Frontline, "Putin's Way"

[newthinking]

6. PBS-TV’s Frontline Misrepresents Russia’s Vladimir Putin

It is incredibly difficult to try and illuminate discussions on Russia and Putin because the media has been so saturated with escalating rhetoric and the general public is completley ignorant as a result, to what has really happened in that part of the world in the last 20 years.

I will leave it to this piece by Eric Zuess, who knows the truth of what went on in the 90s in Russia and how the west sent in some rather nasty neoliberal bankers along with Neo-cons, the Republican institute, conservative shysters wanting to get rich, etc. I was astonished the first time I went to that part of the world just in seeing the CRAP that was on the Televisions of the unsuspecting public of the former USSR. It was the most vile crap; all 3rd rate stuff, mostly from the US, that is so bad it doesn't even sell here.

We exported to them the **absolute worst** of modern neoliberal philosophy. Sold them on a form of parasitic libertarianism, and told them it was "Capitalism". That and the chaos of a changing system is the truth of what led to the dramatic banditry of that time.

Many westerners were at the front of it and some of these crooks have been interviewed in hit pieces like "Putin's Kleptocracy". Those people are not reporting facts. They are often upset that they lost their gravy train. Or embarrassed that they were exiled when their deeds became apparent.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/01/pbs-tvs-frontlines-misrepresents-russias-vladimir-putin.html


PBS-TV’s Frontline Misrepresents Russia’s Vladimir Putin
Posted on January 17, 2015 by Eric Zuesse.

Eric Zuesse

On January 13th, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) telecast the FRONTLINE documentary, “Putin’s Way,” which purported to be a biography of Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin.

The press release about this film states: “Drawing on firsthand accounts from exiled Russian business tycoons, writers and politicians, as well as the exhaustive research of scholar and best-selling Putin’s Kleptocracy author Karen Dawisha, the film examines troubling episodes in Putin’s past, from alleged money-laundering activities and ties to organized crime, to a secret personal fortune said to be in the billions. … These accounts portray a Russian leader who began by professing hope and democracy but now is stoking nationalism, conflict and authoritarianism.”

This documentary opens by describing the corruption that pervaded post-Soviet Russia and the Presidential Administration of Putin’s sponsor Boris Yeltsin during the transitional period of ending communism and starting capitalism, which was the period of privatization of the former Soviet Government’s assets. This film ignores the role that the U.S. and especially the then-World-Bank President Lawrence Summers and his protege Andrei Shleifer and other members of Harvard’s Economics Department played in planning and largely overseeing that entire process. Yeltsin brought that team in, to plan and oversee the process, because he figured that Harvard would know how to set up capitalism. On 10 February 2006, the Harvard Crimson headlined about the result, “‘Tawdry Shleifer Affair’ Stokes Faculty Anger Toward Summers,” and noted that the affair was such an embarrassment to the University that, “Shleifer, the Jones professor of economics, was found liable by a federal court in 2004 for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government while leading a Harvard economic reform program in Russia as it transitioned to capitalism in the 1990s. Shleifer settled the case for $2 million.” An extensive article by David McClintick in Institutional Investor magazine described the sleazy details of this affair, under the banner of “How Harvard Lost Russia.” However, this FRONTLINE documentary ignores all of that history, and pretends that Yeltsin established Russia’s crony-capitalism with no help or guidance from the U.S., the World Bank, and Harvard’s economists. Putin is instead portrayed as having been, and as now being, just a continuation of Soviet-era corruption, not at all as functioning in what was, to a significant extent, actually a U.S.-headed transition into capitalism.

Then, the film presents Putin as having first come to power in Russia on account of his attacking Chechnya after several apartment buildings in Moscow and other Russian cities were bombed and Chechens were blamed for the bombings. This film fails to mention that Chechnya was a part of Russia, rather than a foreign country, and that, as wikipedia summarizes the origin of the Chechen war: