July 28, 2016
Moscow Kremlin
Source: Bigstock
Russian politics and media in the 1990s served only one purpose: to make room for this pillaging, and to prevent all popular or legal obstacles to its happening as fast as possible. Russian media was only “free” in the perverse sense that it served entirely the private interests of men like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Boris Jordan. They owned TV stations, newspapers, and magazines, and news was edited to facilitate and cover up their criminal enterprise and their control of puppet politicians, like the besotted Yeltsin. Many journalists during that time lost their lives when they tried to expose corruption. The Western journalists and politicians who cry crocodile tears now over Putin’s supposed crimes had nothing to say then.
This all sounds and feels familiar. If Putin really is responsible for the DNC leaks, he has done a great service to journalism and to America. The emails reveal what was widely known but previously dismissed as a “conspiracy theory”: The American political system as it now exists is rigged by party apparatchiks in thrall to corporate donors and lobbyists. These same few financiers own most of the media outlets, which coordinate with the marionette political class to promote an oligarch-approved narrative. The entire edifice of American government and media of our time serves here the same purpose that the controlled government and media of Russia served in the 1990s.
Several recent studies have documented the catastrophic decline in the life expectancy and living standard of the white working class in the United States. But this has exactly the same causes as the great suffering experienced by the Russians in the “90s, and in many cases it is the same people and corporations who are profiting by it. The offshoring of America’s industries and jobs, the devastation of American manufacturing and most kinds of engineering, the massive national debt are, in their beginnings, the same process of national destruction that began in Russia in the 1990s, but to which Putin put a stop in the 2000s.
Hillary Clinton, like Jeb Bush, is not running for president. With the exception of Trump and maybe Sanders, all other candidates this year were running for the analogue of Yeltsin’s position in the Russia of the “90s. That is, a puppet who will give a rubber stamp to a few oligarchs to extract as much wealth as possible in America’s hour of decline and prepare for themselves a refuge abroad. Mass immigration, reckless wars, and the various international trade deals proposed are the principal policies by which this is to be done. “Diversity,” “the global economy,” and other such platitudes are the rhetoric meant to hypnotize the people to their own dispossession. And the same international vampires who raped Russia and who hate Putin for stopping their schemes are now shaking with fear that an American can stop them at home.
