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by Gouda » Thu Feb 08, 2007 7:47 am
by Sweejak » Thu Feb 08, 2007 3:10 pm
by tal » Thu Feb 15, 2007 11:46 pm
The Oligarchs
Or How the Virgin Became a Whore
By URI AVNERY
This is a TV series about Russia. But it could have been about Israel. Or about the United States. It is entitled "The Oligarchs" and is now being screened on Israeli television.
Some of its episodes are simply unbelievable--or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses' mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.
The "oligarchs" are a tiny group of entrepreneurs who exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six out of the seven are Jews.
In popular parlance they are called "oligarchs"--from the Greek word meaning "rule of the few".
In the first years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism they were the bold and nimble ones who knew how to exploit the economic anarchy in order to acquire enormous possessions for a hundredth or a thousandth of their value: oil, natural gas, nickel and other minerals. They used every possible trick, including cheating, bribery and murder. Every one of them had a small private army. In the course of the series they are proud to tell in great detail how they did it.
But the most intriguing part of the series recounts the way they took control of the political apparatus. After a period of fighting each other, they decided that it would be more profitable for them to cooperate in order to take over the state.
At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was in a steep decline. On the eve of the new elections for the presidency, his rating in public opinion polls stood at 4%. He was an alcoholic with a severe heart disease, working about two hours a day. The state was, in practice, ruled by his bodyguard and his daughter; corruption was the order of the day.
The oligarchs decided to take power through him. They had almost unlimited funds, control of all TV channels and most of the other media. They put all these at the disposal of Yeltsin's reelection campaign, denying his opponents even one minute of TV time and pouring huge sums of money into the effort. (The series omits an interesting detail: they secretly brought over the most outstanding American election experts and copywriters, who applied methods previously unknown in Russia.)
The campaign bore fruit: Yeltsin was indeed reelected. On the very same day he had another heart attack and spent the rest of his term in hospital. In practice, the oligarchs ruled Russia. One of them, Boris Berezovsky, appointed himself Prime Minister. There was a minor scandal when it became known that he (like most of the oligarchs) had acquired Israeli citizenship, but he gave up his Israeli passport and everything was in order again.
By the way, Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective pipeline there. In order to achieve this he put an end to the peace agreement that gave the country some kind of independence. The oligarchs dismissed and destroyed Alexander Lebed, the popular general who engineered the agreement, and the war has been going on since then.
In the end, there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.)
Since all the exploits of the oligarchs occurred in public, there is a danger that the affair might cause an increase in anti-Semitism in Russia. Indeed, the anti-Semites argue that these doings confirm the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a document fabricated by the Russian secret police a century ago, purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to control the world.
Moving from Russia to America--the same thing happened, of course, in the US, but more than a hundred years ago. At the time, the great "robber barons", Morgan, Rockefeller at al., all of them good Christians, used very similar methods to acquire capital and power on a massive scale. Today, it works in far more refined ways.
In the present election campaign, the candidates collect hundreds of millions of dollars. George W. Bush and John Kerry both brag about their talent for raising enormous sums of money. From whom? From pensioners? From the mythical "old lady in tennis shoes"? Of course not, but from the cabals of billionaires, the giant corporations and powerful lobbies (arms dealers, Jewish organiztions, doctors, lawyers and such). Many of them give money to both candidates--just to be on the safe side.
All of these expect, of course, to receive a generous bonus when their candidate is elected. "There is no such thing as a free lunch", as the right-wing economist Milton Friedman wrote. As in Russia, every dollar (or ruble) invested wisely in an election will yield a ten- or hundred-fold return.
The problem is rooted in the fact that presidential candidates (and all other candidates for political office) need ever increasing amounts of money. Elections are mainly fought out on TV and cost huge sums. It is not a coincidence that all the present candidates in the US are multi-millionaires. The Bush family has amassed a fortune from the oil business (helped by its political connections, of course.) Kerry is married to one of the richest women in America, who was once the wife of the ketchup king, Henry John Heinz. Dick Cheney was the chief of a huge corporation that has garnered contracts worth billions in Iraq. John Edwards, candidate for Vice President, has made a fortune as a trial lawyer.
From time to time there is talk in America about reforming election finances, but nothing worthwhile ever comes of it. None of the oligarchs has any interest in changing a system that enables them to buy the government of the United States.
In Israel, too, talk about "Money and Power" is now in vogue. Ariel Sharon and one of his two sons have been suspected of accepting bribes from a real estate magnate. An indictment was blocked by the new Attorney General who happened to be appointed by the Sharon government at the height of the affair. Another investigation into Sharon and his sons is still pending. It concerns millions of dollars that reached his election coffers by roundabout routes, crossing three continents.
Shimon Peres' connections with multi-millionaires are well-known, as are the huge sums poured out by American Jewish multi-millionaires for extreme right-wing causes in Israel. One of the Russian oligarchs is the part-owner of the second biggest Israeli newspaper.
A political scandal concerning the Israeli Minister for Infrastructure has mushroomed into an affair involving giant multi-national corporations competing for contracts for supplying natural gas to the Israeli Electricity Company, an affair of billions in which underworld figures, politicians and private investigators play their parts. This disclosure has made it clear to Israelis that here, too, politicians of the highest rank have long ago been acting as mercenaries for powerful financial interests.
These facts must alarm everybody who cares about democracy--in Israel, Russia, the United States and elsewhere. Oligarchy and democracy are incompatible. As a Russian commentator in the TV series said about the new Russian democracy: "They have turned a virgin into a whore."
Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is one of the writers featured in The Other Israel: Voices of Dissent and Refusal. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's hot new book The Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: avnery@counterpunch.org.
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by Sweejak » Sun Mar 04, 2007 1:04 am
by pepsified thinker » Mon Mar 05, 2007 12:05 am
by Sweejak » Mon Mar 05, 2007 12:26 am
You know you work behind the scenes and do things and suddenly people are in the streets, that's amazing. It's like science you know. We do the experiment in test tubes and a little tinkering and then something big comes out of it.
By Stephen D. Shenfield.
POLITICS
1. A PUZZLING MEANS OF LIQUIDATION?
Why was the decision made to use radioactive material to kill Litvinenko? It appears at first sight a puzzling means of liquidation.
After all, there are many “cleaner” and equally fast-acting poisons that might have been used, many tried and tested techniques for disposing of an opponent for example, a shot of ricin from the tip of a passerby’s umbrella on the street.
A radioactive poison would seem to have clear disadvantages. The main one is that it leaves radioactive traces all over the place. That upsets people. They ask themselves the obvious question: who has access to this stuff? It also makes it easy for foreign detectives to identify the likely culprits. Then the Russian authorities have to intervene openly to block the investigation, arousing people’s suspicions even further.
All this makes it very hard for us to continue to delude ourselves. We would so much like to remain in a state of uncertainty about who might have ordered the murder of Litvinenko and the murder of Politkovskaya and, indeed, the entire chain of linked murders. Couldn’t they have been the work of criminal “mafias” and terrorist organizations? By definition, a respectable and respected statesman can’t be a murderer, a criminal, or a terrorist, can he?
So it seems to make no sense. Did Putin and his “security” officials really not foresee the quite predictable emotional and psychological impact of choosing this particular method?
Or did they perhaps WANT to deprive us of our illusions? Did they want us to KNOW who was behind the murders, beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt?
I suspect that the answer is yes. For only if we KNOW will we be effectively intimidated and (if we don’t count the small and shrinking minority of self-sacrificing heroes) adjust our behavior in the light of our knowledge.
That certainly doesn’t mean we are supposed to SAY what we know, at least not in public. Quite the contrary! The standard response to those who say what they know is indignant or irritated complaints about Russophobic prejudice and paranoia. We are expected to PRETEND that we don’t know. Our willingness to sustain that pretence is a test. For those of us privileged to be Russian citizens it is a test of our loyalty and patriotism. For the rest of us it is a test of our commitment to good relations with Russia. It has presumably been decided that we are ready for such a test. May we all prove worthy of the confidence placed in us!
by Sweejak » Wed Mar 07, 2007 4:25 pm
by Sweejak » Thu Mar 22, 2007 12:47 pm
March 21, 2007 -- The Litvinenko radiation poisoning and a mysterious plane crash. Amid the hype over the radiation poisoning death of ex-Russian intelligence agent and Boris Berezovsky colleague Alexander Litvinenko last November, a little-reported story about a helicopter crash went largely unnoticed. In what may have been an indication of who and what was behind the Litvinenko poisoning and the attempts by Italian right-wing politicians to discredit both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, the activities of a mysterious firm tied to Berezovsky and his former Yukos Oil business partner, Tel Aviv-based Leonid Nevzlin, are under renewed scrutiny.
On January 2, 2007, WMR reported: "In another full circle between Tel Aviv and Italy, Menatep's [Group Menatep -- the Gibraltar-based firm behind Yukos since renamed GML] former chief for investment management Alexei Globuvich said, after his arrest last Spring in Italy, that Nevzlin may have tried to poison him and his family after mercury was found in his office, home, and car. Globuvich said he was a threat because he knew where Yukos and Menatep assets were located. Shortly thereafter, a Scotland Yard officer handed over to the British security firm ISC Global plans by the British government to extradite a number of Russian-Israeli exiles in Britain to Russia. ISC Global had been part of Menatep and Nevzlin was one of its chief customers. The London offices of ISC Global, now known as RISC Management, were visited in November 2006 by Litvinenko and Russian businessmen Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun and traces of polonium-210 were discovered there. According to the Sunday Times of London, Russian police are also investigating whether the poisoning of Litvinenko and the attempted poisoning of Globuvich are connected to the radiation poisoning death two years ago of Roman Tsepov, a former bodyguard of Putin when he was deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg. Tsepov was involved in the Russian government's tracking of Yukos assets. Also of interest are connections to the June 2004 assassination of Forbes Russian edition editor-in-chief Paul Klebnikov, a U.S. citizen who wrote a damaging expose of Berezovsky. Three Chechen contract killers were charged in Klebnikov's murder. The same Russian-Israeli mob ring is also being looked at in the investigation of the assassination of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya of Novaya Gazeta as a way to embarrass Putin."
Attention is being drawn to a May 14, 2006 article in the Times of London. In March 2004, British attorney Stephen Curtis, the chairman of ISC Global, died, along with his pilot, in a helicopter crash near Bournemouth Airport. The two were on their way to Dublin. The Times reported a James Bond-like secret project by ISC Global, jailed Yukos tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Nevzlin to launch an international smear campaign to discredit Putin and other members of the Russian government, including Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, other ministers, and officials of state-owned energy companies. Doctored "compromising" photographs were to be used in the smear campaign. Also targeted by the Russian gangsters was Russian tycoon and Chelsea football team owner Roman Abramovich, who had earned the wrath of Nevzlin, Berezovsky, and others because Putin allowed Abramovich to retain his billions in wealth and travel freely to and from Russia.
According to The Times, Curtis, who managed a £16 billion portfolio for Menatep, was under surveillance and had been threatened in the weeks before his death. He told a relative, "If anything happens in the next two weeks then it won't be an accident." After his death, Curtis' home was found to contain a small magnet used for a bugging device. It also was revealed at the Curtis death inquest that the British attorney had been in contact with British police "on many occasions" concerning the activities of his Russian clients.
ISC was to obtain a luxury yacht, the Constellation, that would become a headquarters for exiled Russian-Israeli oligarchs wanted by Moscow for fraud. The yacht would have its own armed SWAT team and crew to repel any attacks. The yacht would be outfitted with bullet proof glass and "white noise" generators to prevent eavesdropping. Prostitutes invited on board would be specially screened by a "trusted agency." Nevzlin authorized the anti-Putin project in a 12-page dossier marked "Secret." In the document, Putin is referred to as "X." British ex-SAS commandos were to be used as personal bodyguards to protect the exiled Russian tycoons from kidnapping and extradition by Russian agents.
Fact vs. fiction: No difference with the forces out to bring down Russian President Putin.
On January 11 this year, Yuri Golubev, 64, a Yukos cofounder, along with Khodorkovsky, and colleague of former Yukos deputy chairman Nevzlin, was found dead in his bed in London. Police ruled the cause of death as "natural causes." Our sources in Britain report that the scandals surrounding British Prime Minister Tony Blair and key members of his government are part and parcel of the fact that Britain's government has been co-opted by the Russian-Israeli mobsters, much in the same way that their American colleagues, acting through neo-con proxies, have captured control of the Bush administration. The British honors-for-cash scandal, British defense contractor malfeasance, and phony intelligence about Iraqi WMDs laundered through the British government, are all results of the mobsters' control of Blair and his advisers.
by chiggerbit » Tue Oct 09, 2007 11:05 am
by Sweejak » Sat Oct 27, 2007 6:29 pm
The former Russian spy poisoned in a London hotel was an MI6 agent, the Daily Mail can reveal.
Alexander Litvinenko was receiving a retainer of around £2,000 a month from the British security services at the time he was murdered.
by Sweejak » Mon Jan 28, 2008 9:37 pm
Taking on Mogilevich, who runs a private army of brutal killers, was a huge risk for a civilian outfit such as the Mitrokhin Commission, and Litvinenko soon picked up word that he was enraging the Ukrainian's siloviki friends in Moscow
Litvinenko should have been wary of Lugovoi from the start, but the lure of money was too strong. Otherwise he might have found out that Lugovoi was a close associate of Alexander Talik
by seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 01, 2010 10:50 pm
Putin 'may have known of spy death'
Dec 2 2010
Senior American officials believed Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin may well have known about the operation to murder dissident former spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, according to leaked US diplomatic cables.
Washington's senior diplomat in Europe challenged suggestions that the killing could have been the work of "rogue elements" in the Russian security forces, according to the latest documents posted on the WikiLeaks website.
Assistant secretary of state Daniel Fried said that Mr Putin's attention to detail meant that it would have been difficult for such an operation to be carried out without his knowledge.
Elsewhere, the cables describe Russia as a "virtual mafia state" in which the activities of the government and organised crime are indistinguishable, according to The Guardian which had advance access to the material.
Mr Fried's comments were made in a conversation in Paris with Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, a senior adviser to then French president Jacques Chirac, on December 7 2006, two weeks after Mr Litvinenko's death in a London hospital.
Mr Gourdault-Montagne was said to have adopted a "defensive posture" over claims that the Russian government was involved. "He showed reluctance to see the Kremlin's hand in the Litvinenko poisoning, preferring to ascribe it to rogue elements," according to the US record of the conversation.
Mr Fried, however, strongly disagreed. "Fried commented that the short-term trend inside Russia was negative, noting increasing indications that the UK investigation into the murder of Litvinenko could well point to some sort of Russian involvement," the account noted.
"MGM (Mr Gourdault-Montagne) wondered aloud who might have given the order, but speculated the murder probably involved a settling of accounts between services rather than occurring under direct order from the Kremlin.
"(But) Fried, noting Putin's attention to detail, questioned whether rogue security elements could operate, in the UK no less, without Putin's knowledge.
"Describing the current atmosphere as strange, he described the Russians as increasingly self-confident, to the point of arrogance."
by JackRiddler » Thu Dec 02, 2010 12:46 am
by 8bitagent » Fri Dec 03, 2010 7:45 am
JackRiddler wrote:.
I think Justin has a party line of sorts, and Putin fits in on what he sees as his side geopolitically. His comments about the Moscow 9/99 affair are embarrassingly ignorant.
I never saw anything about Litvinenko and 9/11, a short google suggests only that he thought the Russian govt. derived benefits at the time, which is not outside the realm of possibility.
The Arctic Circle operation of 9/11, Northern Vigilance, was supposedly in response to a Russian exercise on the same day, in the old mode of the Cold War. Presumably the Global Guardian set of exercises (which included various scenarios for Stratcom, Spacecom and the NORAD/NEADS Vigilant Guardian/Warrior hijack game) incorporated tracking of the real-world operations happening to the north. GG had been moved up to 9/11 from its original Oct 2001 date at some point after the beginning of the Bush regime in January 01. The Russians apparently knew what was coming, evidence their own warning some weeks before about 25 terror pilots infiltrating the US! Perhaps there was a concert on the scheduling, there are of course various possibilities (such as that the Russians decided on having theirs that day as a kind of nod to what was going down in the US).
All that aside, I've always seen 9/99 and 9/11 as a set. Both arranged structurally similar terror coups in their capitals to facilitate a variety of plans for wars, police and national security state growth, stronger "leadership" in times of crisis, keeping the population in fear, etc. One sheer reality is that after both have happened, neither side can expose the crime of the other. However, I imagine those arranging 9/11 watched 9/99 with intense interest, for obvious reasons, perhaps even saw its undeniable success as a kind of green light to go forward. Other possible interactions are easily imagined, but I'll leave the imagining for some other time.
.
by seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 24, 2011 9:07 am
Ex-police officer arrested over Politkovskaya murder
By Stuart Williams (AFP) – 6 hours ago
MOSCOW — Russia has arrested a former senior police officer suspected of organising the 2006 murder of anti-Kremlin reporter Anna Politkovskaya in exchange for cash, investigators said on Wednesday.
The announcement marks a major development in the long-running case that has failed to secure any convictions after half a decade. The investigators said they also had information on the supposed mastermind of the killing.
Retired police lieutenant colonel Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov is suspected of organising the criminal group that carried out the murder as well as obtaining the murder weapon, said the spokesman for the Investigative Committee Vladimir Markin.
"According to the investigation, Pavlyuchenkov received the order to organise the killing of Anna Politkovskaya from an unknown individual in exchange for a monetary reward and gave his agreement," he said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.
The arrest, which was made after questioning on Tuesday, was first announced by the editor-in-chief of Politkovskaya's Novaya Gazeta newspaper Dmitry Muratov late on Tuesday.
A trenchant critic of the Kremlin, Politkovskaya had won international prizes for her reports accusing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin of using the Chechen conflict to strangle democracy while he was president.
Her killing sparked international outrage and underlined the lack of security faced by reporters in Russia who dare to challenge the authorities.
Politkovskaya was shot dead in October 2006 in her apartment block in Moscow and failure of the investigation to secure any convictions has been widely ridiculed in Russia and abroad.
In another major possible lead, Markin also said investigators had information on the supposed mastermind of the killing, who has never been identified let alone arrested.
"For the moment we think it premature to make this information public," he added.
Two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, and former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov were tried for suspected involvement in the killing but were acquitted on a lack of evidence in 2009.
This verdict was then annulled by the supreme court and a new investigation reopened with the same suspects. The authorities in June arrested a third Makhmudov brother, Rustam, on suspicion of carrying out the murder.
Markin said that Pavlyuchenkov is suspected of hiring the Makhmudov brothers to carry out the crime and also obtaining the pistol allegedly used by Rustam Makhmudov.
"Pavlyuchenkov promised the Makhmudov brothers a monetary reward for carrying out the order," said Markin.
According to Markin, Pavlyuchenkov told the brothers where Politkovskaya lived in central Moscow as well as the make of car that she drove. The group was then able to trail her to confirm her routine before the murder was carried out.
Pavlyuchenkov was a witness in the trial against the three suspects where, according to the Novaya Gazeta, he sought to present himself as a valuable source and gave information that was made-up.
Veteran Russian rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva applauded the apparent renewal of interest in the case but expressed doubt if the investigators would in the end find those who were truly behind the killing.
"I am happy that they have returned to the Politkovskaya case, that they have taken it away from the dead end. But there are doubts," she told AFP.
Putin famously said in the days after her murder that the killing was "an unacceptable crime that cannot go unpunished" but also described her capability to influence politics in Russia as "insignificant".
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