In publishing on Russia, there comes a time when a writer, journalist, bank analyst, television presenter, or academic produces something so lacking in truthfulness, so replete with fawning and meretriciousness, that this website must kill and skin another goat; dry out the vellum; and have a fresh scroll inscribed with the Cat’s Paw – that’s the Personal Abasement Award (PAW).TPTB have never forgiven Putin for taming the oligarchs to whom Yeltsin and the Harvard Boyz turned Russia over to. This is what regime change in Russia is really all about — reinstalling the rule of the oligarchs in an oligarchic democracy modeled on the developed countries of the West. This their model for neoliberal globalization, and they will do whatever it takes to impose it.
This award is designed to encourage accountability and ethical reporting on Russia. The PAW committee decided to suspend the Cat’s Paw awards when the start of the Ukraine civil war threatened to overwhelm the supply of vellum and the goat population on which it depends. The goats who have earned the Cat’s PAW scroll have also multiplied exponentially.
At the Financial Times’ Moscow Bureau there has been a tradition of viewing Russian business figures as agents of regime change, making them appear the harbingers of democracy, and pitting them against the Kremlin; that is, once Boris Yeltsin’s destruction of the Russian parliament in 1993, and his election steal in 1996, failed to do the Russian reform trick. For FT reporters this has meant advertorial promotion of the oligarchs applying to the City of London to raise debt and equity finance; buying London and country real estate; promoting themselves with British public relations and deterring investigation of their business with British libel law firms.
The FT reporters have been closely pressed by rivals at The Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, and other print and broadcast media....
Dances with Bears
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