Replies

“completely blows away the analysis of an international bank (UBS’s) highly trained Harvard PhD economist”

What - am I supposed to go on my knees and genuflect in the direction of cambridge”

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Harvard bean counters have ruined this country in the last 30 years but let me give another example that you should be able to fathom.

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’
PHOENIX - Who says you can’t have your cake and eat it, too? All it takes is the New Math invented by the Harvard leftist “voodoo economists,” led by Jeffrey Sachs of the Harvard Institute of International Development (HIID). And the greasing of the palms which helps make the unpalatable digestible.

During the 1992-1994 Yegor Gaidar-orchestrated “reforms,” inspired by these heavy duty Harvard liberals - read “commies” - “these guys were able to carry on the biggest privatization in the world without creating a single private enterprise,” a free market Russian economist Larisa Piyasheva seethed in a just-completed book by Anne Williamson, “How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy.”

(Lest you forget, Gaidar was that “western darling” who was supposed to lead the “backward Russians’” on their road to capitalism and prosperity, under the tutelage of the HIID. Instead, this former ‘aparatchik’ had led his nation to corruption and ruin before being fired in 1994).

How is that possible? Williamson, who has covered Russia since 1987 for a myriad of U.S. publications, ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the SPY magazine, explains in her hard-hitting book due to be published soon by Farrar, Straus and Giroux:

“What GKI [Russian investments’ committee] did was to value all state property at 150 billion rubles at 1991 prices and to divide that figure by a population of 150 million, leaving a share worth 10,000 rubles to each individual, the voucher’s face value. Two thirds of the 150 billion whole was immediately excluded from privatization entirely [a private perch reserved for the Yeltsin aparachiks’ personal gains. TiM Ed.]. The remaining third was then divided again. Again, one half of that third was excluded. The remaining half of the third was the property privatized in 1992-94, but it too was divided.

Small property - mostly municipal holdings - was auctioned for cash. Only what remained of the last division was subject to voucher privatization as it had been defined. However, of any single property privatized by voucher, 46% went to workers, 5% to management, 29% was sold at cash auctions and the remaining 20% - at a minimum - was left in the state’s hands, meaning that at the end of the privatization process the state’s largest shareholding dwarfed others’ claims and therefore was the controlling shareholder of any “privatized” Russian asset.

The program had indeed put in place an expensive, time-consuming, distracting and destructive paper chase at the conclusion of which the government stood still mighty as the largest shareholder in any single allegedly privatized enterprise.”

If the preceding comes as a surprise to you, as it may to many readers who have exclusively relied on the establishment media as sources of information on Russia, then you ought to line up in front of the nation’s bookstores when Ms. Williamson’s book becomes available. Just as some brain-dead Americans did last on Mar. 23 so they could catch a glimpse of Hollywood’s (also mostly brain-dead) stars arriving for the Academy Awards presentations.

For, the “Financial Crime of the Century” - the plunder of Russia’s assets following the end of the Cold War by the New World Order (NWO) sharks and hyenas - will make a far more interesting a story than the high-tech sinking of the “Titanic.” Even in monetary terms Russia’s disaster was a bigger story. According to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, it was a $400 billion heist.