An old Russian gold mining town…….

The other day I was surprised to learn that Jeffrey Sachs, the creator of “shock therapy” capitalism, who participated in the looting of Russia in the 1990s, is now NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top adviser for health care. So we in NY will get shock therapy, much as the Russians did two decades ago. Here is a story I wrote for The Wanderer in 2000:

How Clinton & Company & The Bankers Plundered Russia

by Paul Likoudis (May 4, 2000)

In an ordinary election year, Anne Williamson’s Contagion would be

political dynamite, a bombshell, a block-buster, a regime breaker.

If America were a free and democratic country, with a free press and

independent publishing houses (and assuming, of course, that Americans were a

literate people), Williamson’s book would topple the Clinton regime, the

World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the rest of the criminal

cabal that inhabits the world of modern corporate statism faster than you

could say “Jonathan Hay.”

Hay, for those who need an introduction to the international financial

buccaneers who control our lives, was the general director of the Harvard

Institute of International Development (HIID) in Moscow (1992-1997), who

facilitated the crippling of the Russian economy and the plundering of its

industrial and manufacturing infrastructure with a strategy concocted by

Larry Summers, Andre Schliefer (HIID’s Cambridge-based manager), Jeffrey

Sachs and his Swedish sidekick Anders Aslund, and a host of private players

from banks and investment houses in Boston and New York — a plan approved and

assisted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

Contagion can be read on many different levels.

At its simplest, it is a breezy, slightly cynical, highly entertaining

narrative of Russian history from the last months of Gorbachev’s rule to

April 2000 — a period which saw Russia transformed from a decaying socialist

economy (which despite its shortcomings, provided a modest standard of living

to its citizens) to a “managed economy” where home-grown gangsters and

socialist theoreticians from the West, like Hay and his fellow Harvardian

Jeffrey Sachs, delivered 2,500% inflation and indescribable poverty, and

transferred the ownership of Russian industry to Western financiers.

Williamson was an eyewitness who lived on and off in Russia for more than

ten years, where she reported on all things Russian for The New York Times, Th

e Wall Street Journal, and a host of other equally reputable publications.

She knew and interviewed just about everybody involved in this gargantuan

plundering scheme: Russian politicians and businessmen, the new “gangster”

capitalists and their American sponsors from the IMF, the World Bank, USAID,

Credit Suisse First Boston, the CIA, the KGB — all in all, hundreds of

sources who spoke candidly, often ruthlessly, of their parts in this terrible

human drama.

Her account is filled with quotations from interviews with top aides of

Yeltsin and Clinton, all down through the ranks of the two hierarchical

societies to the proliferating mass of Russian destitute, pornographers,

pimps, drug dealers, and prostitutes. Some of the principal characters, of

course, refused to talk to Williamson, such as Bill Clinton’s longtime friend

from Oxford, Strobe Talbott, now a deputy secretary of state and, Williamson

suspects, a onetime KGB operative whose claim to fame is a deceitful

translation of the Khrushchev Memoirs. (A KGB colonel refused to confirm or

deny to Williamson that Clinton and Talbott visited North Vietnam together in

1971 — though he did confirm their contacts with the KGB for their protests

against the U.S. war in Vietnam in Moscow. See especially footnote 1, page

210.)

The 546-page book (the best part of which is the footnotes) gives a nearly

day-by-day report on what happened to Russia; left unstated, but implied on

every page, is the assumption that those in the United States who think what

happened in Russia “can’t happen here” better realize it can happen here.

Once the Clinton regime and its lapdogs in the media defined Russian thug

Boris Yeltsin as a “democrat,” the wholesale looting of Russia began.

According to the socialist theoreticians at Harvard, Russia needed to be

brought into the New World Order in a hurry; and what better way to do it

than Sachs’ “shock therapy” — a plan that empowered the degenerate,

third-generation descendants of the original Bolsheviks by assigning them the

deeds of Russia’s mightiest state-owned industries — including the giant gas,

oil, electrical, and telecommunications industries, the world’s largest

paper, iron, and steel factories, the world’s richest gold, silver, diamond,

and platinum mines, automobile and airplane factories, etc. — who, in turn,

sold some of their shares of the properties to Westerners for a song, and

pocketed the cash, while retaining control of the companies.

These third-generation Bolsheviks — led by former Pravda hack Yegor Gaidar,

grandson of a Bolshevik who achieved prominence as the teenage mass murderer

of White Army officers, now heads the Moscow-based Institute for Economies in

Transition — became instant millionaires (or billionaires) and left the

Russian workers virtual slaves of them and their new foreign investors.

When Russian members of the Supreme Soviet openly criticized the looting of

the national patrimony by these new gangsters early in the U.S.-driven

“reform” program, in 1993, before all Soviet institutions were destroyed,

Yeltsin bombed Parliament.

Ironically, when Harvard’s Sachs and Hay started identifying Russians they

could work with, they ignored — or shunned — the most capable talent at hand:

those numerous Russian economists who for 20 years had been studying the

Swiss economist Wilhelm von Roepke and his disciple, Ludwig Erhard, father of

Germany’s “economic miracle” in anticipation of the day when Communism would

collapse.

Somewhat sardonically, Williamson notes that one, probably unintended,

benefit of Gorbachev’s perestroika was the recruitment of these Russian

economists by top U.S. universities.

In the new, emerging global economy, it’s clear that Russia is the

designated center for heavy manufacturing — just as Asia is for clothing and

computers — with its nearly unlimited supply of hydroelectric power, iron and

steel, timber, gold and other precious metals.

This helps explain why America’s political elites don’t give a fig about

the closing down of American industries and mines. As Williamson observes,

Russia is viewed as some kind of “closet.”

What is important for Western readers to understand — as Williamson reports

— is that when Western banks and corporations bought these companies at

bargain basement prices, they bought more than just industrial equipment. In

the Soviet model, every unit of industrial production included workers’

housing, churches, opera houses, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, etc., and

the whole kit-and-caboodle was included in the selling price. By buying large

shares of these companies, Western corporations became, ipso facto, town

managers.

Another Level

On another level, Contagion is about the workings of international finance,

the consolidation of capital into fewer and fewer hands, and the ruthless,

death-dealing policies it inflicts on its target countries through currency

manipulation, inflation, depression, taxation and war — with emphasis on

Russia but with attention also given to Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, the

Balkans, and other countries, and how it uses its control over money to

produce social chaos.

Those who read Williamson’s book will find particularly interesting her

treatment of the Federal Reserve, and how this “bank” was designed to plunder

the wealth of America through war, debt, and taxation, in order to maintain

what is nothing more nor less than a giant pyramid scheme that depends on

domination of the earth and its resources.

Williamson is of that small but noble school of economics writers who

believe that the academic field of economics is not some esoteric science

that can only be comprehended by those with IQs in four digits, and she —

drawing on such writers as Hayek and von Mises, Roepke and the late American

Murray Rothbard — explains in layman’s vocabulary the nuts and bolts of sound

economic principles and the real-world effects of the Fed’s policies on

hapless Americans.

Contagion also serves up a severe indictment of the World Bank, the

International Monetary Fund, and the other international “lending” agencies

spawned by the Council on Foreign Relations and similar “councils” and

“commissions” which are fronts for the big banks run by the Houses of

Rockefeller, Morgan, Warburg, et al.

The policies inflicted on Russia by the banks were cruel to the Nth degree;

but the policy implementers — Williamson employs the derogatory Russian word m

yakigolovy (“soft-headed ones”) applied to the Americans — were a foppish

lot, streaming into Russia by the thousands (the IMF, alone, with 150

staffers) with their outrageous salaries and per diem allowances, renting out

the finest dachas, bringing in their exotic consumer goods, driving up prices

for goods and rents, spurring a boom in the drug and prostitution businesses,

and then watching, cold-heartedly, the declining fortunes of their hosts as

they lost everything — including the artistic heritage of the country.

Williamson describes brilliantly that heady atmosphere in Moscow in the

early days of the IMF/USAID loan-scamming: a 24-hour party. There were bars

like the Canadian-operated Hungry Duck, which lured Russian teenage girls

into its bar with a male striptease and free drinks, “who, once thoroughly

intoxicated, were then exposed to crowds of anxious young men the club

admitted only late in the evening.”

The Third Level

At a third and more intriguing level, Contagion is about America’s criminal

politics in the Clinton regime, and, inevitably, the reader will put

Williamson’s book down with the sense that Al Gore will be the next occupier

of the White House.

Gore, who was raised to be President, has impeccable Russian connections.

His father, of course, was Lenin financier Armand Hammer’s pocket senator,

and it was Hammer who paid for Al Jr.’s expensive St. Alban’s Prep schooling;

and, as Williamson reports, Al Jr.’s daughter married Andrew Schiff, grandson

of Jacob, who, as a member of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., underwrote anti-czarist

political agitation for two decades before Lenin’s coup, and congratulated

Lenin upon his successful revolution.

Williamson also documents Gore’s intimate involvement with powerful Wall

Street financial houses, and his New York breakfast meeting with

multibillionaire George Soros (a key Russian player) just as the Russian

collapse was underway.

Williamson tells an interesting story of Gore’s response to the IMF/World

Bank/USAID plunder of U.S. taxpayers for the purpose of hobbling Russia.

By March 1999, Russia was now a financial basket case, and billions, if not

tens of billions of U.S. taxpayer-backed loans had vanished into the secret

bank accounts of both Russian and American gangster capitalists, and the news

was starting to make little vibrations on Capitol Hill.

“The U.S. administration’s response to the debacle was repulsively similar

to a typical Bill Clinton bimbo-eruption operation: Having ruined Russia by

cosseting her in debt, meddling ignorantly in her internal affairs, and

funding a drunken usurper, his agents denied all error and slandered

(‘slimed’) her,” writes Williamson.

“Pundits and academics joined government officials in bemoaning Mother

Russia’s thieving ways, her bottomless corruption and constant chaos, all the

while wringing their soft hands with a schoolmarm’s exasperation. Russia’s

self-appointed democracy coach Strobe Talbott (‘Pro-Consul Strobe’ to the

Russians) would get it right. An equally sanctimonious Albert Gore — the same

Al Gore who’d been so quick to return the CIA’s 1995 report detailing Viktor

Chernomyrdin’s and Anatoly Chubais’ personal corruption with the single word

‘Bullshit’ scrawled across it — took the low road and sniffed that the

Russians would just have to get their own economic house in order and cut

their own deal with the IMF. . . .”

The cost to the American taxpayers of Clinton regime bailouts in a

three-and-a-half-year period, Williamson notes, is more than $180 billion!

The “new financial architecture” Clinton has erected, she writes, “isn’t new

at all, but rather something the international public lenders have been

wanting for decades, i.e., an automatic bailout for their own bad practices.”

As the extent of the corruption of the Clinton-Yeltsin “reform” plan for

Russia unfolded last year, with the attendant Bank of New York scandal, the

mysterious death of super banker Edmond Safra in his Monte Carlo penthouse,

the collapse of the Russian stock market, and the whiplash effect in

Southeast Asia, Congress was pressed to hold hearings.

What resulted, as Williamson accurately narrates it, was just a smoke

screen, show hearings that barely rose above the seriousness of a Gilbert and

Sullivan farce — though they did result in proposed new domestic banking laws

that, if passed, will effectively make banks another federal police force

responsible for reporting to the U.S. government the most minute financial

transactions of U.S. citizens.

Double Effect

In this regard, it is instructive to quote Williamson at length:

“If the FBI, [Manhattan District Attorney] Robert Morgenthau, or Congress

were serious about getting to the bottom of the plundering of Russia’s assets

and U.S. taxpayers’ resources, they would show far more professional interest

in exactly what was said and agreed in the private meetings [U.S. Treasury

secretary] Larry Summers, Strobe Talbott, and [former Treasury Secretary]

Robert Rubin conducted with Anatoly Chubais [former Russian finance minister,

who oversaw the distribution and sale of Russian industries], and Sergie

Vasiliev [Yeltsin’s principal legal adviser, and a member of the Chubais

clan], and later Chubais again in June and July of 1998.

“Instead of allowing Larry Summers to ramble casually in response to

questions at a banking committee hearing, the Treasury secretary should be

asked exactly who suckered him — his Russian friends, his own boss [former

Harvard associate Robert Rubin, his boss at Treasury who was once cochairman

at Goldman Sachs], or private sector counterparts of the Working Committee on

Financial Markets [a White House group whose membership is drawn from the

country’s main financial and market institutions: the Fed, Treasury, SEC, and

the Commodities & Trading Commission]. . . . Or did he just bungle the entire

matter on account of wishful thinking? Or was it gross incompetence?

“The FBI and Congress ought to be very interested in establishing for

taxpayers the truth of any alleged ‘national security’ issues that justified

allowing the Harvard Institute of International Development to privatize U.S.

bilateral assistance. It too should be their brief to discover the

relationship between the [Swedish wheeler-dealer and crony of Sachs, Anders]

Aslund/Carnegie crowd and Treasury and exactly what influence that

relationship may have had on the awarding of additional grants to Harvard

without competition. On what basis did Team Clinton direct their financial

donor, American International Group’s (AIG) Maurice Greenberg (a man nearly

as ubiquitous as any Russian oligarch in sweetheart public-funding deals), to

Brunswick Brokerage when sniffing out a $300 million OPIC guarantee for a

Russian investment fund. . . . And why did Michel Camdessus [who left the

presidency of the IMF earlier this year] announce his sudden retirement so

soon after Moscow newspapers reported that a $200,000 payment was made to him

from a secret Kremlin bank account? . . .

“American and Russian citizens can never be allowed to learn what really

happened to the billions lent to Yeltsin’s government; it would expose the

unsavory and self-interested side of our political, financial, and media

elites. . . . Instead, the [House] Banking Committee hearings will use the

smoke screen of policing foreign assistance flows to pass legislation that

will effectively end U.S. citizens’ financial privacy while making them

prisoners of their citizenship. . . . The Banking Committee will use the

opportunity the Russian dirty money scandal presents to reanimate the

domestic ‘Know Your Customer’ program, which charges domestic banks with

monitoring and reporting on the financial transactions in which middle-class

Americans engage. This data is collected and used by various government

agencies, including the IRS; meaning that if a citizen sells the family’s

beat-up station wagon or their ‘starter’ home, the taxman is alerted

immediately that the citizen’s filing should reflect the greater tax

obligation in that year of the sale. . . . Other data on citizens for which

the government has long thirsted will also be collected by government’s

newest police force, the banks. . . .”

You see, as this book explains, the Clinton’s Russia policy did not just

plunder Russians, leaving them destitute while creating a new and ruthless

class of international capitalist gangsters at U.S. taxpayer expense; it had

the double consequence of bringing all Americans deeper into the bankers’ New

World Order by increasing their debt load, decreasing their privacy, and

restricting their civil rights.

If only Americans cared.