Trump has done all he can to distance himself from "The Russia, Russia, Russia Thing." It is imperative the American people learn the reality. Seeing how Corporate McPravda makes money by ignoring the damage the orange anus is doing on behalf of Russia and the Oligarchs, it's up to us. Here's something the journalist Greg Palast wants to remind us about:
How Billionaires Picked Putin as “Russia’s Pinochet”
From The Archives: The little-known story of Putin’s first “election"
Greg Palast
Feb 23, 2025, first published by BuzzFlash | March 15, 2022
Excerpt...
Vladimir Putin did not arrive from outer space on an abalone shell.
Putin went from the virtually unknown Deputy Mayor of Saint Petersburg to Russia’s President and potentate by winning a weird competition organized by Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky who sought a “Russian Pinochet” to succeed Boris Yeltsin as President.
The competition, dubbed “Operation Successor,” went so far as to send Russia’s “Larry King,” Mikhail Leontyev, to interview General Pinochet for Russian TV while Pinochet was under indictment in Chile on murder charges. Russians were treated to the old dictator’s advice on choosing a leader who could imitate Pinochet’s “strong hand,” a police state, while promoting a hyper-capitalist economy.
And Putin fit the Pinochet profile.
To understand how Russia became, in effect, a military-corporate dictatorship, we have to go back to the 1990s when the former USSR, after the Wall fell, went along with the scheme known as “shock therapy” — substantially crafted by the man who would become Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers. Yeltsin’s oligarchs grabbed 60% of Russia’s state assets for peanuts — including the world’s largest producing oil fields.
The “therapy” was deadly. The US-designed smash-and-grab pushed 60% of Russians into poverty and half the population into starvation: calorie intake per person fell by almost half. Russian men, who had a longer life expectancy than Americans under the USSR, literally died by the millions — their life expectancy dropped to 57 years.
The suffering and resulting Pinochet fever hit its apotheosis with Russia’s 1998 default on its debts. Ben Judah, author of the must-read Putin biography, Fragile Empire, explains the repercussions:
“It was the moment when the elite got scared and moved over further toward authoritarianism. According to Grigory Satarov, Yeltsin’s former aide, it was then that [Yeltsin] ditched the idea of [“reformer” Boris]] Nemtsov as the successor and decided Russia needed a robust, military man. Intellectuals began to debate the need for a ‘Russian Pinochet’ to defend the market.”
The chance that Yeltsin, a notorious drunk, could get re-elected, was close to zero.
Source:
https://gregpalastinvestigates.substack.com/p/how-billionaires-picked-putin-as
Today, of course, we see that they are doing the same via Trump. And thanks for absolutely nothing, Musk.
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