Post by Moses on Dec 29, 2004 8:48:26 GMT -5
Putin's drive to smash the power of the oligarchs represents Russia's final reckoning with the old Soviet ruling class. It is a push to reclaim stolen wealth and finally break the power of parasites who have been feasting on the Russian body politic since 1917.
This is the issue when it comes to Yukos, the Russian oil company previously owned by oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who now sits in a Russian jail. When a U.S. court tried to stop the Yukos bankruptcy sale from proceeding, issuing an injunction against the auctioning off of Yukos' core assets, the auction proceeded anyway. A heretofore unknown company – backed by the Russian state-owned gas monopoly – snapped up the bankrupt Yukos for $9.4 billion. As the Associated Press reported:
"Putin defended the auction as completely legal, and contrasted it with the way well-connected businessmen obtained state-owned properties at bargain prices after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The purchase of Yukos' subsidiary by a 100-percent state-owned company, he said, 'was done in absolute conformity with market means.' ...
"'Putin has achieved his political ambitions, the state has recovered its most important asset - oil,' Chris Weafer said. 'And he has also brought the oligarch era to an end.'"
But what is rising in its place? Both neocons and transnational "progressives" seem to have come to identical conclusions, succinctly summarized by Nicholas Kristof:
"The West has been suckered by Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin. Rather, he's a Russified Pinochet or Franco. And he is not guiding Russia toward free-market democracy, but into fascism.
"In effect, Mr. Putin has steered Russia from a dictatorship of the left to a dictatorship of the right (Chinese leaders have done much the same thing). Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Park Chung Hee, and Putin all emerged in societies suffering from economic and political chaos. All consolidated power in part because they established order and made the trains – or planes – run on time."
While this is an improvement over Communism, Kristof avers, it still isn't good enough to suit his taste, and he confidently predicts "pro-democracy" demonstrations in Moscow. With 70 percent approval ratings for Putin, they're going to have to pour an awful lot more money and resources into the effort to subvert Putinism from within: it'll take more than a few rock concerts and a color-coordinated public relations campaign before the neocons and their newfound "progressive" allies can hope to apply the Ukrainian template to Putin's Russia.
The American judge who issues an injunction to save the hide of a Russian oligarch is acting as if the conquest of Russia is already a militarily accomplished fact. This is an empire that naturally assumes its own primacy. Surrender is never demanded: it is merely assumed. In such a world, the rights of nations to determine their own destiny have gone the way of individual rights, i.e., into the dustbin of history.
The absurdist fiction of a globalized "rule of law" enforced by some judge in Houston, Texas, would be laughable – if it wasn't intended to provoke an international incident with a nuclear-armed power. As 12,000 election "observers" armed with "exit polls" invade Ukraine to ensure the expected result, Kristof and his neocon allies look forward to a similar invasion of the old Soviet heartland. There is just one way to enforce that judge's insufferable arrogance and give it the force of "law" – and if it takes NATO troops in Ukraine, poised to take Moscow, to do it, well, then that's what it will take….
Kristof is selling to the liberals what the neocons have been retailing to the American right-wing: the story that Russia is rising, reverting to Stalinism (or "progressing" to fascism). The next step will be to raise a hue and cry over Russian "rearmament" as we encircle the Kremlin from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian, fomenting "democratic" revolutions on the periphery while moving inexorably toward the center. A renewed arms race and the return of the cold war – all launched under the rubric of exporting "democracy" and "free markets." This new Russophobia has something for everyone.
If Russia is not headed for fascism, then the neocon-progressive alliance of Russia-haters is determined to push them into it – or, at least, to raise such a ruckus over the alleged rise of Russian national socialism that the American public will fall for it long enough to get a new war of civilizations going. --Justin Raimondo
This is the issue when it comes to Yukos, the Russian oil company previously owned by oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who now sits in a Russian jail. When a U.S. court tried to stop the Yukos bankruptcy sale from proceeding, issuing an injunction against the auctioning off of Yukos' core assets, the auction proceeded anyway. A heretofore unknown company – backed by the Russian state-owned gas monopoly – snapped up the bankrupt Yukos for $9.4 billion. As the Associated Press reported:
"Putin defended the auction as completely legal, and contrasted it with the way well-connected businessmen obtained state-owned properties at bargain prices after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The purchase of Yukos' subsidiary by a 100-percent state-owned company, he said, 'was done in absolute conformity with market means.' ...
"'Putin has achieved his political ambitions, the state has recovered its most important asset - oil,' Chris Weafer said. 'And he has also brought the oligarch era to an end.'"
But what is rising in its place? Both neocons and transnational "progressives" seem to have come to identical conclusions, succinctly summarized by Nicholas Kristof:
"The West has been suckered by Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin. Rather, he's a Russified Pinochet or Franco. And he is not guiding Russia toward free-market democracy, but into fascism.
"In effect, Mr. Putin has steered Russia from a dictatorship of the left to a dictatorship of the right (Chinese leaders have done much the same thing). Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet, Park Chung Hee, and Putin all emerged in societies suffering from economic and political chaos. All consolidated power in part because they established order and made the trains – or planes – run on time."
While this is an improvement over Communism, Kristof avers, it still isn't good enough to suit his taste, and he confidently predicts "pro-democracy" demonstrations in Moscow. With 70 percent approval ratings for Putin, they're going to have to pour an awful lot more money and resources into the effort to subvert Putinism from within: it'll take more than a few rock concerts and a color-coordinated public relations campaign before the neocons and their newfound "progressive" allies can hope to apply the Ukrainian template to Putin's Russia.
The American judge who issues an injunction to save the hide of a Russian oligarch is acting as if the conquest of Russia is already a militarily accomplished fact. This is an empire that naturally assumes its own primacy. Surrender is never demanded: it is merely assumed. In such a world, the rights of nations to determine their own destiny have gone the way of individual rights, i.e., into the dustbin of history.
The absurdist fiction of a globalized "rule of law" enforced by some judge in Houston, Texas, would be laughable – if it wasn't intended to provoke an international incident with a nuclear-armed power. As 12,000 election "observers" armed with "exit polls" invade Ukraine to ensure the expected result, Kristof and his neocon allies look forward to a similar invasion of the old Soviet heartland. There is just one way to enforce that judge's insufferable arrogance and give it the force of "law" – and if it takes NATO troops in Ukraine, poised to take Moscow, to do it, well, then that's what it will take….
Kristof is selling to the liberals what the neocons have been retailing to the American right-wing: the story that Russia is rising, reverting to Stalinism (or "progressing" to fascism). The next step will be to raise a hue and cry over Russian "rearmament" as we encircle the Kremlin from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian, fomenting "democratic" revolutions on the periphery while moving inexorably toward the center. A renewed arms race and the return of the cold war – all launched under the rubric of exporting "democracy" and "free markets." This new Russophobia has something for everyone.
If Russia is not headed for fascism, then the neocon-progressive alliance of Russia-haters is determined to push them into it – or, at least, to raise such a ruckus over the alleged rise of Russian national socialism that the American public will fall for it long enough to get a new war of civilizations going. --Justin Raimondo