic advisers drew up an elaborate program for the privatization of industry, housing, and land. In an attempt at "people's capitalism," virtually every Russian was issued a voucher good for shares in a soon-to-be-private enterprise. Stock markets sprouted almost everywhere, while industrial ministries gave way to privately owned, Russia-based multinational corporations.

The largest of these corporations were producers of petroleum, natural gas, or metal that had previously been controlled by a Soviet industrial ministry. Their new executives became dazzlingly wealthy almost overnight. In May 2004, the Russian edition of Forbes identified 36 of these oligarchs as being worth at least $1 billion. Khodorkovsky topped the list with an estimated net worth of $15 billion.

These events appeared to signal the triumph of the market and private industry. To be sure, there were unsettling reports of shady dealings during the takeovers, but most observers explained them away as inevitable side effects of such a far-reaching transformation. After all, did the United States not once have its own robber barons, who, despite early roughhouse tactics, became the leaders of some of the country's most prominent corporations and the benefactors of its most respected charities and foundations? Besides, many argued, it was only a matter of time before the Russian government would intervene to correct the most flagrant misbehavior, much as Theodore Roosevelt did with the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act and other Progressive reforms during the early years of the twentieth century.

The difference in Russia is that the basic reforms and privatization of the 1990s were so flawed and unfair that they created an unstable business environment. A radical resettling of existing ownership arrangements was thus all but inevitable. And given Putin's authoritarian tendencies, it is hardly surprising that when the move came it was equally flawed and unfair-and perhaps equally destabilizing. What has happened to Khodorkovsky and nine of his now-jailed or exiled senior associates is, in short, more than the dramatic saga of a rich man's fall from grace or a despot's capricious revenge: it is a window onto the cracks that run through Russia's post-Soviet political economy.

OIL SLICKS VS. GOVERNMENT STIFFS

The reforms of the 1990s were mainly the work of the advisers brought in under then president Boris Yeltsin. Fearing that the population might soon have a change of heart and turn its back on reform, Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais, the chief Russian architects of the process, decided to accelerate it, selling off state resources and enterprises at little or no charge. Not long into the process, ownership of some of Russia's most valuable resources was auctioned off by oligarch-owned banks under a scheme called "Loans for Shares." Although they were supposedly acting on behalf of the state, the bank auctioneers rigged the process-and in almost every case ended up as the successful bidders. This was how Khodorkovsky got a 78 percent share of ownership in Yukos, worth about $5 billion, for a mere $310 million, and how Boris Berezovsky got Sibneft, another oil giant, worth $3 billion, for about $100 million.

When it came to dealing with the oligarchs, the government was generally unable to exercise much control. Since the state was very weak, these "new Russians" paid little or no taxes on their purchases. And if most American robber barons had at least created something out of nothing, the Russian oligarchs added nothing to what already was something. Virtually all their wealth came from the seizure of Russia's raw material assets, which until 1992 had been owned and managed by the state. An oligarch's success, in other words, almost always depended on his connections to the government officials in charge of privatizing the country's rich energy and mineral deposits, as well as on his ability to outmaneuver or intimidate rivals. (Two senior Yukos executives have been charged with murder and attempted murder, and the mayor of Nefteyugansk, where Yukos' major producing unit is headquartered, was murdered after criticizing the firm's failure to pay taxes.)

By the time Putin succeeded Yeltsin in 2000, there was much to remedy. One of Putin's first steps was to declare a change in the rules of the game. As he put it in a meeting with the oligarchs in February 2000, "It is asked, what then should be the relationship with the so-called oligarchs? The same as with anyone else. The same as with the owner of a small bakery or a shoe repair shop." That Putin said this at a special meeting with the oligarchs and not with a group of bakers or cobblers is beside the point; the statement was taken as a signal that the tycoons would no longer be able to flout government regulations and count on special access to the Kremlin. In July of that year, Putin told the oligarchs that he would not interfere with their businesses or renationalize state resources as long as they stayed out of politics-that is, as long as they did not challenge or criticize the president. Although the promise provided some reassurance, it also displayed a warped concept of how markets, businesses, and the state are supposed to function in a democracy.

Limiting the oligarchs' political involvement proved difficult. As more people grew richer, some were inevitably tempted to expand their activities beyond business. Several, including Vladimir Gusinsky and Berezovsky, created media empires of television stations, newspapers, and magazines and used these outlets to attack not only each other, but also Putin, particularly for his policies in Chechnya and his inept response to the 2000 sinking of a nuclear-powered submarine in the Barents Sea.

As Putin started to feel betrayed by the oligarchs politically, others found themselves victimized economically. Investors in Khodorkovsky's projects regularly found that they had acquired worthless pieces of paper. The American investor Kenneth Dart had to write off an estimated $1 billion. The oil company then known as Amoco (and later as BP Amoco) had a similar experience. Both had put money into an oil-producing subsidiary that Khodorkovsky seized and stripped of its assets. Similarly, when the Russian company Tyumen Oil stripped the assets of a Sidanko Oil subsidiary, BP Amoco had to write off, at least temporarily, $200 million of its $500 million investment in Sidanko Oil.

After the Russian government declared a moratorium on the repayment of its debt on August 17, 1998, most Russian banks, including Khodorkovsky's Menatep, simply closed their doors, depriving hundreds of thousands of ordinary Russians of their savings. Rather than try to help depositors and other lenders, Khodorkovsky took whatever sound assets he could salvage and diverted them to a subsidiary in St. Petersburg, beyond the reach of his creditors. After lengthy and often halfhearted intervention by the government, Menatep eventually agreed to provide token compensation; so did Yukos, to those who had taken its stock as collateral for loans to the company. But by the time Khodorkovsky was through issuing new shares and watering down the old stock, few of the banks' depositors or lenders had much to show for their efforts.

Still, it was less Khodorkovsky's financial skullduggery than it was his interference in political matters that upset Putin. Khodorkovsky was reported to have offered Russia's two liberal parties, Yabloko and SPS (the Party of Right Forces), $100 million to unite and campaign together in opposition to Putin and his United Russia Party. And he broadly hinted that he would run for president in 2008, when Putin's term is due to expire.

Khodorkovsky also actively promoted legislation that would benefit Yukos. It was said that, to ensure such support, he bought control of as many as 100 seats in the Duma (the lower house of the Russian parliament), including several held by members of the Communist Party. Whether the rumors were true or not, he was able to head off attempts by the Duma to increase taxes on petroleum producers in 2001 and 2002.

Such heavy-handed lobbying is hardly unknown in the U.S. Congress, especially on energy matters, but to Putin it represented a violation of the deal he had offered the oligarchs. The siloviki, the law-and-order types from the KGB, the police, and the army that Putin had been bringing into the government, felt the same way. Khodorkovsky's methods were a fundamental challenge to their control of the country-or, as one noted, "a danger and threat to the Russian state."

FLEECING THE BEAR

Ironically, just a few years earlier, Khodorkovsky had decided to turn over a new leaf, at least in financial matters, and he started to change the way he ran his business. In 1999, he espoused the importance of transparency for himself and his fellow oligarchs. He hired Western accounting firms, and Yukos became one of the few Russian companies to acknowledge who its main stockholders were. It began to pay back wages to its employees and publish a more complete statement of its tax obligations. Khodorkovsky reorganized Yukos' board of directors, bringing in several well-respected Western investors, lawyers, and businessmen. He also established the Open Russia Foundation, a charity supporting educational and cultural projects, and recruited Henry Kissinger, Lord Rothschild, and Arthur Hartman, the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, for its board. Once he had made his billions, he, like the American robber barons, decided it was time to become charitable and play by the rules.

As many in the West applauded these changes, Khodorkovsky became increasingly self-confident and even brazen. Eager to export more oil, he called for the building of new pipelines: one to the Arctic port of Murmansk (a base for exports to the United States), another through Siberia (toward Asian markets). For the latter, he favored a pipeline to China, despite the government's preference for a route to the Pacific, which would serve Japan. Although both proposals already were a direct challenge to Transneft, the state monopoly that owned and operated all of Russia's pipelines, Khodorkovsky announced that he was prepared to build his own pipelines if necessary.

To top it off, at a February 2003 meeting in the Kremlin, Khodorkovsky complained to Putin that the executives of a state-owned oil company, Rosneft, had overpaid for a smaller company in a sweetheart deal. (He was angry because Yukos had also been interested in the company but had refused to buy it at what it considered an inflated price.) Khodorkovsky's denunciation of Rosneft was an open challenge to Putin because Rosneft's head, Sergei Bogdanchikov, was closely associated with the siloviki. More and more, it appeared that, with his immense wealth, control over what was about to become the world's fourth-largest oil company, and considerable influence in the Duma, Khodorkovsky saw himself as beyond the control of the Kremlin. No businessman had ever reached that point before, neither under the tsar nor under Yeltsin, and Putin was determined not to let it happen on his watch either.

Khodorkovsky's financial shenanigans were hardly exceptional. The authorities could have brought similar charges of underpayment, tax evasion, bribery, murder, or attempted murder against many of the oligarchs. It was the audacity that Khodorkovsky and his Yukos subordinates displayed in interfering directly in politics that made them a special target. Like Gusinsky (who was jailed for a time) and Berezovsky (who was exiled) before him, Khodorkovsky provoked Putin by criticizing him and supporting opposition parties and candidates.

To those who believe in the supremacy of the state-as most Russians do-Khodorkovsky's aggressive behavior was suspect on any number of counts. An even more basic question, however, was whether he has the right to claim for himself so much of the wealth that had until recently belonged to the state or, supposedly, to the people at large. This issue loomed increasingly large for the Kremlin and the siloviki. From their perspective, the oligarchs had done nothing to deserve such good fortune. The country's resources had been stolen through the manipulation of a poorly conceived privatization process, thanks to rigged bids, bribes, violence, and dubious interpretations of the law. Until late 1999, moreover, almost none of the oligarchs had done much to restructure or improve the assets they had acquired from the state.

As a few private individuals seized state property, a third of Russia's population was thrust below the poverty line, exacerbating public resentment over such radical redistribution of wealth. According to a recent poll, 77 percent of Russians feel that privatization should be either fully or partially revised. Only 18 percent oppose renationalization. Many of those interviewed were also unhappy with the market system in general and sought to discredit the whole privatization process.

The siloviki, meanwhile, had become concerned that access to and ownership of more and more of Russia's mineral deposits were being sold to foreign multinational corporations, including some owned predominantly by Americans. By the time of Khodorkovsky's arrest in October 2003, Tyumen Oil had formed a partnership with BP, and several other companies (such as ConocoPhillips) were secretly engaged in similar negotiations. When Khodorkovsky, after announcing a pending merger between Yukos and Sibneft, began to negotiate with both ExxonMobil and Chevron-Texaco, government hard-liners grew truly alarmed. They feared that Putin would wake up one morning and discover that Russia's most strategic and valuable energy companies had been taken over by Western corporations. It was one thing for the foreign companies to be minority investors, but quite another for them to buy operational control, especially when some of their payments to the oligarchs were being diverted abroad. Roman Abramovich's purchase of London's Chelsea soccer team for $400 million may have pleased Londoners, but it angered Moscow's mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who wanted to know why the money was not going to improve a Moscow team instead.

That many of the oligarchs were Jewish also helped revive some old and ugly prejudices. It was only a matter of time before a Russian nationalist like Alexander Tsipko dusted off the image of "Jewish capital" from the tsar's days, claiming (incorrectly) that Khodorkovsky had arranged for the transfer of his "stake in Yukos to the guardianship of Lord Rothschild's Institute of Jewish Policy Research in Britain" if anything happened to him.

In short, the oligarchs were an easy target. After Khodorkovsky's arrest, Putin's poll ratings rose from an already high 70 percent to an impressive 80 percent. In addition, running on the slogan "Russia for Russians," Rodina, a nationalist political party only a few months old, was able to win nine percent of the vote in Duma elections two months later. Most Russians feel, with good reason, that if the country's economic reforms in general, and privatization in particular, had been carried out more honestly and equitably, the economic results would have been better, the country's income disparities less pronounced, and control over its resources more widely dispersed.

PUTIN'S HEAVY HAND

If it is difficult to defend Khodorkovsky and most of the other oligarchs, it is equally difficult to justify the methods Putin used against them. The machinations of the siloviki have been particularly aggressive. According to the sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya, the siloviki now constitute 50 to 70 percent of the Kremlin's staff. Although most are not proponents of communism, they do seek to restore power to the state and ensure that the security forces regain a central, if not commanding, role in Russian politics. As Rosneft's Bogdanchikov, a key siloviki ally, boasted, "three days in Butyrke Prison and [Khodorkovsky and his aide Roman Lebedev] will understand who is the master of the forest."

To prevent the transfer of Yukos' ownership to Western companies, state authorities ordered the seizure of 40 percent of Yukos' stock, along with Khodorkovsky's arrest. They also sought to force Khodorkovsky and his aides to transfer control of the company to the state or at least to a more sympathetic Russian owner. Threats against Gusinsky had brought good results: after a few days in prison in a cell with common criminals, some of whom were thought to be infected with HIV, he had signed over his shares in Media Most to Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas monopoly.

But the Yukos executives were more resolute. Despite being denied bail and given ever-lengthening prison terms, they refused to turn over their shares. They held out in the face of the prosecutor's warnings that their sentences might stretch from days, weeks, and months into decades. Bemoaning the fact that "sadly, it is impossible to give Khodorkovsky a longer term" than ten years, Deputy Prosecutor-General Vladimir Kolesnikov suggested that the law be amended to extend the maximum term. And to deter anyone who might be tempted to come to Khodorkovsky's defense, Kolesnikov warned, "Let those who are not yet in jail think hard about what they are doing."

Arresting rich businessmen, even billionaires, is no longer a novelty in Russia or elsewhere. But in Russia they are arrested by masked men armed with machine guns, and they are denied bail. Those who are not jailed are increasingly pressured to accept siloviki as partners or return ownership to the state, lest their corporations be stripped of their value. The Natural Resource Ministry has already revoked Yukos' license to drill in some parts of Siberia. In July, the Ministry of Justice threatened to seize the company's largest subsidiary, Yuganskneftegaz, which is worth between $17 billion and $24 billion. Contemplating, ironically, a favorite tactic of Khodorkovsky's, for a time the government considered underpricing the asset and selling it off for only $1.75 billion, as partial payment for the company's $3.4 billion tax bill for the year 2000. At that rate, Yukos would not be able to pay its bill for 2000, or for any year since.

There are those in the Kremlin who would see such a sale as a golden opportunity for the state and the siloviki to regain control from people they consider to be undeserving hucksters. As a sign of what might be ahead, Igor Sechin, a senior Kremlin aide to Putin, has also just been appointed chairman of Rosneft, the state oil company. (His daughter just married the son of Vladimir Ustinov, Russia's chief prosecutor-general in charge of the Yukos case.) A few weeks later, Putin announced that Rosneft would be merged into Gazprom. As Russia's largest company, the new state-controlled entity would thereby become the most likely candidate to pick up Yuganskneftegaz should Yukos be forced to sell it off to pay taxes.

REFORMING THE REFORMS

Any examination of how Russia has come to find itself in such a situation must begin with a look at the original privatization process. The architects of the reforms can rightly claim that their blueprint achieved its main objective: the communists have not regained control of the government. But by moving so quickly to privatize state resources while failing to encourage the startup of new businesses, the reformers inadvertently paved the way for the rise of the oligarchs-and for the state's counterattack. And as the 2003 election results demonstrated, the oligarchic seizure of Russia's resources triggered support for the neo-nationalists-whose agenda is not all that different from that of the communists, at least not when it comes to the state's regaining control of mineral resources.

In response to these political trends, in April, Russia's State Audit Chamber-the equivalent of the U.S. Government Accountability Office-convened a one-day retreat with three Americans and four Europeans to consider what might be done to redress abuses of the privatization process. Its final report is expected by the end of this year, but Russian officials have said in an interim report that inspections of 140 privatized companies have revealed 56 violations of state regulations. Igor Shuvalov, one of Putin's economic advisers, later warned that Yukos would not be the last company to find itself under attack.

The return of the statists and their push for redress are bound to unsettle existing and potential private investors, Russian and foreign. Certainly, BP should be worried about the $7 billion it has already invested in a partnership with Tyumen Oil, a company that has been accused of misbehavior similar to Yukos', including abuse of the legal system, unfair payment for state resources, and tax delinquency. The partnership itself has also been charged with violating the official state secrets act by disclosing the extent of the country's petroleum reserves, even though it is information that the partnership's senior executive officers needed to know. State prosecutors and tax authorities have also raided the offices of Sibir Airlines, the metal producer RusAl, and the oil company Sibneft (which paid taxes on only 7 percent of its profits, less than a third of the statutory rate and half of what Yukos paid).

Foreign investors have not been spared, either. A 1993 tender for development on Sakhalin Island by an ExxonMobil-led consortium was suddenly revoked in February after the consortium was accused of failing to invest as much as it had promised. Since almost all the privatization efforts have involved underpayment, cutting corners, tax avoidance, intimidation, or outright physical force, every new owner has to fear that, if he can be identified, someday a government agency will also single him out for harassment. As a result, the crackdown may have unintentionally set back efforts to make Russian business more transparent.

Recognizing the anxiety that these measures have triggered, Putin has tried to reassure the business community. He made a point of meeting with James Mulva, the CEO of ConocoPhillips, to encourage him to bid for the shares the state still holds in Lukoil. In a December 2003 meeting with the Russian Chamber of Commerce, moreover, Putin noted, "If five, seven, or ten people broke the law, that doesn't mean the others did the same. The rest may not have made as much money, but today they sleep soundly."

This is hardly comforting. Who knows which five, seven, or ten of the 5,500 or so privatized businesses Putin was referring to? And if the past is any precedent, it would be unusual, as the State Audit Chamber report suggests, for so few companies to come under scrutiny in the end. So despite Putin's reassurances, most of those who benefited from privatization will see Khodorkovsky's imprisonment as a warning of what could happen to them if they get too ambitious or challenge the Kremlin.

Russia will undoubtedly survive the flawed process of privatization, just as it has survived more serious crises. But the direction Putin is taking is disappointing. By merging state-controlled Gazprom with state-owned Rosneft, he has signaled once again that the state will become a strong if not dominant voice in energy policy and economic planning. Moreover, the new entity has become the most likely suitor for Yuganskneftegaz once, as seems likely, Yukos is forced to sell it. If the purchase occurs, Gazprom-Rosneft will then account for 25 percent of the country's energy production. Combined with Putin's crackdown on the media and his September order to terminate the direct election of governors and members of the Duma, his increased involvement in economic matters is worrisome. It means that, under Putin, Russia is reversing some of the most important economic and political reforms it adopted after freeing itself from the yoke of communism.

[HFTengineer]

Vashdojme me arrestin e oligarckve qe blen pronat me 8/ 100 se veleres reale

https://www.theguardian.com/business...s-bill-browder


The arrest of one of Russia's richest men last week was an attempt by President Vladimir Putin to protect himself from a palace coup, according to one of his most vocal critics.

Bill Browder, the hedge fund manager who has become a crusader against Russian corruption, said the arrest of Vladimir Yevtushenkov was intended to send a message to any oligarch plotting moves against Putin, as the value of their assets drops in the wake of western sanctions.

Yevtushenkov was released on Friday, after being put under house arrest for three days on charges of money laundering.

As the richest man to fall into the hands of the Russian justice system since Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested in 2003, Yevtushenkov's detention heightened speculation that the Kremlin wanted to take control of his oil company, Bashneft – one of the few Russian energy companies still in private ownership.

Speaking before Yevtushenkov's release, Browder said the arrest was "more motivated by paranoia than any demand for a particular asset", because "Putin and his underlings can always steal these assets in any number of ways".

"I don't know if Yevtushenkov did anything more or less irritating to Putin than the other oligarchs. I just think [Putin] randomly picked one out to make sure none of the other oligarchs are going to start challenging him or start planning any palace coups.

"Now that their wealth has been diminished by Putin's actions, they have a big incentive to act against Putin and he knows that."

Russia's main stock market, Micex, has lost 6% of its value since the west tightened economic sanctions against Russia in July over its threat to the sovereignty of Ukraine, and the value of the rouble has fallen to all-time lows against the dollar.

Browder is seeking to hold to account low-level Russian officials whom he believes are responsible for the death of his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow jail in 2009 a year after reporting a massive tax fraud to the authorities.

Browder himself was blacklisted by the Russian government in 2006 after 10 years of investing in the country through his Hermitage Capital Management fund.

He says he has traced $200m (£123m) of the $230m missing under the tax fraud scheme and is seeking to get the European Union to follow the United States in banning suspected perpetrators from their territory and freezing their assets.

Browder said he was hopeful that one of the EU's 28 member states would put the issue on the agenda before the end of the year. However, he is critical of western countries for having been slow to respond to the crisis in Ukraine. "We would be in a much less dangerous situation if they had gone for targeted sanctions with broad lists of Putin cronies at the very get-go," he said.

Western sanctions are already weighing on Russia's weak economy. The former finance minister Alexei Kudrin recently warned that the government would struggle to help state companies frozen out of western money markets as the economy slides deeper into stagnation.

Yevtushenkov's arrest heightened alarm among Russian business people already uneasy about sanctions. German Gref, an economic liberal who leads state banking giant Sberbank, described it as a tragedy that would have a negative impact on Russia's business climate, while the leader of the main business union collected signatures to petition for Yevtushenkov's release.

The influence of economic liberals in the country has diminished since the onset of the Ukraine crisis, which has bolstered the position of the Kremlin's hawkish siloviki faction of officials with a background in national security.

"Putin's calculus in Ukraine is not economic but geopolitical, so naturally the influence of the liberals has diminished," said Alexander Kliment at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group. He has observed a deterioration in the business climate over the past year – an area where Russia has never scored highly on international rankings. And as business slows down, the fight for the spoils is intensifying.

"As the economic pie starts to shrink, everyone is sharpening their knives. Those who are closer to the Kremlin will do better than those who are not, and Yevtushenkov was not as close to the Kremlin as others."

While many observers – including Khodorkovsky himself – have drawn parallels to the Yukos case, in which the oil company owned by Khordorkovsky was forcibly broken up over alleged unpaid taxes, Kliment sees some important differences.

Khodorkovsky was arrested at a time when Russia was trying to rebuild its national resources, when oil prices and incomes were rising. Now oil prices are falling and the economy is practically in recession.

"The Russian elite is starting to cannibalise itself."

[HFTengineer]

http://www.economist.com/node/82208


What is behind the arrest of Russia’s top independent television mogul, Vladimir Gusinsky? Will other influential tycoons also come under threat?
Jun 15th 2000 | MOSCOW
PUT it all together and the first months of Vladimir Putin's presidency can look pretty alarming. Free speech is the most lasting legacy of reform in Russia. Now it is under threat. Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of NTV, the only independent national television station, was jailed on June 13th on a spurious-sounding allegation of fraud. Before that, the press minister had called him a “bacterium”, anti-Semitic remarks were broadcast about him on state-controlled television and masked police had raided his headquarters. The government is also talking about tougher licensing laws for the media, while officials have reverted to Soviet-style habits of bluster and bullying in dealing with annoying journalists.


Other nasty Soviet practices seem to be on the rise elsewhere in government, bringing squawks of protest from environmentalists, liberal pressure-groups, defenders of minority religions, and non-Russian ethnic lobbies. Some of this overlaps: Mr Gusinsky is president of the Russian Jewish Congress. The day after his arrest, 17 of the country's most powerful businessmen joined the chorus of protest and offered to stand bail for him. “We thought we were living in a democratic country; today we have serious doubts,” they declared in a joint letter.

Is Mr Putin going back to his KGB roots? If so, he is being careful to leave no fingerprints. At the time of Mr Gusinsky's arrest he was in Spain. Both president and prime minister expressed surprise and distanced themselves from the arrest; Mr Putin said he was “worried” by it, but discerned no “political” aspect. Besides, Russia's legal system was independent. Even some of Mr Gusinsky's defenders have been willing to give Mr Putin the benefit of the doubt, suggesting that the instigators are cronies from the previous regime, driven by greed and revenge.

Yet a week before being elected president on March 26th, Mr Putin warned Russia's tycoons that their days of running the country were over. “Those people who fuse power and capital: there will be no oligarchs of this kind as a class,” he said. It was a popular warning. Mr Gusinsky's media empire would be a logical place to start; he built it thanks to political connections, backed the wrong side, and now should pay the penalty, goes the official thinking. His journalists fear he will agree to leave the country if freed, leaving his empire to more pliable owners.

Who, or what, will be next? If the main target is out-of-favour oligarchs, rather than civil liberties as such, a leading candidate would be Yuri Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. He was a chum of Mr Gusinsky's, and once the strongest challenger to the Kremlin's grip on power and money in Russia. The state-run media gave him a pounding before the general election last December, alleging murder, corruption, fraud, links to Scientology and so on. Since then, the central government has sacked several of his top officials. His municipal empire has been hacked back, although it still remains the biggest business in the city. Still, after grovelling to Mr Putin, Mr Luzhkov retrieved enough favour to accompany the president on a trip to Italy last week. But by comparing Mr Gusinsky's arrest to Stalin's terror in the 1930s, Mr Luzhkov may soon be heading back to the Kremlin's doghouse.

Another possible target is Anatoly Chubais, who co-ordinated the tycoons' support for Mr Gusinsky this week. Once Russia's best-known economic reformer, he is tainted at home by the unpopularity of his privatisation programme, which many Russians saw as giving the well-connected a licence to loot. In April 1998, he moved to the main electricity company, United Energy Systems, touting plans for proper management, investment and expansion. He used to be Mr Putin's boss in St Petersburg, but early signs that he might find a place in the president's team proved misleading. Now even his remaining fans among western investors have lost patience with his headstrong style and murky plans to sell off bits of his company. Its share price is dropping. That is a risky base from which to challenge the Kremlin.

It is possible that those behind Mr Gusinsky's arrest, whether Mr Putin or other Kremlin figures, underestimated the opposition it would arouse. Even oligarchs who had been successfully keeping their heads down signed the protest letter. They included Rem Vyakhirev, boss of Gazprom, the country's largest company, which is 38% owned by the state. He clashed with Mr Putin in January over a restructuring plan for the gas industry, but then backed down. Another signatory was Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a controversial oilman once vilified by his foreign shareholders but now reinventing himself as an investor-friendly Internet entrepreneur. Even Mr Luzhkov's chief television tormentor, Sergei Dorenko, has professed his support for Mr Gusinsky.

The main result of the arrest is to face Mr Putin with decisions that will shape his presidency. If he endorses his prosecutor's move or even fails to condemn it, he will need to deal with serious opposition for the first time since becoming president. If he denounces the arrest, he keeps his shaky democratic credentials but raises questions about his grip on government.

One puzzling aspect of the whole affair is its timing. Mr Putin had plenty on his plate already: his government is trying to push a radical income-tax reform through parliament, decide on an economic policy and restore central authority over Russia's 89 regions and republics. This last aim, hugely important if meant seriously, already looks in danger of misfiring. Mr Putin has also made several trips abroad.

Another big question involves the most powerful oligarch, Boris Berezovsky. He has clearly played an influential role so far in Mr Putin's presidency: plenty of his friends got top jobs in both government and the presidential administration. Some believe Mr Berezovsky's power is now so absolute that any sign of an attack on it is just face-saving camouflage for his puppet-president.

But there are signs of friction. On June 14th, the prosecutor's office said it was extending an investigation into the finances of Aeroflot, the state airline whose foreign-currency revenues were funnelled through Swiss companies linked to Mr Berezovsky; prosecutors there want to talk to him. That could be a hint that Mr Putin—or someone—is gunning for him too, after his unusual criticism earlier this month of Mr Putin's plans for tougher central control.

Russia's top oligarch seems an unlikely convert to the cause of constitutional government. His favourite theme is the need to “consolidate power”—just what Mr Putin seems to be attempting. It is notable, too, that Yevgeny Shvidler, head of Sibneft, one of Mr Berezovsky's supposed assets, has signed the joint letter of protest.

In any event, Mr Berezovsky is showing scant sympathy for Mr Gusinsky, saying that he had overstepped the mark in his “unconstructive” criticism of the government. He clearly assumes his own adverse remarks are a different matter. But will Mr Putin continue to agree? Russians are holding their breath.

[HFTengineer]

Vashdojme me pse u zgjodh putini dhe eokonomia:

Background[edit]
Putin's domestic policies, especially early in his first presidency, were aimed at creating a strict "vertical of power". On 13 May 2000, he issued a decree dividing the 89 federal subjects of Russia between 7 federal districts overseen by representatives named by himself in order to facilitate federal administration. Putin also pursued a policy of enlargement of federal subjects: their number was reduced from 89 in 2000 to the present 83 after the autonomous okrugs of Russia were merged with their parent subjects.


On 13 May 2000, Putin divided Russia into 7 federal districts. On 19 January 2010, the new 8th North Caucasian Federal District (shown here in purple) was split from Southern Federal District.
According to Stephen White, Russia under the presidency of Putin made it clear that it had no intention of establishing a "second edition" of the American or British political system, but rather a system that was closer to Russia's own traditions and circumstances.[1] Putin's administration has often been described as a "sovereign democracy".[2] First proposed by Vladislav Surkov in February 2006, the term quickly gained currency within Russia and arguably unified various political elites around it. According to its proponents, the government's actions and policies ought above all to enjoy popular support within Russia itself and not be determined from outside the country.[3][4]

In July 2000, according to a law proposed by him and approved by the Federal Assembly of Russia, Putin gained the right to dismiss heads of the federal subjects. In 2004, the direct election of governors by popular vote was ended. This was seen by Putin as a necessary move to stop separatist tendencies and get rid of those governors who were connected with organised crime.[5] The measure proved to be temporary: in 2012, as proposed by Putin's successor Dmitry Medvedev, the direct election of governors was re-introduced.[6] Along with the return of elected governors, Medvedev's reforms also simplified the registration of political parties and reduced the number of signatures required by non-parliamentary parties and independent candidates to participate in elections,[6] thus reverting or further loosening the restrictions imposed by previous Putin-endorsed legislation. Notably, the tough electoral legislation has been among the government actions effected under Putin's presidency that have been criticised by many independent Russian media outlets and Western commentators as anti-democratic.[7][8]

During his first term in office, Putin moved to curb the political ambitions of some of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, resulting in the exile or imprisonment of such people as Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky; other oligarchs soon joined Putin's camp.[citation needed]





the first Putin administration the economy made real gains of an average 7% per year (2000: 10%, 2001: 5.1%, 2002: 4.7%, 2003: 7.3%, 2004: 7.2%, 2005: 6.4%, 2006: 8.2%, 2007: 8.5%),[12] making it the 7th largest economy in the world in purchasing power. Russia's nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased 6 fold, climbing from 22nd to 10th largest in the world. In 2007, Russia's GDP exceeded that of Russian SFSR in 1990, meaning it has overcome the devastating consequences of the 1998 financial crisis and preceding recession in the 1990s.[13]

During Putin's first term of eight years in office, industry grew by 76%, investments increased by 125%,[13] and agricultural production and construction increased as well. Real incomes more than doubled and the average monthly salary increased sevenfold from $80 to $640.[14][15] From 2000 to 2006 the volume of consumer credit increased 45 times[16][17] and the middle class grew from 8 million to 55 million. The number of people living below the poverty line decreased from 30% in 2000 to 14% in 2008.[13][18]

In 2001, Putin, who has advocated liberal economic policies, introduced a flat tax rate of 13%;[19][20] the corporate rate of tax was also reduced from 35 percent to 24 percent;[19] Small businesses also get better treatment. The old system with high tax rates has been replaced by a new system where companies can choose either a 6-percent tax on gross revenue or a 15-percent tax on profits.[19] The overall tax burden is lower in Russia than in most European countries.[21]

A central concept in Putin's economic thinking was the creation of so-called National champions, vertically integrated companies in strategic sectors that are expected not only to seek profit, but also to "advance the interests of the nation". Examples of such companies include Gazprom, Rosneft and United Aircraft Corporation.[22]

Before the Putin era, in 1998, over 60% of industrial turnover in Russia was based on barter and various monetary surrogates. The use of such alternatives to money has now fallen out of favour, boosting economic productivity significantly. Besides raising wages and consumption, Putin's government has received broad praise also for eliminating this problem.[23]

Some oil revenue went to the stabilization fund established in 2004. The fund accumulated oil revenue, allowing Russia to repay all of the Soviet Union's debts by 2005. In early 2008, it was split into the Reserve Fund (designed to protect Russia from possible global financial shocks) and the National Welfare Fund, whose revenues will be used for a pension reform.[13]

Inflation remained a problem however, as between 1999–2007 it was kept at the forecast ceiling only twice, and in 2007 the inflation exceeded that of 2006, continuing an upward trend at the beginning of 2008.[13] The Russian economy is still commodity-driven despite its growth. Payments from the fuel and energy sector in the form of customs duties and taxes accounted for nearly half of the federal budget's revenues. The large majority of Russia's exports are made up of raw materials and fertilizers,[13] although exports as a whole accounted for only 8.7% of the GDP in 2007, compared to 20% in 2000.[24]

In December 2011, after 15 years of negotiations, Russia finally joined the World Trade Organisation. The accession to WTO was expected to be ratified by Russian Parliament in the spring of 2012.


Putin promotes the Lada Kalina brand driving through the recently opened Amur Highway in 2010.
To boost the market share of locally produced vehicles and support the Russia's automotive industry, the government under Putin implemented several protectionist measures and launched programs to attract foreign producers into the country. In late 2005, the government enacted legislation to create special economic zones (SEZ) with the aim of encouraging investments by foreign automotive companies. The benefits of operating in the special economic zones include tax allowances, abolishment of asset and land taxes and protection against changes in the tax regime. Some regions also provide extensive support for large investors (over $100 million.) These include Saint Petersburg/Leningrad Oblast, Kaluga Oblast and Kaliningrad Oblast.[25] Under Putin as President and Premier, most of the world's largest automotive companies opened plants in Russia, including Ford Motor Company, Toyota, General Motors, Nissan, Hyundai Motor, Suzuki, Magna International, Scania and MAN SE.

In 2005, Putin initiated an industry consolidation programme to bring the main aircraft producing companies under a single umbrella organization, the United Aircraft Corporation (UAC). The aim was optimize production lines and minimise losses. The programme was divided in three parts: reorganization and crisis management (2007–2010), evolution of existing projects (2010–2015) and further progress within the newly created structure (2015–2025).[26]

The UAC, one of the so-called national champions and comparable to EADS in Europe, enjoyed considerable financial support from the Russian government, and injected money to the companies it had acquired to improve their financial standing. The deliveries of civilian aircraft increased to 6 in 2005, and in 2009 the industry delivered 15 civilian aircraft, worth 12.5 billion roubles, mostly to domestic customers.[27] Since then Russia has successfully tested the fifth generation jet fighter, Sukhoi PAK FA, and started the commercial production of the regional airliner Sukhoi Superjet 100, as well as started developing a number of other major projects.

In a similar fashion, Putin created the United Shipbuilding Corporation in 2007, which led to the recovery[citation needed] of shipbuilding in Russia. Since 2006, much efforts were put into consolidation and development of the Rosatom Nuclear Energy State Corporation, which led to the renewed construction of nuclear power plants in Russia as well as a vast activity of Rosatom abroad, buying huge shares in world's leading uranium production companies and building nuclear power plants in many countries, including Iran, China, Vietnam and Belarus.[citation needed] In 2007, the Russian Nanotechnology Corporation was established, aimed to boost the science and technology and high-tech industry in Russia.[28]


Under Putin, Russia strengthened its position as a key oil and gas supplier to much of Europe.
In the decade following 2000, energy in Russia helped transform the country, especially oil and gas energy. This transformation promoted Russia's well-being and international influence, and the country was frequently described in the media as an energy superpower.[29] Putin oversaw growing taxation of oil and gas exports which helped finance the budget, while the oil industry of Russia, production, and exports all significantly grew.

Putin sought to increase Russia's share of the European energy market by building submerged gas pipelines bypassing Ukraine and the New Europe (the countries which were often seen as non-reliable transit partners by Russia, especially following Russia-Ukraine gas disputes of the late 2000s (decade)). The pipeline projects backed by Putin include the Blue Stream from Russia to Turkey (build on the Black Sea bed), Nord Stream from Russia to Germany (the longest sub-sea pipeline in the world, built through the Baltic Sea) and the planned South Stream from Russia to the Balkans and Italy (via the Black Sea). Russia also undermined the rival pipeline project Nabucco by buying the Turkmen gas and redirecting it into Russian pipelines.

On the other hand, Russia diversified its export markets by building the Trans-Siberian oil pipeline to the markets of China, Japan and Korea, as well as the Sakhalin–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok gas pipeline in the Russian Far East. Russia has built LNG plant on Sakhalin and is building another one in Primorye, aiming to increase the overseas gas exports. Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Finland Russia has built a major Ust-Luga port connected to the Baltic Pipeline System-II, which allowed to export oil without transit through the ports of the Baltic states. The share of processed oil slowly grows with major oil refineries being built in Tatarstan and other regions of Russia.

Putin also presided over resuming the construction of major hydropower plants, such as the Bureya Dam and the Boguchany Dam, as well as the restoration of the nuclear industry of Russia, with some 1 trillion rubles ($42.7 billion) allocated from the federal budget to nuclear power and industry development before 2015.[30] A large number of nuclear power stations and units are currently being constructed by the state corporation Rosatom in Russia and abroad.



July 9, 2000, in speaking to Parliament, Putin advocated economy policies[53] that introduced flat tax rate of 13%;[54] the corporate rate of tax was also reduced from 35 percent to 24 percent;[54] Small businesses also get better treatment. The old system with high tax rates has been replaced by a new system where companies can choose either a 6 percent tax on gross revenue or a 15 percent tax on profits.[54]

In February 2009, Putin called for a single VAT rate to be "as low as possible" (at the time it stood at an average rate of 18 percent): it could be reduced to between 12 percent and 13 percent.[55] Overall tax burden was lower in Russia under Putin than in most European countries.[56]



ecovery and growth (1999–2008)

Oil prices in the 2000s
Russia bounced back from the August 1998 financial crash with surprising speed. Much of the reason for the recovery was devaluation of the ruble, which made domestic producers more competitive nationally and internationally.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia
Between 2000 and 2002, there was a significant amount of pro-growth economic reforms including a comprehensive tax reform, which introduced a flat income tax of 13%; and a broad effort at deregulation which improved the situation for small and medium-sized enterprises.[63]

Between 2000 and 2008, Russian economy got a major boost from rising commodity prices. GDP grew on average 7% per year.[56][64] Disposable incomes more than doubled and in dollar-denominated terms increased eightfold.[36] The volume of consumer credit between 2000–2006 increased 45 times, fuelling a boom in private consumption.[65][66] The number of people living below poverty line declined from 30% in 2000 to 14% in 2008.[64][67][68]

Inflation remained a problem however, as the central bank aggressively expanded money supply to combat appreciation of the ruble.[69] Nevertheless, in 2007 the World Bank declared that the Russian economy achieved "unprecedented macroeconomic stability".[70] Until October 2007, Russia maintained impressive fiscal discipline with budget surpluses every year from 2000.[63]

[HFTengineer]

Radhes tjeter para se te flashesh kas mundsi te sjellesh ca fakte.

90 % te olifgarkeve ktu jane cifut.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...a.lukeharding1


http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative...s-3163918.html



Kta te harvardit ekonmista neoliberal te kohes se klintonit apo klintonomisk dhe harvaridid

Si andrei shefer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Shleifer

Robert rubiun :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rubin


Larry summers:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/20...resident-in-a/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers

jane cifuta


organizaun loan per share dhe anatoli chubais ekonmisti qe beri kto reforma ehste cifuit:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Chubais

[HFTengineer]

Dlaim tek olgarket ukrainas cifut dhe neokonservatistat :

https://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/0...s/?print=print


A senior U.S. diplomat told me recently that if Russia were to occupy all of Ukraine and even neighboring Belarus that there would be zero impact on U.S. national interests. The diplomat wasn’t advocating that, of course, but was noting the curious reality that Official Washington’s current war hysteria over Ukraine doesn’t connect to genuine security concerns.

So why has so much of the Washington Establishment from prominent government officials to all the major media pundits devoted so much time this past year to pounding their chests over the need to confront Russia regarding Ukraine? Who is benefiting from this eminently avoidable yet extremely dangerous crisis? What’s driving the madness?

Of course, Washington’s conventional wisdom is that America only wants “democracy” for the people of Ukraine and that Russian President Vladimir Putin provoked this confrontation as part of an imperialist design to reclaim Russian territory lost during the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. But that “group think” doesn’t withstand examination. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Who’s Telling the Big Lie on Ukraine?”]

The Ukraine crisis was provoked not by Putin but by a combination of the European Union’s reckless move to expand its influence eastward and the machinations of U.S. neoconservatives who were angered by Putin’s collaboration with President Barack Obama to tamp down confrontations in Syria and Iran, two neocon targets for “regime change.”

Plus, if “democracy promotion” were the real motive, there were obviously better ways to achieve it. Democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych pledged on Feb. 21 in an agreement guaranteed by three European nations to surrender much of his power and hold early elections so he could be voted out of office if the people wanted.

However, on Feb. 22, the agreement was brushed aside as neo-Nazi militias stormed presidential buildings and forced Yanukovych and other officials to flee for their lives. Rather than stand behind the Feb. 21 arrangement, the U.S. State Department quickly endorsed the coup regime that emerged as “legitimate” and the mainstream U.S. press dutifully demonized Yanukovych by noting, for instance, that a house being built for him had a pricy sauna.

The key role of the neo-Nazis, who were given several ministries in recognition of their importance to the putsch, was studiously ignored or immediately forgotten by all the big U.S. news outlets. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ Reality.”]

So, it’s hard for any rational person to swallow the official line that the U.S. interest in the spiraling catastrophe of Ukraine, now including thousands of ethnic Russians killed by the coup regime’s brutal “anti-terrorist operation,” was either to stop Putin’s imperial designs or to bring “democracy” to the Ukrainians.

That skepticism combined with the extraordinary danger of stoking a hot war on the border of nuclear-armed Russia has caused many observers to search for more strategic explanations behind the crisis, such as the West’s desires to “frack” eastern Ukraine for shale gas or the American determination to protect the dollar as the world’s currency.

Thermo-Nuclear War Anyone?

The thinking is that when the potential cost of such an adventure, i.e. thermo-nuclear warfare that could end all life on the planet, is so high, the motivation must be commensurate. And there is logic behind that thinking although it’s hard to conceive what financial payoff is big enough to risk wiping out all humanity including the people on Wall Street.

But sometimes gambles are made with the assumption that lots of money can be pocketed before cooler heads intervene to prevent total devastation — or even the more immediate risk that the Ukraine crisis will pitch Europe into a triple-dip recession that could destabilize the fragile U.S. economy, too.

In the Ukraine case, the temptation has been to think that Moscow hit with escalating economic sanctions will back down even as the EU and U.S. energy interests seize control of eastern Ukraine’s energy reserves. The fracking could mean both a financial bonanza to investors and an end to Russia’s dominance of the natural gas supplies feeding central and eastern Europe. So the economic and geopolitical payoff could be substantial.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, Ukraine has Europe’s third-largest shale gas reserves at 42 trillion cubic feet, an inviting target especially since other European nations, such as Britain, Poland, France and Bulgaria, have resisted fracking technology because of environmental concerns. An economically supine Ukraine would presumably be less able to say no. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Beneath the Ukraine Crisis: Shale Gas.”]

Further supporting the “natural gas motive” is the fact that it was Vice President Joe Biden who demanded that President Yanukovych pull back his police on Feb. 21, a move that opened the way for the neo-Nazi militias and the U.S.-backed coup. Then, just three months later, Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.

While that might strike some of you as a serious conflict of interest, even vocal advocates for ethics in government lost their voices amid Washington’s near-universal applause for the ouster of Yanukovych and warm affection for the coup regime in Kiev.

For instance, Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, dismissed the idea that Hunter Biden’s new job should raise eyebrows, telling Reuters: “It can’t be that because your dad is the vice president, you can’t do anything,”

Who Is Behind Burisma?

Soon, Burisma a shadowy Cyprus-based company was lining up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.

As Time magazine reported, “Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.”

According to investigative journalism in Ukraine, the ownership of Burisma has been traced to Privat Bank, which is controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the coup regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine. Kolomoysky also has been associated with the financing of brutal paramilitary forces killing ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.

Also, regarding this energy motive, it shouldn’t be forgotten that on Dec. 13, 2013, when neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland reminded Ukrainian business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their “European aspirations,” she was at a conference sponsored by Chevron. She even stood next to the company’s logo.

So, clearly energy resources and the billions of dollars that go with them should be factored in when trying to solve the mystery of why Official Washington has gone so berserk about a confrontation with Russia that boils down to whether ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine should be allowed some measure of autonomy or be put firmly under the thumb of U.S.-friendly authorities in Kiev.

There’s also the issue of Russia’s interest in exploring with China and other emerging economies the possibility of escaping the financial hegemony of the U.S. dollar, a move that could seriously threaten American economic dominance. According to this line of thinking, the U.S. and its close allies need to bring Moscow to its geopolitical knees where it was under the late Boris Yeltsin to stop any experimentation with other currencies for global trade.

Again, the advocates for this theory have a point. Protecting the Mighty Dollar is of utmost importance to Wall Street. The financial cataclysm of a potential ouster of the U.S. dollar as the world’s benchmark currency might understandably prompt some powerful people to play a dangerous game of chicken with nuclear-armed Russia.

Of course, there’s also the budgetary interest of NATO and the U.S. “military-industrial complex” (which helps fund many of Washington’s “think tanks”) to hype every propaganda opportunity to scare the American people about the “Russian threat.”

And, it’s a truism that every major international confrontation has multiple drivers. Think back on the motives behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Among a variety of factors were Vice President Dick Cheney’s lust for oil, President George W. Bush’s psychological rivalry with his father, and the neocons’ interest in orchestrating “regime change” in countries considered hostile to Israel. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

There are also other reasons to disdain Putin, from his bare-chested horseback riding to his retrograde policies on gay rights. But he is no Stalin and surely no Hitler.

The Neocons’ ‘Samson Option’

So, while it’s reasonable to see multiple motives behind the brinksmanship with Russia over Ukraine, the sheer recklessness of the confrontation has, to me, the feel of an ideology or an “ism,” where people are ready to risk it all for some larger vision that is central to their being.

That is why I have long considered the Ukraine crisis to be an outgrowth of the neoconservative obsession with Israel’s interests in the Middle East.

Not only did key neocons the likes of Assistant Secretary Nuland and Sen. John McCain put themselves at the center of the coup plotting last winter but the neocons had an overriding motive: they wanted to destroy the behind-the-scenes collaboration between President Obama and President Putin who had worked together to avert a U.S. bombing campaign against the Syrian government a year ago and then advanced negotiations with Iran over limiting but not eliminating its nuclear program.

[HFTengineer]

Between 2009 and 2013, including when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation received at least $8.6 million from the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, according to that foundation, which is based in Kiev, Ukraine.

It was created by Mr. Pinchuk, whose fortune stems from a pipe-making company. He served two terms as an elected member of the Ukrainian Parliament and is a proponent of closer ties between Ukraine and the European Union.

In 2008, Mr. Pinchuk made a five-year, $29 million commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative, a wing of the foundation that coordinates charitable projects and funding for them but doesn’t handle the money. The pledge was to fund a program to train future Ukrainian leaders and professionals “to modernize Ukraine,” according to the Clinton Foundation. Several alumni are current members of the Ukrainian Parliament. Actual donations so far amount to only $1.8 million, a Pinchuk foundation spokesman said, citing the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2015/...ch-in-ukraine/