{"id":17121,"date":"2014-05-12T09:08:47","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T13:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/?p=17121"},"modified":"2014-05-12T11:17:14","modified_gmt":"2014-05-12T15:17:14","slug":"has-americas-use-of-finance-as-a-foreign-policy-tool-backfired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/2014\/05\/12\/has-americas-use-of-finance-as-a-foreign-policy-tool-backfired\/","title":{"rendered":"Has America\u2019s Use of Finance as a Foreign Policy Tool Backfired?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Naked Capitalism<\/em> has the post Has America\u2019s Use of Finance as a Foreign Policy Tool Backfired?<\/a> by Yves Smith.\u00a0 There is much to quote from the post, but I have selected a quote that Yves Smith made from the article The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba\u2019s fake Twitter clone<\/a> by Mark Ames.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There were many ways to transform Russia in the 1990s, but thanks to funding from USAID, the path chosen was the most brutal and disastrous of all: Shock therapy, mass privatization, and the mass impoverishment of 150 million people. As Janine Wedel and my former eXile partner Matt Taibbi documented, USAID funding and support empowered a single \u201cclan\u201d from St. Petersburg led by Anatoly Chubais, who oversaw the complete destruction of Russia\u2019s social welfare system, and the handing over of lucrative assets to a tiny handful of oligarchs.<\/p>\n

Under Chubais\u2019 stewardship, Russia\u2019s economic output declined some 60% in the 1990s, while the average Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years. Russia\u2019s population went into a freefall, Russia\u2019s worst death-to-birth ratio at any time in the 20th Century \u2014 which is amazing when you think that USAID\u2019s privatization program had to compete with the ravages Hitler, Dzerzhinsky and Stalin wreaked on Russia.<\/p>\n

USAID funded Chubais through public-private organizations and a Harvard program that was so patently corrupt, Harvard and its program directors including economist Andrei Shleifer were sued by the US Department of Justice for \u201cconspiring to defraud\u201d the US government (not to mention Russians). USAID also paid public relations giant Burson-Marsteller to sell the disastrous voucher program to the Russian public, in a mass media advertising blitz that promoted Chubais\u2019 political party on the eve of parliamentary elections. It was this USAID funded privatization, and the USAID-backed Russia \u201cdemocrats,\u201d which soured Russians on market capitalism and democracy (renamed \u201cdermokratsia\u201d or \u201cshitocracy\u201d in Russian).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What the Yves Smith article has to say about Larry Summers’ and Harvard’s role is devastating.\u00a0 We all need to say ,”Thank you Elizabeth Warren for preventing Larry Summers’ from becoming the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.\u00a0 We dodged a major bullet with that one.”\u00a0 As a Harvard insider, perhaps Elizabeth Warren knew the real reason Summers was dismissed as Harvard President.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Naked Capitalism has the post Has America\u2019s Use of Finance as a Foreign Policy Tool Backfired? by Yves Smith.\u00a0 There is much to quote from the post, but I have selected a quote that Yves Smith made from the article The murderous history of USAID, the US Government agency behind Cuba\u2019s fake Twitter clone by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17121","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17121"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17123,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17121\/revisions\/17123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}