Note: No, this post is not about the oft quoted bromance of Mssrs. Trump and Putin. Nor is it about spying, hacking, or leaking of substances from paper to mystery liquid. It is simply about money, lots of it.
The point about Trump and Russia is money, as Time reported in August 2016 and others have since: But the real truth is that, as major banks in America stopped lending him [Trump] money following his many bankruptcies, the Trump organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions.
What this article as well as news about the dealings of his advisers, including Manafort's adventures in Ukraine, fail to address is that decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, the 2000s, created a carpetbeggar's paradise in Eurasia.
The term carpetbeggar comes from the era following the U.S. civil war when many Northerners took to the South and when the Southern elites scrambled to save their fortunes. Wikipedia explains Although the stated purpose of these initiatives was to empower freedmen
politically and economically, many carpetbaggers were businessmen who
purchased or leased plantations and became wealthy landowners, hiring
freedmen and white Southerners to do the labor through the development
of sharecropping. Within a year of Andrew Johnson's presidency, however,
whatever was left of the South's white elite had been restored to
power, with those whom had avoided bankruptcy regaining farmland or
reestablishing businesses.
Sounds like bringing democracy and freedom to the former Soviet Union and creating lots of oligarchs, doesn't it?
There are indeed major similarities to what happened in the former Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries, except that the stakes were even higher, and the riches mindboggling:
Russia’s descent into gangster capitalism began in the early 1990s when
Russian market reformers attempted to introduce capitalism in one fell
swoop—on the advice of Western advisors, particularly Harvard University
“shock therapist,” Professor Jeffrey Sachs and his capitalist
provocateurs at the Harvard Institute for International Development
(HIID).
Sachs’ reforms gave the “New Russian” entrepreneurs their freedom, to be
sure. But instead of investments rationalizing the economy along
capitalist lines, Russia’s new bourgeoisie just plunged into a hellish
free-for-all of “grabification”—a brutal struggle to steal everything
they could get their hands on. They plundered the nation’s wealth of
natural resources, sold state-owned gold, diamonds, oil, gas, Siberian
forests, even plutonium, and unloaded them on the West to amass their
private fortunes. And, as we’ve seen in the money-laundering scandals of
late, they also privatized billions of dollars of western aid.
Instead of "Northerners" in the post 1990s, read Westerners and returning exilees, for "Southerners" read Russians, and you are pretty close.
Russian and other former Soviet Union country oligarchs have shown a tendency to move large amounts of money abroad, into countries like Britain, Switzerland, the U.S., and Panama. Being in real estate in some of the more corrupt countries in the world, see this map, makes it very likely that playing by the local rules involves practices one would not condone at home.
While many of the reports on dealings regrading the new carpetbeggars have involved Republicans or Republican leaning business people, the GOP does not have an exclusive.
When the son of former vice president Biden took a high profile position with a Ukrainian gas company, some observers wondered about the purpose of this arrangement.
There is still some carpetbegging to be done right at home in the United States, and the GOP has been on it for decades.
The effort comes labeled as "states rights", "better land management", and variants that include job creation or energy independence.
It involves the transfer of federally managed land to states or local communities to open up mining and oil drilling and other ventures. A recent change in federal rules making such transfers easier shows the direction in which the country is heading.
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