The myth that Russia collapsed because of the arms race with Reagan is just that a total myth and oversimplification. What is more important is understanding the transfer and consolidation of wealth into the hands of the Oligarchs.
Who are the Oligarchs? See this for a profile run down, of where they were and where thay are now. from the BBC.
There are 7 oligarchs. These seven Oligarchs are all criminals. It is not prejudice to mention that they are Jewish as they have connections to Zionism and Israel it is relevant.
In the 1990s a handful of Russian businessmen came to prominence as the Kremlin's financiers and media moguls.Their power peaked in an infamous loans-for shares deal which saw privatised assets handed out at knock-down prices in exchange for political support for then-President Boris Yeltsin.
Under Vladimir Putin their fortunes have varied - to say the least.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky --> S IIMA -->
--> E IIMA -->
Age: 40
Business: Chief executive of Yukos, Russia's biggest oil company since its merger with rival Sibneft.
Worth: About $8bn, making him possibly Russia's richest man.
Pedigree: Left the Soviet Communist youth league to set up a banking business at the end of the Soviet era. Moved into oil and gas in 1995.
Hobbies: Funding liberal Russian opposition parties.
Where is he now?: Prison, Russia.
Roman Abramovich --> S IIMA -->
--> E IIMA -->
Age:37
Business: Industrialist, oil magnate, football boss, governor of Chukotka region in Russia's far northeast.
Worth: Unknown, estimated to be $6bn-7bn.
Pedigree : College drop-out who got rich in oil trading in the early 1990s, dabbling also in airlines and aluminium.
Hobbies: Chelsea FC.
Where is he now?: West London.
Boris Berezovsky --> S IIMA -->
--> E IIMA -->
Age: 57
Business: Media magnate, freelance anti-Putin dissident.
Worth: About $3bn.
Pedigree: Former Young Communist turned auto-industry magnate. Won influence in the 1990s by taking control of newspapers and television stations which were later confiscated by the Kremlin. Briefly deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council.
Hobbies: Avoiding extradition to Russia on fraud charges, spreading conspiracy theories.
Where is he now?: A refugee in London.
Vladimir Gusinsky --> S IIMA -->
--> E IIMA -->
Age: 51
Business: Media magnate (retired).
Worth: Unknown.
Pedigree: Flamboyant theatre director who established banking business in the dying days of the USSR. Later financed newspapers and Russia's first independent television station which was eventually confiscated for opposing pro-Putin forces.
Hobbies: Keeping a low profile, avoiding extradition to Moscow on fraud charges.
Where is he now?: In exile in Greece, Spain or Israel.
Vladimir Potanin --> S IIMA -->
--> E IIMA -->
Age: 42
Business: Metals magnate with major shareholding in Norilsk Nickel, the world's biggest nickel producer.
Worth: About $1bn.
Pedigree: Former Soviet trade official turned financier in the early 1990s. Dabbled in media and other industries including oil and telecoms before settling on metals.
Hobbies: Arts philanthropy, steering clear of politics.
Where is he now?: Plush dacha, Moscow.
Mikhail Fridman --> S IIMA -->
--> E IIMA -->
Age: 39
Business: Oil magnate and financier. Financial services and retail outlets. His Alfa Bank controls TNK, a leading oil company which recently merged with BP in the largest ever foreign investment in Russia.
Worth: Unknown.
Pedigree: Engineer turned multi-purpose entrepreneur making money in oil trades and various import-export schemes.
Hobbies: PR, wooing foreign investors.
Where is he now?: Plush office, Moscow.
Oleg Deripaska --> S IIMA -->
--> E IIMA -->
Age: 35
Business: Aluminium. His company Base Element controls more than 70 per cent of Russia's aluminium capacity. He also makes cars, has a stake in Aeroflot and dabbles in timber, textiles and insurance.
Worth: $1.5bn.
Pedigree: An engineer by training, he was a late arrival to the premier league of oligarchy. But he did his time along with erstwhile partner Abramovich in the vicious "aluminium wars" for control of lucrative metal assets in Siberia in the 1990s.
Hobbies:Buying moribund Soviet industrial giants.
Where is he now?: Moscow, Russia's industrial heartlands
It a nut shell here is what went down. Back when the Borris Yeltsin was in charge of Russia, who was an absolute drunk, (I remember once Yeltsin was so drunk while eating dinner with the Clintons the Bill Clinton had to talk over him and rush to end the discussion because Yeltsin was acting like a total fool.) Under the crook Yelson's rein in office, a Harvard professor named Jeffery Sachs and an economist named Yegor Gaidar (the PM of Russia in 1992) got together some other economists and hatched a plan of how best to take advantage of the coming Russian implosion. Russia was about to burst with hyper inflation. (easy to rig when you run the central bank) Russia had its currency the Ruble, diminished to nearly nothing.
As the joke used to go, "hey Olath, what's cheaper, to buy toilet paper or just wipe your ass with rubles?." the joke is not funny. People had their life savings wiped out. It didn't matter how much they had saved because it would be like if all your dollars turned to pennies. Some people could not afford clothes for the coming horrible Russian winters. People could not eat and some people died. Prices numerically rose of course because the ruble was falling but value-wise they were actually cheaper because of the desperation. But the prices didn't rise in dollars. A few people made fortunes by correctly predicting (actually by having insider knowledge) the wild price gyrations. They knew what to buy up and when to do it. More often it was the case that as formerly run state industries were "privatizing" instead of being auctioned off to the highest bidder or to the entrepreneurs who could utilize the mines/oil/resource the best, the bureaucrats in charge of the transition were bribed into selling them off at a fraction of their worth (normally only 5 to 10% of their real value) to the Oligarchs who then resold them to third parties for mountains of cash in solid currencies. A lot of this was commandeered by the Mossad agent Marc Rich, the Israeli Oligarch then used their Jewish status to flee Russia in order to avoid being prosecuted by Russian courts.
The Zionists, the same that manipulated the banks, knew ahead of time what the plans of the 'reformers' were. But it went well beyond that. They lied, murdered and pulled every trick in the book to get their wealth. They defaulted on valuators. They took money for investments and never invested it, and just pocketed the money. They (Boris) ran the media in Russia and fought with one another. When money becomes worthless certain things have intrinsic value like land and assets. They bought these things up cheaply with dollars from people who risked either selling for less than it was worth in dollars or possibly by the next day losing everything if it remained in rubles.
Number 1 Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Yukos oil is now in jail (serving 8 year sentence) and while he was in prison he claimed that had his face slashed open by a knife but according to the prison he was just punched in the nose and got a scratch.
There is a film you can probably find it called a Dimes worth of difference: beyond the lesser of two evils. Uri Avnery (a non-zionist Jews) wrote an fairly good article on the film in counterpunch.
"his is a TV series about Russia. But it could have been about Israel. Or about the United States. It is entitled "The Oligarchs" and is now being screened on Israeli television.
Some of its episodes are simply unbelievable--or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses' mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.
The "oligarchs" are a tiny group of entrepreneurs who exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six out of the seven are Jews.
In popular parlance they are called "oligarchs"--from the Greek word meaning "rule of the few".
In the first years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism they were the bold and nimble ones who knew how to exploit the economic anarchy in order to acquire enormous possessions for a hundredth or a thousandth of their value: oil, natural gas, nickel and other minerals. They used every possible trick, including cheating, bribery and murder. Every one of them had a small private army. In the course of the series they are proud to tell in great detail how they did it.
But the most intriguing part of the series recounts the way they took control of the political apparatus. After a period of fighting each other, they decided that it would be more profitable for them to cooperate in order to take over the state.
At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was in a steep decline. On the eve of the new elections for the presidency, his rating in public opinion polls stood at 4%. He was an alcoholic with a severe heart disease, working about two hours a day. The state was, in practice, ruled by his bodyguard and his daughter; corruption was the order of the day.
The oligarchs decided to take power through him. They had almost unlimited funds, control of all TV channels and most of the other media. They put all these at the disposal of Yeltsin's reelection campaign, denying his opponents even one minute of TV time and pouring huge sums of money into the effort. (The series omits an interesting detail: they secretly brought over the most outstanding American election experts and copywriters, who applied methods previously unknown in Russia.)
The campaign bore fruit: Yeltsin was indeed reelected. On the very same day he had another heart attack and spent the rest of his term in hospital. In practice, the oligarchs ruled Russia. One of them, Boris Berezovsky, appointed himself Prime Minister. There was a minor scandal when it became known that he (like most of the oligarchs) had acquired Israeli citizenship, but he gave up his Israeli passport and everything was in order again.
By the way, Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective pipeline there. In order to achieve this he put an end to the peace agreement that gave the country some kind of independence. The oligarchs dismissed and destroyed Alexander Lebed, the popular general who engineered the agreement, and the war has been going on since then.
In the end, there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.)
Since all the exploits of the oligarchs occurred in public, there is a danger that the affair might cause an increase in anti-Semitism in Russia. Indeed, the anti-Semites argue that these doings confirm the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a document fabricated by the Russian secret police a century ago, purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to control the world.
Moving from Russia to America--the same thing happened, of course, in the US, but more than a hundred years ago. At the time, the great "robber barons", Morgan, Rockefeller at al., all of them good Christians, used very similar methods to acquire capital and power on a massive scale. Today, it works in far more refined ways.
In the present election campaign, the candidates collect hundreds of millions of dollars. George W. Bush and John Kerry both brag about their talent for raising enormous sums of money. From whom? From pensioners? From the mythical "old lady in tennis shoes"? Of course not, but from the cabals of billionaires, the giant corporations and powerful lobbies (arms dealers, Jewish organiztions, doctors, lawyers and such). Many of them give money to both candidates--just to be on the safe side.
All of these expect, of course, to receive a generous bonus when their candidate is elected. "There is no such thing as a free lunch", as the right-wing economist Milton Friedman wrote. As in Russia, every dollar (or ruble) invested wisely in an election will yield a ten- or hundred-fold return.
The problem is rooted in the fact that presidential candidates (and all other candidates for political office) need ever increasing amounts of money. Elections are mainly fought out on TV and cost huge sums. It is not a coincidence that all the present candidates in the US are multi-millionaires. The Bush family has amassed a fortune from the oil business (helped by its political connections, of course.) Kerry is married to one of the richest women in America, who was once the wife of the ketchup king, Henry John Heinz. Dick Cheney was the chief of a huge corporation that has garnered contracts worth billions in Iraq. John Edwards, candidate for Vice President, has made a fortune as a trial lawyer.
From time to time there is talk in America about reforming election finances, but nothing worthwhile ever comes of it. None of the oligarchs has any interest in changing a system that enables them to buy the government of the United States.
In Israel, too, talk about "Money and Power" is now in vogue. Ariel Sharon and one of his two sons have been suspected of accepting bribes from a real estate magnate. An indictment was blocked by the new Attorney General who happened to be appointed by the Sharon government at the height of the affair. Another investigation into Sharon and his sons is still pending. It concerns millions of dollars that reached his election coffers by roundabout routes, crossing three continents.
Shimon Peres' connections with multi-millionaires are well-known, as are the huge sums poured out by American Jewish multi-millionaires for extreme right-wing causes in Israel. One of the Russian oligarchs is the part-owner of the second biggest Israeli newspaper.
A political scandal concerning the Israeli Minister for Infrastructure has mushroomed into an affair involving giant multi-national corporations competing for contracts for supplying natural gas to the Israeli Electricity Company, an affair of billions in which underworld figures, politicians and private investigators play their parts. This disclosure has made it clear to Israelis that here, too, politicians of the highest rank have long ago been acting as mercenaries for powerful financial interests.
These facts must alarm everybody who cares about democracy--in Israel, Russia, the United States and elsewhere. Oligarchy and democracy are incompatible. As a Russian commentator in the TV series said about the new Russian democracy: "They have turned a virgin into a whore."
Alexander Litvinenko
The Alexander Litvinenko affair, (which I am going to move to the Zionist scandals section, is becoming ever so interesting. Given that traces of polonium 210 were found at Berezovsky's residence and Britain and Russia were on the verge of negotiating a new extradition treaty it seems likeLitvinenko had plans to blackmail the oligarches.
We have double motive, means, and physical evidence of a very rare substance found in the home of the Oligarch who tried to frame Putin.
Yegor Gaidar is now having his daughter claim that he too was a victim of radiation poisoning. Interesting all these Zionists and the radio active meterial. We know which country conducted tests of radiation poisoning on unsuspecting children, Israel (with the pay check coming from America). 6,000 of the Sephardi children died shortly and thousands more died slowly afterward and some of people are still dying of living with handicaps. It was deliberate and basically an entire generation of Saphadic Jews were purposely poisoned under the direction of the Israeli Labor Party founders while Zionists Jews were left alone. They were creating the Israel that they wanted, the one good for the American MIC.
Once again all roads lead to Israel.
I will be getting to the bottom of this.
