One of the neoliberals who ruined Russian economy in the 90s shocks MSNBC pro-war nest with his anti-war positions!
Once in
a while miracles indeed happen. Lately, more and more often, even in
the US corporate media. After Tucker Carlson decided
that truth could be proven more profitable than lies and propaganda,
it was the turn of Jeffrey Sachs, one of the early economists of the
neoliberal priesthood, to shock MSNBC pro-war pundits inside their
home.
The most
hilarious detail in the whole story, is that, apparently, the MSNBC
pundits wanted another neoliberal to say that Donald Trump is
dangerous, and stop there. Why did they pick Sachs? Obviously because
of his past record, especially his central role in the destruction of
Russian economy in the 90s through a tsunami of neoliberal
policies.
But
Sachs had an unpleasant surprise for them. Instead of just confirming
that Donald Trump is dangerous and actually 'unsuitable' to conduct
wars, he went further and condemned all the devastating pro-war
policies before him. Essentially, he said indirectly that Trump is
the symptom of all previous bad policies, not the problem. And then,
he said that the establishment mechanism was keep pushing Trump to go
to war.
Watch
the anxiety of MSNBC pundits as he goes out of control:
Adam
Curtis gives us the details about how Jeffrey Sachs, member of the
free market gurus back in the 90s, literally destroyed the Russian
economy:
In 1992,
the American government had passed the Freedom Support Act. Its aim
was to help Russia reconstruct itself. Along with millions of dollars
of aid, came a group of young American advisers, economists and
political theorists, that had a radical vision of what was necessary.
They called it 'Shock therapy'. The aim was to remove all State
control over the Russian economy as a stroke. All price subsidies
will be removed, and all State industries privatized overnight. Their
leader was a Harvard economist called Jeffrey Sachs.
The
Americans allied themselves with a group of young radical free
marketeers around Yeltsin, and together they drew up a plan.
Underlying it there was a theory of how to transform society by
creating new human beings. It was the same theory that laid behind
the rise of what was called market democracy in Britain and America
in the 1980s.
The
theory said that if one destroyed all the elite institutions that in
the past had told people what to do, and instead allowed individuals
to become independent in the market place, then they would become new
kinds of rational beings, choosing what they wanted. Out of this,
would come a new form of order, and a new kind of democracy, in which
the market, not politics, gave people what they wanted.
But
things didn't work out as the theory predicted. On the first day of
the plan, all price controls in Russia were removed, and the cost of
all goods soared. Millions of people found themselves unable to
afford even the most basic of goods, and with no one to help them.
The only solution for millions of Russians, was to come out on to the
streets and sell their belongings for anything they could get.
The
chaos began to spread, as the currency no longer had any value.
Factories began to pay their workers in the products they made, which
the people then had to sell wherever they could in order to live.
Then, the privatization plan kicked in. Every Russian was given
vouchers to buy shares in the privatized companies, but desperate for
cash, they simply sold their vouchers to ruthless businessmen for a
fraction of their worth. And a new elite began to emerge who snapped
off vast sections of Russian industry. They became known as the
'oligarchs'.
As
Joseph Stiglitz describes in his book Globalization and Its
Discontents:
Globalization
and the introduction of a market economy has not produced the
promised results in Russia and most of the other economies making the
transition from communism to the market. These countries were told by
the West that the new economic system would bring them unprecedented
prosperity. Instead, it brought unprecedented poverty: in many
respects, for most of the people, the market economy proved even
worse than their Communist leaders had predicted. The contrast
between Russia's transition, as engineered by the international
economic institutions, and that of China, designed by itself, could
not be greater: While in 1990 China's gross domestic product (GDP)
was 60 percent that of Russia, by the end of the decade the numbers
had been reversed. While Russia saw an unprecedented increase in
poverty, China saw an unprecedented decrease.
The
radical reform strategy did not work: gross domestic product in
post-1989 Russia fell, year after year. What had been envisioned as a
short transition recession turned into one of a decade or more. The
bottom seemed never in sight. The devastation-the loss in GDP was
greater than Russia had suffered in World War II. In the period
1940-46 the Soviet Union industrial production fell 24 percent. In
the period 1990--99, Russian industrial production fell by almost 60
percent-even greater than the fall in GDP (54%).
Another
neoliberal globalist finds his way towards truth. Our guess is that
Jeffrey Sachs is now blacklisted and none of the mainstream media
will call him again to speak.
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