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the washington consensus...

...this “consensus”, which was never actually a consensus, was decided in January 1993, an American scholar tells us, between “15th Street and 19th Street in Washington among the United States Treasury, the IMF and the World Bank, as well as some influential think tanks, a prominent majority of academics along with assorted editorialists and, most importantly, business interests.”

According to Canadian author Naomi Klein, in her seminal work The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan, 2007), many of the powerful masterminds in Washington saw Russia’s economic collapse as a geopolitical victory — the decisive one that secured the United States’ supremacy. “With the end of the Soviet empire”, she wrote, “the market now had a global monopoly”.

Klein went on to reveal that advocates of the Washington Consensus talked “frankly and freely” about actively causing a serious crisis in the transition countries to be able to push through a “shock therapy”, as this exercise was called. “Only countries that are really suffering, that are shocked, submit to shock therapy”, the argument ran.

 

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Russian oligarchs, or the ‘revolutionary installation of an entrepreneurial class’BY Arne C. Seifert*

 

On 24 February 2022, something happened that the world deemed unthinkable: War broke out in Europe with Russia’s “special military operation” against Ukraine. Harald Kujat, a former NATO general, commented on this on 21 August of the same year: “The measures taken by the West to stop the Russian attack on Ukraine – financial support, sanctions and the supply of weapons – must be seen as an overall strategy”. And: “It has been foreseeable for some time that Russia will be more successful than expected in surviving the effects of the sanctions imposed by the West”.2 
    The latter is certainly true with regard to Western sanctions against Russian oligarchs.
    Berlin also justified the latter observation as a serious blow “against the close associates of the Putin regime, which will affect those who have profited from corruption in the country for decades”.3 
    An oligarchy, it is said, is a “rule of the few”. Its supporters are “those who rule with a few others, in particular big businessmen who have also gained political power over a country or region through corruption. With the intertwining of politics and business, political decision-making processes become non-transparent and often go hand in hand with autocratic rule and a shadow economy”.4
    The social category “oligarch”: Where did it come from in post-Soviet Russia? Suddenly and abruptly? Until the dismantling of the USSR in the early 1990s, this fresh-faced “oligarch” was a Soviet citizen, a functionary in a socialist state, a member of the CPSU or of Komsomol, a man of finance, industry, transport, collective agriculture, raw materials, etc. Consequently, he was by no means a capitalist, nor did he fall from the sky. The doors to becoming an oligarch were opened to him by the “shock therapy” of what was commonly called at the time the Washington Consensus. 

 

 ‘Washington consensus’

This “consensus”, which was never actually a consensus, was decided in January 1993, an American scholar tells us, between “15th Street and 19th Street in Washington among the United States Treasury, the IMF and the World Bank, as well as some influential think tanks, a prominent majority of academics along with assorted editorialists and, most importantly, business interests.”5 According to Canadian author Naomi Klein, in her seminal work The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan, 2007), many of the powerful masterminds in Washington saw Russia’s economic collapse as a geopolitical victory – the decisive one that secured the United States’ supremacy. “With the end of the Soviet empire”, she wrote, “the market now had a global monopoly”. Klein went on to reveal that advocates of the Washington Consensus talked “frankly and freely” about actively causing a serious crisis in the transition countries to be able to push through a “shock therapy”, as this exercise was called. “Only countries that are really suffering, that are shocked, submit to shock therapy”, the argument ran.

 

 West German support 

The “shock therapy” of the Washington Consensus also found supporters in the Federal Republic of Germany. The position that the West had to steer the transformation processes in the post-Soviet space from the outside was expressed, for example, in the postulate that “the only condition under which a market economy and democracy can be implanted and flourish simultaneously is if both are imposed on a society from the outside and guaranteed for long periods of time through international dependency relationships”.6  
    East Germany became both theoretically and practically the object of this neo-liberal strategy of simultaneous transformation of all political, economic, and social systems in a “frontal attack: the ‘revolutionary installation of an entrepreneurial class’”, as Claus Offe, the German sociologist and political scientist wrote in 1996. This would be accomplished through determined and comprehensive privatisation of state and cooperative property, the introduction of market-economy instruments, the withdrawal of the state from the social sphere, the replacement of elites where possible, and the reorganisation of the political system on the basis of the model of Western democracy.
    The “frontal attack”, with its primacy of property privatisation, hit East Germany hard and had negative long-term economic effects there. [Not so for the Western oligarchs. Historically well established in the German West, they knew how to prevent and stop the emergence of competing “Eastern oligarchs” from the outset by means of “transformational” control of property through a “Treuhand” (Trust agency)].

 

 The IMF, the World Bank, and the Russian oligarchs

The IMF and World Bank fuelled the “revolutionary installation of an entrepreneurial class” in their own way by “driving up the number of companies that were transferred to the private sector, by whatever means” during Russia’s “transition period” from around 1992–93.7
    Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner for economics, a member of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Experts, chief economist and senior vice-president of the World Bank, was ruthlessly critical of this strategy. “Almost everything else was secondary”, he wrote.8 The haste ordered by the West allowed “an elite led by international bureaucrats … to impose rapid changes on a dissenting population”. 
    The first phase of shock therapy provided for the rapid privatisation of almost 225,000 state-owned companies.
    Stiglitz summarised: “Shock therapy [as a] stabilisation, liberalisation and privatisation programme was of course not a growth programme […] It created the conditions for decline”.9 Stiglitz answered his question “Who ruined Russia?” with a clear assignment of responsibility: “The economic policy guidelines of the Washington Consensus led to a wrongly implemented privatisation, which did not lead to efficiency and growth spurts, but to shattered companies and a decline in production”.10
    Referring to the political dimension of the IMF and World Bank, Stiglitz summarised: “The IMF’s haste was based on no less political motives”. The “powerful class of oligarchs” that the government created was intended to “secure [Boris] Yeltsin’s re-election”. “The ‘loans for shares’ programme [of the IMF] represented the final phase of the enrichment of the oligarchs ... who ultimately also dominated political life. High-ranking American and IMF officials ... focused on keeping their friends Boris Yeltsin and the so-called ‘reformers’ in power”.11 
    These senior officials found support in Yeltsin’s favour in German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. At the conference of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation in Europe (CSCE) in Moscow in September 1991, Genscher succeeded in pushing through postulates in favour of Yeltsin remaining  the head of the USSR, which also achieved normative status in Western international politics regarding Russia. Namely, “The demand for respect for human rights is not subject to the ban on interference in internal affairs”. And: “I also joined [then President Yeltsin] in my initiative to enshrine non-recognition of unconstitutional changes of power within the CSCE framework”.12  

The circle closes

From this brief review it should be clear that Russia’s oligarchs sprang from the  “revolutionary installation of an entrepreneurial class” under the direction of the Washington Consensus. However, it seems rather schizophrenic that those who subscribed to the consensus, as neoliberal midwives of Russian oligarchy, should include it now as an enemy in their sweeping anti-Russian attack: They are actually putting down the first “pioneers” and advocates who fulfilled the West’s greatest geostrategic dream in world history: to open the doors to capitalism on one-sixth of the earth – Russia. •

 

* Dr Dr h.c. Arne Clemens Seifert, former ambassador, senior research fellow, WeltTrends Institute for International Politics, Potsdam. Studied at the Institute of International Relations, Moscow, specialising in Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, graduated 1963. Doctorate at the Institute for International Labour Movement, Berlin, 1977. Dr h.c. at the Orient Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2017. Functions in the Foreign Ministry of the GDR 1964–1990: Arab States Division, worked in Egypt, Jordan; Sector Head Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan; Research Assistant to the Deputy Minister for Asia, Africa; Ambassador to the State of Kuwait 1982–1987; Head of Department 1987–1990. After 1990: OSCE Mission to Tajikistan; Central Asia Advisor at the Centre for OSCE Research (CORE), Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, specialising in OSCE and Central Asia research – civil conflict prevention, transformation, political Islam, secular–Islamic relations, political processes. Numerous publications on geopolitical topics.

 

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2024/nr-20-1-oktober-2024/russische-oligarchen-oder-die-revolutionaere-installierung-einer-unternehmerklasse1

 

 

THIS "WASHINGTON CONSENSUS" WAS A BIG PART IN FORWARDING THE CONQUEST OF THE HEARTLAND... IT FAILED BECAUSE... ONE NEVER KNOWS... IF YELTSIN PLAYED THE AMERICANS ALONG WHILE PUSHING PUTIN TO THE FORE, KNOWING THAT THE LITTLE GUY FROM THE KGB WAS GOING TO BE THE BEST CHEESE TO COUNTER THE DAMAGE STARTED BY GORBACHEV, AFTER HAVING BEING TAKEN FOR A RIDE BY RONALD REAGAN.......

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

another washington caca....

Iran and Israel


by Thierry Meyssan


We are making a serious mistake in thinking that all of Iran is opposed to Israel’s colonization of Palestine. A group of Iranians, albeit a minority, still hopes to revive trade with the West at the cost of an agreement with the genocidal regime of Benyamin Netanyahu.

Most of us think that the Islamic Republic of Iran is primarily turned against Israel. This is to misunderstand the teaching of Imam Khomeini and to ignore the many relationships between the two countries.

 

Ruhollah Khomeiny was an anti-imperialist in a country that suffered first from the United Kingdom, then from the United States.

It is unknown in the West, but during the First World War, Iran suffered a terrible famine that decimated a third, or even half, of its population, making it one of the main victims of this conflict [1]. This catastrophe has hardly been studied in the West and is generally not mentioned in works on the Great War. In any case, Iranians are convinced that this genocide was caused by the requisition of crops to feed the British army against the Ottomans and the Russians. Subsequently, in 1953, the United Kingdom joined forces with the United States to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized oil at the expense of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and to impose the Nazi Fazlollah Zahedi as his successor [2]. The latter then established a sadistic political police, the SAVAK [3], with the help of a group of revisionist Zionists delegated by Yitzhak Shamir, then head of a branch of the Israeli Mossad.

This is why Ayatollah Khomeini’s writings are always first directed against the United States and the United Kingdom (“the great and the little Satan”), Israel being presented only as the expression of the Anglo-Saxons and not as an independent power.

However, the close ties of the Persian Empire with Israel have never ceased. Even today, the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline, built in 1968 with the Shah, is still operated by a company owned half by Israel and half by Iran. Any publication on the owners of this pipeline is punishable by 15 years in prison in Israel [4].

These points having been made, it is appropriate to recall the importance of the Iran-Contra affair in the history of the Islamic Republic.

This operation by the US secret services was conceived by SS-Hauptsturmführer Klaus Barbie, who had organized the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer in Bolivia and the Medellin cartel. It was a question of supplying weapons to the pro-US mercenaries who were fighting against the revolution claiming to be from Augusto Sandino (the "Sandinistas"). However, Barbie was arrested and extradited to France. Colonel Oliver North, who led a secret team of assassins within the National Security Council, took over the case. He imagined a much more complex operation: to free the US civilians taken hostage during the Lebanese civil war in exchange for weapons to the Islamic Republic of Iran so that it could defend itself during the war imposed by Iraq and overthrow President Saddam Hussein. These weapons were allegedly taken by Israel from those supplied to it by the United States and transferred to Iran. But some of them would have reached the Nicaraguan Contras. This project obtained the support of the assistant to the Secretary of State, the revisionist Zionist Elliott Abrams.

Contact was therefore made with an Iranian deputy, Hassan Rohani, whom the US services knew from the time of the Shah. He introduced them to the president of the Majlis (parliament), Hashemi Rafsanjani. The operation was so important that the commissions paid to the latter allowed him to become the richest man in his country.

Despite all the official investigations that have been conducted into this dark affair, the most important things remain secret. In any case, it is clear that Hassan Rouhani (who became president from 2013 to 2021) and Hashemi Rafsanjani (who became president from 1989 to 1997) were collaborators of the team of Oliver North and Elliott Abrams.

In 2006-2007, Elliott Abrams—still him—co-directed with Liz Cheney (daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney) the Syria Policy and Operations Group; a cross-cutting institution of the Bush Jr. administration, with a top-secret budget. It oversaw aid to the Iranian opposition and to all those who fight against the “mullahs’ regime” wherever they are.

Oliver North is no longer active, but Elliott Abrams organized Benjamin Netanyahu’s last election campaign, his alliance with the Kahanists (Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Force and Bezalel Smotrich’s Jewish Home) to reform the revisionist Zionist movement (of the fascist Zeev Jabotinsky [5]) and his transformation of Israeli legal constitutional rules (what the opposition and many commentators have called a “coup d’état”).

The Iranians do not want to destroy their rivals. So they have gotten into the habit, when two groups come into conflict, of creating a commission to reconcile them. Since it generally does not succeed and, on the contrary, itself comes into conflict with another institution, they create a fourth and so on. In the end, they obtain a very complex organizational chart in which the slightest decision requires a dozen signatures that no one ever manages to gather all of them. The system has thus blocked itself.

In 1993-1994, the Revolutionary Guards sent soldiers to fight alongside NATO in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They came to the aid of President Alija Izetbegović. There was no opposition between the Islamic Republic of President Hashemi Rafsanjani and the Anglo-Saxons. Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden’s Arab Legion were involved in this joint operation.

In 2005, a major press campaign was launched against the new Iranian president, the anti-imperialist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Reuters invented a statement by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to make people believe that he wanted to wipe Israel off the map. This false quote drew condemnation from the United Nations Security Council before the intoxication was discovered and Reuters wrote a denial [6]. President Ahmadinejad had simply said that the State of Israel, like the Soviet Union, would be swept away by time, not that its population should be thrown into the sea. No matter: the false quote is now included in many books as established fact.

It was also at this time that the Anglo-Saxons began a campaign to make people believe that Iran wanted to acquire nuclear weapons to crush Israel. They hoped to justify an attack on Iran after those in Afghanistan and Iraq [7]. However, it was the Shah who wanted to acquire an atomic bomb; a project solemnly abandoned by Imam Ruhollah Khomeini in 1988 and never revived since.

In 2009, when the United States attempted a colour revolution during the re-election of nationalist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Washington then clearly relied on former President Hashemi Rafsanjani. They finally managed, in 2013, to negotiate with envoys of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, the ouster of Ahmadinejad’s group from the presidential election and the appointment of Hassan Rohani.

In 2011, the head of Iranian counter-espionage in charge of combating Mossad infiltration who was appointed was... an Israeli agent. He remained in office until 2021 and now lives in Israel. He surrounded himself with a team of about twenty people who fled with him to Israel. They were the ones who organized the assassinations of the nuclear scientists and the theft of the archives exhibited by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Under these conditions, it is not surprising that an Iranian source informed Israel of the places and times when it could assassinate the leaders of Hezbollah one by one. Especially since the supreme leader is currently negotiating with the Biden administration with the idea of reaching an agreement before November 5, the date of the US presidential election. That is to say, the pro-US are today more powerful than ever in Tehran.

Iran’s main problem is not the opposition between conservatives and renovators, as the Western press claims (the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in favor of the freedom to wear the veil and the beard, while the renovator Mir Hossein Moussavi was against the freedom of homosexuals), but in the paralysis of institutions. There is certainly an anti-Jewish current in Iran, just as there was a Nazi party, but the Jewish community is represented in the Majlis (parliament). Iranian political life can rather be explained in a sociological manner: the bourgeoisie of Tehran and Isfahan draws its wealth from international trade and therefore aspires to the abolition of borders, while the common people of the countryside remember the famine that decimated their families under the inflexible gaze of the Anglo-Saxons.


What you need to remember:
• A small Iranian minority is sympathetic to the West and Israel. President Rafsanjani had sent soldiers to fight under NATO command in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• It is not impossible to hold an anti-Israeli discourse while doing business with Tel Aviv: even today the two states jointly operate an oil pipeline that is essential to the Israeli economy.
• Pro-Israel supporters have held important positions in the Islamic Republic. It is not surprising that it was Iranian officials who betrayed Hassan Nasrallah.

 

It is thanks to your encouragement that we can keep going.

Thierry Meyssan
Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article221335.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.