[Peace-discuss] US and Russia

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The old SDS mantra was, "Everything is connected" -- it represented the
astonishment of Americans a generation ago who found that the neat
divisions of the world proposed by American society were in fact a
propaganda covering for what was really going on.  That there is a
connection of that sort between the "war on terrorism" and events in the
FSU (former Soviet Union) -- and that that connection is found in
US-sponsored corporate globalization -- is suggested in the following
article by Matt Taibbi from New York Press. --CGE]

	Oligarchs R Us 
	Deep politics swirl behind the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky

There is big news brewing in Russia this week, and America is being sold a
line of goods about what's happening there. The coverage of the arrest by
the Vladimir Putin administration of "businessman" Mikhail Khodorkovsky
has featured such grossly, shockingly transparent propaganda that it could
hardly have been worse during the Cold War. What's more, some of my old
friends -- they know who they are -- are participating in it.

This story, about the politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, the
Croseus-rich tycoon who heads the oil company Yukos, is in fact an
important story for the ordinary American. The clash between two of the
world's baddest gangsters -- Putin and Khodorkovsky -- is also a great
symbolic battle, each side representing one of the two great remaining
pretenders to global rule.

Putin represents the past, which also happens to be the American present:
the fictional democracy, in fact a ruthless oligarchy of corporate
interests, with the state as the castrated referee.

Khodorkovsky represents the future: no referee. Which is why our media
establishment has chosen to take up arms for him. They are making his case
into an open referendum on the neo-con revolution that until now has been
fought in a largely clandestine manner here at home.

The backstory to this scandal is far too involved to get into in any
detail here, but the outlines are as follows. Khodorkovsky is one of about
a dozen major "entrepreneurs" who emerged from the collapse of the Soviet
Union to dominate the Russian economy. A series of corrupt privatization
deals organized and overseen by American advisors basically ensured that
ownership of the assets of the Russian state would go to this small
handful of crooks.

The basic story is that the U.S., in conjunction with the Yeltsin
administration, decided to create a super-wealthy class of oligarchs who
would ruthlessly defend their assets against any attempt to renationalize
the economy. In return -- and this is the key point -- they were to
support, financially, the ruling, Western-friendly "democratic"
government. It is through such machinations that we were able to bring
about a compliant Russian state, wholly dependent on corporate support,
that would answer the bell whenever we needed something ugly out of them
-- for instance their assistance in our bombing of their traditional
allies, the Serbs.

The key moment in this story was the winter of 1996. Polls showed that
Yeltsin was certain to lose a reelection bid against the idiot communist
Gennady Zyuganov. So the state, in conjunction with U.S. advisors, sold
off the crown jewels of the Russian economy to these crooks for pennies on
the dollar. In return, these beneficiaries massively funded Yeltsin's
reelection campaign. This is how Khodorkovsky, then the chief of a bank
called Menatep, came to control the precious Yukos empire that is now
under siege. It was given to him. His bank was put in charge of the
auction for 78 percent of the company, and he actually excluded other
bidders at will. He "paid" around $300 million (whether or not he ever
paid even that money is still a matter of dispute) for his controlling 78-
percent stake. The company is now valued at about $15 billion.

That doesn't begin to tell the Khodorkovsky story. Even in the group of
fantastic individuals who participated in this mass robbery, he stands
out. He is the Bad Bad Leroy Brown of Russia. You know that opening scene
in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta says, "All my life, I wanted to be a
gangster"? Just imagine the fleshy, bespectacled Khodorkovsky slamming
that trunk shut. In a nation of mobsters, he is king, a stone-cold
ruthless genius. It would take a hundred thousand pages to detail all of
his schemes, but they make the work of Professor Moriarty seem like a game
of Chinese checkers.

I'll set down one example, from a story I did many years ago about Russian
minerals company called Avisma, which eventually filed suit against its
owners here in the States, naming Khodorkovsky's Menatep as the chief
villain. Menatep (allegedly, I have to say in America) bought the company,
then forced its directors to sell its commodities to a Menatep shell
company called TMC at pennies on the dollar. TMC then sold the goods
(mainly titanium) to Western investors at cost. To make matters worse, TMC
then (allegedly) induced Avisma to buy materials from them above cost.
Readers are invited to imagine what words like "forced" and "induced" mean
in this context. In the end, nothing was left but a skeletonized carcass.
Any Brooklyn restaurant owner who has been taken over by the Lucchese or
Gambino families will recognize this technique.

This was what was described as "the encouraging emergence of market
capitalism" in the new Russia, and for many years it was cool with
everybody -- the press, the Russian state, the American diplomatic effort.
Until this year, that is, when Khodorkovsky broke the rules of the
gangster-arrangement implicit in the new Russian state. He decided he no
longer wanted to pay the piper -- Putin. Instead of ponying up the
agreed-upon tribute, he started making noise about wanting to be president
himself in 2008, and then, even worse, he started to fund opposition
parties.

I'll give Putin this: He has balls. Unlike Boris Yeltsin, who dropped to
his knees for every greasy hood with a dollar for eight consecutive years,
Putin decided to make an example of Misha. In America, we settle these
disputes by giving the F-117 contract to a different company. In Russia,
the methods are a little different: an untimely car accident, an exploding
briefcase, a mysterious fatal illness contracted after a routine phone
conversation. Absolutely the most civilized of these options is
imprisonment and seizure of assets. This is the route Putin took with
Khodorkovsky. In response to the latter's decision not to abide by the
laws of gangsterdom, Putin decided, for once, to enforce the laws of the
state.

How anyone can find morality in any of this is beyond me. But it is not
beyond the New York Times, and it is not even beyond the Boston Globe.
These papers, along with the vast majority of Western media outlets around
the world, have cast this smarmy fight over assets long ago stolen from
the Russian people as a battle between the evil forces of nationalization
and the good, industrious representatives (Khodorkovsky) of the
people-friendly market economy. Here is how Steven Lee Myers of the Times
described the resignation of Kremlin chief of staff Alexander Voloshin,
who has apparently thrown in his lot with Khodorkovsky:

"On Mr. Voloshin's side is a coterie of aides who favor greater freedom
for the economy. On the other are those advisors who, like Mr. Putin
himself, served in the K.G.B. or other security services and favor a
stronger role for the state..."

Myers leaves out here the fact that Khodorkovsky himself, like most of the
tycoons, is a creature of the security services, having once been a chief
of the Komsomol in Moscow. He goes on:

"That faction, known collectively as the siloviki -- or as Chekists after
the old Soviet-era word for intelligence operatives -- is widely believed
to have initiated or supported the prosecutorial assault on Yukos, though
exactly why remains unclear."

This is outright bullshit. Everyone in Russia knows why. It's because
Yukos didn't pay the piper. This is typical of the Times, casting mafia
disagreements in the garb of an ideological dispute. For a dozen years
now, in that paper, anyone who disagreed with the neo-con laissez-faire
corporate tribe aligned with U.S. interests has been a Soviet throwback.
It is worth noting that just three years ago, when Putin was the same
blunt thug he is today, the Times went to great lengths to portray him as
the next Thomas Jefferson. He was on our side then.

Alongside the Myers piece, the Times ran an editorial entitled, "Crime and
Punishment for Capitalists." The piece was written by Leon Aron, the
author of one of the most shameless blowjobs in the history of
biographical art: Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life. In the piece, Aron
actually details many of the same facts I've set down here, but he argues,
against all available fact, that the tycoons are actually wonderfully
productive people who are doing their darndest to lift Russia to its feet.
The piece is full of righteous sentences like the following, condemning
Putin: "No one knows how far they will take their campaign against
economic vitality..."

The papers have gone so far as to portray Khodorkovsky -- a man whose name
causes grown men to spit uncontrollably in every part of the Russian
empire -- as an anti-Soviet martyr along the lines of Andrei Sakharov. The
Globe, normally the most sensible source of Russia coverage, even ran an
AFP photo showing a woman holding a sign that reads, "Free Khodorkovsky."

The "pro-Khodorkovsky" demonstration that this woman was a part of is the
kind of thing that no journalist with any shame would ever touch. In
Russia, it is well-known that "spontaneous" demonstrations on behalf of
elitist monsters are usually paid productions. I once went to a
demonstration of "Moving Together," the so-called Putin Youth movement, in
which the attending kids were given tickets to see Shrek in return for
appearing. At another, a demonstration on behalf of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's
neo-fascist LDPR party, demonstrators were given free beer. They even gave
me some. The LDPR has the best parties in town.

Many of us who spent the 90s in Russia became aware over time that the aim
of the United States was to create a rump state that would allow economic
interests to strip assets at will. The population in this scheme was to be
good for consuming foreign goods produced abroad with Russia's own cheaply
sold raw materials. The aim was a castrated state, anarchy, a vast,
confused territory of captive consumers, cheap labor and unguarded oil and
aluminum.

Some of us who came home after seeing this began to realize that the same
process is underway in the United States: the erosion of the tax base, the
gradual appropriation of the tools of government by economic interests, a
massive, disorganized population useless to everybody except as shoppers.
That is their revolution: smashing states everywhere and creating a
scattered global nation of villas and tax shelters, as inaccessible as
Olympus, forbidding entry even to mighty dictators.

That's what this Khodorkovsky business is all about -- preserving that
dream. Ask yourself what other reason there could be for the American
press to defend a thief with eight billion dollars.

<http://www.nypress.com/16/45/news&columns/cage.cfm>