Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Michel Chossudovsky — Regime Change in Ukraine and the IMF’s Bitter “Economic Medicine”

The Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Ihor Sorkin was fired on February 25th and replaced by a new governor: Stepan Kubiv....
Kubic is no ordinary bank executive. He was one of the first field “commandants” of the EuroMaidan riots alongside Andriy Parubiy co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda) and Dimitry Yarosh, leader of the Right Sector Brown Shirts, which now has the status of a political party.

Kubiv was in the Maidan square addressing protesters on February 18, at the very moment when armed Right Sector thugs under the helm of Dmitry Yarosh were raiding the parliament building.
A few days later, upon the establishment of the interim government, Stepan Kubiv was put in charge of negotiations with Wall Street and the IMF....
You get the drift of where this is going.

Global Research
Regime Change in Ukraine and the IMF’s Bitter “Economic Medicine”
Michel Chossudovsky | Professor of Economics (emeritus), University of Ottawa, and adviser to the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research

10 comments:

Ken said...

Ugh ... Michel Chossudovsky ... not credible. Nothing from that "Global Research" site should be considered credible. It is a conspiracy theory site.

Tom Hickey said...

I read the post. Sounds credible to me.

Evidence of where he is incorrect?

Ken said...

No ... I refuse to even read that guy. Do some digging on him and on that site. Might just as well post stuff from Alex Jones.

Hint ... if you go to the front page, the very first story is about how the airliner disappearance was some kind of intelligence conspiracy.

Tom Hickey said...

Here the US position from US News:

Behind Russia's 'Neo-Nazi' Propaganda Campaign in Ukraine

"The Maidan is peaceful, deeply religious, iconic, symbolic, and a place of discussion and a mixture of all kinds of people discussing the phenomenon of the Maidan revolution," says William Miller, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1993 to 1998. He returned this week from Kiev, where he met with senior government ministers overseeing the governmental transition.

The atmosphere is deeply religious, he says, with participation from Jews, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Muslims, and "a heavy dose of atheists and nonbelievers" says Miller.

"The expectations of the future government to carry out the principles of the Maidan — which are direct democratic action and principled behavior — are not unlike the principles contained in the best constitutions of the democratic world, and the Ten Commandments," he says.


Here the opposing view that is in agreement with MC.

Ukraine’s Inconvenient Neo-Nazis

The Neo-Nazi Question in Ukraine

Here is Michael Hudson saying substantially the same thing as MC about the IMF deal.

Ukraine’s Boomerang Aid

See the other stuff on his page about Ukraine, too.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, I learned back during the Iraq War never to trust anything from that bozo and his crackpot website.

Tom Hickey said...

Well then read the other stuff I just posted. Says essentially the same thing.

BTW, MC was an economics prof in Chile when the Allende regime was overthrown. He has seen this closeup.

He was a visiting professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile during the 1970-1973 government of Salvador Allende, and it was the effects of General Augusto Pinochet's post-coup policies which sparked his interest in "economic repression".[5] Pinochet's government among other measures quadrupled the price of bread, and Chossudovsky set out to examine the social effects, concluding that the government was engaging not merely in conventional political repression, but also in "economic repression". Chossudovsky subsequently examined these types of economic policies in a wide range of countries, often associated with International Monetary Fund and/or World Bank programs. One of Chossudovsky's policy conclusions was the corrosive effect of tax havens, which he argued in a world of increasingly mobile capital had facilitated the "criminalization" of the global economy through movements of large amounts of drug money and other illegal finance: "This critical drain of billions of dollars in capital flight dramatically reduces state tax revenues, paralyses social programs, drives up budget deficits and spurs the accumulation of large public debts."[5]

Peter Pan said...

Paul Craig Roberts links to this guy, so he must be legit.

Tom Hickey said...

PCR's economics may be out of paradigm but his political instincts have been pretty good.

Tom Hickey said...

I should also remind that I don't endorse everything I put up. I post things that you aren't likely run into in the media that give an alternative interpretation. One needs to consider the range of opinion from Establishment propaganda to investigative reporting to come to one's own conclusions.

My own conclusion is that most of the omission, spin and outright lying comes from the side of propaganda, while investigative reporting is at somewhat of a disadvantage since without an intelligence service behind one, it's hard to ferret out the evidence. Moreover, many investigative reporters have a POV they are pushing, too, or that is at least influencing them.

What I find alarming in this situation is how much of push there is toward the neocon position in the US. The play book has been to whip up fear of an enemy along with patriotic fever to get the American people behind and adventure that they eventually sour on due to the protracted costs. They never seem to learn that it's the same old story.

BTW, read this Chomsky account of how close we've come to nuclear war on several occasion in addition to Cuba and it was something of a miracle that it was avoided. If you are not one of the people that think NC is a conspiracy theorist, that is.

Noam Chomsky | The Prospects for Survival

To cite an example from the late Cold War: In November 1983 the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization launched a military exercise designed to probe Russian air defenses, simulating air and naval attacks and even a nuclear alert.

These actions were undertaken at a very tense moment. Pershing II strategic missiles were being deployed in Europe. President Reagan, fresh from the "Evil Empire" speech, had announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars," which the Russians understood to be effectively a first-strike weapon - a standard interpretation of missile defense on all sides.

Naturally these actions caused great alarm in Russia, which, unlike the U.S., was quite vulnerable and had repeatedly been invaded.

Newly released archives reveal that the danger was even more severe than historians had previously assumed. The NATO exercise "almost became a prelude to a preventative (Russian) nuclear strike," according to an account last year by Dmitry Adamsky in the Journal of Strategic Studies.

Nor was this the only close call. In September 1983, Russia's early-warning systems registered an incoming missile strike from the United States and sent the highest-level alert. The Soviet military protocol was to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own.

The Soviet officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, intuiting a false alarm, decided not to report the warnings to his superiors. Thanks to his dereliction of duty, we're alive to talk about the incident.
Security of the population was no more a high priority for Reagan planners than for their predecessors. Such heedlessness continues to the present, even putting aside the numerous near-catastrophic accidents, reviewed in a chilling new book, "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety," by Eric Schlosser.

It's hard to contest the conclusion of the last commander of the Strategic Air Command, Gen . Lee Butler, that humanity has so far survived the nuclear age "by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion."

Peter Pan said...

We've come close to nuclear war due to incompetence, accidents or false alarms. If the elites want a nuclear war, we will have one.

The article in question says what other articles have generally said. The consequences of IMF reforms are well-known. This may be the price that Ukrainians pay to align themselves with Europe. Naturally there will be opportunities to profit from these 'reforms'.