



Once in a while miracles indeed happen. Lately, more and more often, even in the US corporate media. After Tucker Carlson decided that truth could be proven more profitable than lies and propaganda, it was the turn of Jeffrey Sachs, one of the early economists of the neoliberal priesthood, to shock MSNBC pro-war pundits inside their home.





The most hilarious detail in the whole story, is that, apparently, the MSNBC pundits wanted another neoliberal to say that Donald Trump is dangerous, and stop there. Why did they pick Sachs? Obviously because of his past record, especially his central role in the destruction of Russian economy in the 90s through a tsunami of neoliberal policies.





But Sachs had an unpleasant surprise for them. Instead of just confirming that Donald Trump is dangerous and actually 'unsuitable' to conduct wars, he went further and condemned all the devastating pro-war policies before him. Essentially, he said indirectly that Trump is the symptom of all previous bad policies, not the problem. And then, he said that the establishment mechanism was keep pushing Trump to go to war.





Watch the anxiety of MSNBC pundits as he goes out of control:









Adam Curtis gives us the details about how Jeffrey Sachs, member of the free market gurus back in the 90s, literally destroyed the Russian economy:





In 1992, the American government had passed the Freedom Support Act. Its aim was to help Russia reconstruct itself. Along with millions of dollars of aid, came a group of young American advisers, economists and political theorists, that had a radical vision of what was necessary. They called it 'Shock therapy'. The aim was to remove all State control over the Russian economy as a stroke. All price subsidies will be removed, and all State industries privatized overnight. Their leader was a Harvard economist called Jeffrey Sachs.





The Americans allied themselves with a group of young radical free marketeers around Yeltsin, and together they drew up a plan. Underlying it there was a theory of how to transform society by creating new human beings. It was the same theory that laid behind the rise of what was called market democracy in Britain and America in the 1980s.





The theory said that if one destroyed all the elite institutions that in the past had told people what to do, and instead allowed individuals to become independent in the market place, then they would become new kinds of rational beings, choosing what they wanted. Out of this, would come a new form of order, and a new kind of democracy, in which the market, not politics, gave people what they wanted.





But things didn't work out as the theory predicted. On the first day of the plan, all price controls in Russia were removed, and the cost of all goods soared. Millions of people found themselves unable to afford even the most basic of goods, and with no one to help them. The only solution for millions of Russians, was to come out on to the streets and sell their belongings for anything they could get.





The chaos began to spread, as the currency no longer had any value. Factories began to pay their workers in the products they made, which the people then had to sell wherever they could in order to live. Then, the privatization plan kicked in. Every Russian was given vouchers to buy shares in the privatized companies, but desperate for cash, they simply sold their vouchers to ruthless businessmen for a fraction of their worth. And a new elite began to emerge who snapped off vast sections of Russian industry. They became known as the 'oligarchs'.









As Joseph Stiglitz describes in his book Globalization and Its Discontents:





Globalization and the introduction of a market economy has not produced the promised results in Russia and most of the other economies making the transition from communism to the market. These countries were told by the West that the new economic system would bring them unprecedented prosperity. Instead, it brought unprecedented poverty: in many respects, for most of the people, the market economy proved even worse than their Communist leaders had predicted. The contrast between Russia's transition, as engineered by the international economic institutions, and that of China, designed by itself, could not be greater: While in 1990 China's gross domestic product (GDP) was 60 percent that of Russia, by the end of the decade the numbers had been reversed. While Russia saw an unprecedented increase in poverty, China saw an unprecedented decrease.





The radical reform strategy did not work: gross domestic product in post-1989 Russia fell, year after year. What had been envisioned as a short transition recession turned into one of a decade or more. The bottom seemed never in sight. The devastation-the loss in GDP was greater than Russia had suffered in World War II. In the period 1940-46 the Soviet Union industrial production fell 24 percent. In the period 1990--99, Russian industrial production fell by almost 60 percent-even greater than the fall in GDP (54%).







