Darren Weeks
Coalition to Govern America
November 10, 2018
President Trump and the First Lady are in Paris today to celebrate the end of the Great War, the war to end all wars, or World War I. Regardless of what one chooses to call it, it is a war that ended in 1918. While we should always celebrate the end of state-sponsored killing, how stupid is it for a sitting president to celebrate the end of a war that reached its conclusion a century ago, when we currently have U.S. troops fighting and dying every day in theaters all over the world? How ridiculous is it for the president of the United States to herald the end of a one hundred year-old war, when he has stacked his cabinet with warmongering neocons and hawks whose policy recommendations are driving him to make decisions which are pushing the United States dangerously closer to the next hot war? How sick it is to think of celebrating peace, when we have the Mockingbird media pushing narratives of the intelligence establishment to create enmity with Russia, the ultimate insane goal of which seems to be regime change?
We have chronicled how the Deep State controls the White House, producing false flag attacks to manipulate the president into reversing his orders to pullout troops from Syria. It is clear that the real purpose of the never-ending Robert Mueller witch hunt, coupled with the endless and groundless accusations of Russian collusion, are to create a political environment so as to make it politically impossible for Trump to form a relationship with Vladamir Putin that would be based upon the precepts of peace. It is very sad to see the president cowering to the bullying, going along with the unproven allegations of Russian hacking into the U.S. election systems. To date, there has never been any proof, only repeated claims.
The Mueller "probe" also serves as cover for the real conspiracy of collusion that transcends party lines — the conspiracy to loot Russia by rich oligarchs and wealthy billionaires, some of whom used the taxpayer resources at the U.S. State Department's Agency for International Development to do it.
Larry Summers, former chief economist for the World Bank, and later, treasury secretary for Bill Clinton, led a privatization scheme in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, following its collapse. Summers was the president of Harvard, and it was the Harvard Institute for International Development which was the vehicle through which billions of taxpayer dollars from USAID, flowed, working with corrupt officials inside the Russian government, including Boris Yeltsin and an associate of his by the name of Anatoly Chubais, to acquire resources that had formerly belonged to the communist state. After selling off the country's resources for pennies on the dollar, Yeltsin gave Chubais control over the Russian economy. The New York Times shed light on the feeling of the Russian people toward Chubais, describing why he had become "the most hated public figure in Russia" (text underscored by me):
Rapidly delivering on his promise to throw some human dynamite into the faltering Russian Government, President Boris N. Yeltsin named his most effective yet despised aide tonight to a position that will essentially give him control of the economy.
The appointment of the aide, Anatoly B. Chubais, as First Deputy Prime Minister had been expected and it was eagerly anticipated by Western investors who see the President's canny 41-year-old chief of staff as the only man capable of keeping the nation on the troublesome road to economic reform.
But the news, which was released late tonight at the beginning of a long holiday weekend, was met with far more skepticism here than in Washington or in Paris. Mr. Chubais is the most hated public figure in Russia, having led the initial, disastrous and much-detested effort to introduce privatization here.
Sophisticated, politically aware and deeply committed to economic reform and free-market solutions, Mr. Chubais is nonetheless branded by millions as the man who gave away the country's giant factories, its stores and its nearly bottomless pit of natural resources for next to nothing.
Western investors — or more accurately, predator capitalists — "eagarly anticipated" Chubais' ascension to the office because they knew it would mean that their privatization gravy train would continue, at the expense of the Russian people. Wikipedia has this account of Chubais' oversight of privatization in Russia, and its cost to the Russian people:
In November 1991, Chubais became a minister in the Yeltsin Cabinet where he managed the portfolio of Rosimushchestvo (the Committee for the Management of State Property) which was handling privatization in Russia.
Chubais originally advocated rapid privatization in order to raise revenue, similar to the model used in Hungary. However, the Congress of People's Deputies of Russia rejected this model. Eventually, a compromise was proposed in the form of a voucher privatization program akin to the program used in the Czech Republic at the time. On 11 June 1991 the Supreme Soviet of Russia adopted this compromise and the massive program was officially initiated by decree of President Boris Yeltsin on 19 August 1991. This privatization program later came under heavy criticism. While most Russian citizens lost their savings in only a few weeks, a few oligarchs became billionaires by arbitraging the vast difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. The people who benefited from this arbitrage became known as "kleptocrats" because they stashed billions of dollars in Swiss bank accounts rather than investing in the Russian economy.
Dean Baker of The Center for Economic and Policy Research expands upon the depth of this theft from the Russian people:
Between 1990 and 1998, Russia’s economy suffered perhaps the worst downturn of any major country that was not the victim of either war or natural disaster. The proximate cause of course was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the replacement of its system of central planning with a market economy. Larry Summers played a large role in shaping this transition, first as chief economist for the World Bank, then as the undersecretary for international affairs at the Treasury Department and later as the Deputy Treasury Secretary.
Since Russia’s economy had been guided largely by central planning for close to 70 years, this transition would have been difficult even under the best of circumstances. However the actual transition was hardly the best of circumstances. Corruption infested every aspect of the privatization. Those with connections in the government were able to become billionaires almost overnight, as they were allowed to buy Russia’s businesses and resources at a small fraction of their market value.
According to the World Bank, Russia’s government was paid just $8.3 billion from privatizing assets over the years 1990-1998, a period when most of its economy was turned over to private control. By comparison, Lukoil, Russia’s largest private oil company, had a market value of $268.8 billion on August 2, more than 30 times as much as the payments that Russia’s government received for all the assets it sold over this 8-year period.
The data clearly show the devastation that this failed transition imposed on the Russian people. According to the United Nation’s Human Development Report, Russia’s per capita income fell by one-third between 1990 and 2000, a decline that dwarfs the falloff in the Great Depression in the United States. This had enormous consequences in the daily lives of the Russian people as the system of social supports that provided basic services collapsed with nothing to replace it. The Development Report shows a drop in life expectancy fell from 68 in 1990 to 65 in 2000, a drop implying that millions of people would be dying at a younger age than would have been the case a decade earlier.
It was this looting that was stopped by none other than Vladamir Putin, when he came to power. It is for this reason that Putin is hated among them, and that he is in their crosshairs. Many western vulture capitalists took advantage of the privatization scheme, not the least of which is a man by the name of William Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management. Browder is a key figure in understanding the anti-Russian narrative being put forth by the Mockingbird media, and the allegations of Russian collusion and election tampering. I will write more about Browder in the future.
In the meantime, we are left with a president that, while undoubtedly well-intentioned, is still very much under the control of the money powers and the intelligence establishment, which together, serve as a shadow government. It is this Deep State (or permanent state) who make the decisions, whether overtly or by coercion. It is this Deep State which intends to drive the United States into the next world war, at any cost to the people. Until they are stopped, there will be nothing to celebrate.
