If you were to search for a poster boy for the failed supercapitalism of the west, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Anders Åslund fits the bill like no one else. Anytime the liberal world order needs to take a poke at Russia’s Putin, they call up the Swedish economist like a really weasely Captain America. But, just who is this economic superhero who tells everybody about Putin’s billions?
A Salon story by Frank Vogl I read June 30th tells readers that both the Russian and the American president are hiding boatloads of money. But the only “evidence” the author offers is Åslund’s book “Russia’s Crony Capitalism.” That’s it. A Georgetown professor and a former World Bank senior official has no need for proof, he just waves his Anders Åslund flag in the air and yells “corruption” against the enemies of liberalism. But, this only makes sense. Vogl created the PR firm Vogl Communications and one of the top 10 think tanks in the world, Transparency International. I must point out here, that Transparency International (TI) accepted $3 million from the German engineering multinational Siemens, the same company that paid $1.6 billion in fined for bribing government officials in numerous countries. But, let’s move on to Anders Åslund and the courageous captains of ultra-liberal capitalism.
From 1991 to 1994, Anders Åslund worked with Jeffrey Sachs and David Lipton as a senior advisor to the government of former Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Some readers will ask the logical question here, “What was Åslund’s job working with the men trying to sell off the legacy of the Russian people?” The answer is fairly simple. The Swedish economist’s advisory position with Yeltsin was to help install a liberal system of “yes men” and disastrous policies that would enable the western bankers to carve up Russia. Åslund worked with Yeltsin and Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, who installed catastrophic “shock therapy” economic reforms that ruined the lives of millions of Russians. It was these crushing reforms that ushered in the privatization pirates who Vladimir Putin ended up banishing for their greed and foul play in the latter 1990s and early 2000s. These do good economists from the west nearly strangled the life out of Russia, and now they try to paint Putin as the bad guy.
Anders Åslund’s work with privatization chief Anatoly Chubais and others in the 1990s, his association with the globalist bankers who’ve funded and supported all the wars on Russia’s frontiers, it’s further evidenced by his uncanny ability to betray. Take Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko, for instance. Back at the time of the chocolate billionaire’s installation as president, the Swedish economic genius seemed like the architect of what came to be known as “deoligarchization” of Ukraine under Poroshenko. Then, when the west favored a new Ukraine leader, Åslund was one of the first to throw Poroshenko under the bus.
It was Åslund who claimed that then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Russia#s president at the time of the Georgia conflict, Dmitri Medvedev would “become a millstone around the necks of key Russian oligarchs. This, of course, turned out to be only wishful thinking by another liberal world order puppet. However, it does go to show intent, and how the other side of geopolitics functions.
What’s clear about Åslund and western operators like him is their propensity for trying to cast dispersion onto Putin in order to divert attention away from the real problem. The economics of the globalists is simply not working, and Åslund leads a pack of scandalous economists proclaiming British Petroleum and others “good” and Gazprom or any Russian company “bad” for business. It’s a classic case of the “pot calling the kettle black.” But experts like are serving a far more important role in the liberalization and expansion of the super-capitalist hegemony. His job is to make sure the Rothschilds and other investor elites take their hedge from the CIS countries if they cannot get all of Russia just yet.
Back in 2015 in his book “Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It,” Åslund argued that “Ukraine must undertake sweeping political, economic, social, and government reforms to achieve prosperity and independence.” He also called for “the West” to broaden economic assistance to help Ukraine transform itself. However, the 2014 version of “Reboot Ukraine” for the west was not the economist’s first assistance for the liberal order takeover of a former Soviet republic. Another book by Åslund during the time of the Orange Revolution can help us understand the deep corruption of economics academia some experts allude to. Let’s remember that Åslund was on the team of Jeffrey Sach which helped Yeltsin institute a shock therapy on the Russian people that has been described as “the most ruthless experiments in neoliberalist politics ever performed.” But, the real evil of Åslund and the other economic puppets does not stop with trying to carve up Russia. These same shock therapies characterize what’s happening from Greece to Brazil, and the privatization of public wealth worldwide.
Let’s make this simple. Putin saved Russia from a scale of piracy the likes of which the world has never seen. Anders Åslund and the individuals and institutions which support such carrion, they’re more or less employed by the investment houses using the strategy to starve ranchers off their range (sorry, Old West analogy needed) or bankrupt businesses they need to secure more growth. In a rapidly shrinking world of resources, capitalism the way it has been practiced is simply running out of steam. Take a look at how Anders Åslund viewed the shock therapy exacted on the Russian people when he proposed how Yeltsin’s plan would reset the Russian economic system:
“The miraculous incentives or temptations of capitalism conquer more or less anything.” (Dagens Nyheter)
This Swedish economic psychopath actually admitted that Russian companies were to be given away in order to create what he called a new “class of owners” in Russia. And those owners were not all Russians like Yukos Oil mafioso Mikhael Khodorkovsky, who was backed by the Rothschilds. The reason I call Åslund a Psycho-economist is not only because he helped in an effort to destroy Russia, but because many of his ideas are punishing people all over Europe. Åslund actually wrote a book in Swedish entitled “Därför behöver Östeuropa chockterapi” (SNS 1993), which translates to “Why Eastern Europe needs Shock Therapy.” But what about the shock strategies of Jeffrey Sachs and Anders Åslund shutting down shock the colossal Russian industry? Why do more western media and think tanks not discuss how Putin came to the rescue and rebuilt the economy, and how he eliminated the staggering Russian debt these imbeciles and academic puppets helped create? Again, the answer is patently obvious. How could Salon and other liberal broadcasters turn to Åslund and the others if they were labeled stooges? I need to round up this profiling of but I cannot bring myself to quit hitting on him. Anders Åslund has been characterized before as:
“…one of the most convinced partisans of neoliberalism. His macro-economic theories have never been tested on real people before in the history of the world. Until now. In Russia, Anders Åslund got his chance to bring about a society that according to the neoliberal course literature would be the perfect one. A society where self-interest “conquers just about anything”. A society where starving pensioners “are not a political problem”.”
The Swedish economic genius that the Washington think tanks publish and quote time and again, he was also quoted describing the leadership of Russia back in the Yeltsin days in this way:
“They only look after their own interests. No one in Russia is strong enough to look after the interests of society as a whole.”
Isn’t it ironic that when Vladimir Putin stood up to be that strong man, Anders Åslund chose to criticize, ridicule, and outright mislead his constituents about Russia’s president? After studying academics like Åslund, I have changed my definition for the worst and most dangerous kind of corruption.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”