Sunday, June 18, 2017

Alan Gilman — Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin: When the White House fixed a Russian election

The presentation of the US electoral system as a model of democracy is a transparent fraud. It is system that legally sanctions the buying of candidates, parties and elections by a super-rich financial oligarchy. Moreover, the Democratic Party emails allegedly hacked and leaked by the Russian government documented real, and illegal, manipulation of the electoral process, in the form of efforts by the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign to sabotage the campaign of Bernie Sanders for the party’s presidential nomination.
When it comes to manipulating foreign elections, the American ruling elite and its media and political stooges know whereof they speak. The United States is the world leader in interfering in other countries’ elections. Professor Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University has assembled a database documenting as many as 81 occasions between 1946 and 2000 when Washington interfered in elections in other countries. This number does not include military coups or regime-change efforts following the election of candidates the US opposed, as in Iran, Congo, Guatemala, Chile and many other nations.
In fact, the number of countries whose elections have been affected by US meddling is much higher. There is scarcely a country, large or small, where the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon or their various nongovernmental agencies, including the AFL-CIO, have not intervened in an attempt to obtain the election result desired by Washington. This includes nominal “allies” such as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Britain, Australia and Japan.
One fairly recent election stands out for the brazen and open manner in which the United States government, directed from the White House, intervened to put its candidate in office in a foreign land. The targeted country was none other than Russia.
In 1996, the White House and President Bill Clinton personally mounted a massive campaign to secure the reelection of Boris Yeltsin, whose comprador regime had been installed in the first place to oversee the dissolution of the Soviet Union and restoration of capitalism. One of the ironies of the current contrived scandal over alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 election is the fact that the supposed victim, Hillary Clinton, is the wife of the president who oversaw the very real interference by Washington in the Russian election 20 years earlier....
The fact is however that while Bill Clinton cinched the election for Boris Yeltsin, Hillary Clinton lost her own election all on her own owing to her focus on identity politics and her failed campaign strategy. She and her campaign were apparently deluded by polling based on the popular vote, which she indeed won. But elections in the US are decided in the electoral college based on states. Hillary lost states she assumed she didn't need to campaign in.

WSWS
Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin: When the White House fixed a Russian election
Alan Gilman

6 comments:

Kaivey said...

I pinned this to my street screen. It shall be there as ammo on the Guardian's CiF.

Kaivey said...

Despite all the meddling by the US, Yeltsin still lost, so they just simply stole the election.

'Many believe that despite the pervasive interference by the US in the 1996 election, it still was not enough to elect Yeltsin, and that he actually lost. They view the result as an outright fraud, supported by the US.

Comments purportedly made in February 2012 by then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev lend credence to this view. A Time article dated February 24, 2012 indicated that during a meeting with leaders of opposition parties who were complaining about recent election fraud, Medvedev said that Yeltsin was not the winner of the 1996 election.

According to the article, Sergei Babkin, the leader of an opposition party, was the first to reveal the details of that closed-door meeting during a radio interview the following day. “He (Medvedev) brought up the presidential elections of 1996 and said, ‘There is hardly any doubt who won [that race]. It was not Boris Nikolaevich Yeltsin.’”

If one accepts this view, it could be asserted that the true purpose of publicizing the involvement of American political operatives in Yeltsin’s campaign was to provide a sophisticated cover for a more direct subversion of the 1996 Russian election—the theft by fraud of the Russian presidency.

This history underscores the utter hypocrisy of the CIA/Democratic Party/media effort to whip up anti-Russian hysteria in order to prepare aggression against Russia for its alleged involvement in what historically has been America’s specialty—determining the outcome of other countries’ elections.'

Tom Hickey said...

The US might have gotten away with hijacking Russia and turning it into a vassal if it didn't bomb Serbia.

That ended the honeymoon after the collapse of the USSR.

But without that, the US was on track to deindustrialize Russia, get rid of the nukes, neutralize the military and turn Russia into a resource supplier.

Kaivey said...

When I was young I always wondered why oil rich countries did not industrialize. With all those resources they could become hi tech superpowers, I thought. Then I read that if you are a resource country then that messes up the exchange rate for exporting manufactured goods. Now that's odd, it means you're better off having no resources, i.e, being a poor country, and then making yourself rich by manufacturing. So why don't oil rich countries export less oil and develop more manufacturing, I thought. There must be a reason why countries with bags of money, i.e, natural resources, have not industrialized? I also read the West stops them somehow. Like the way you said they were going do deindustrialize Russia.

So you've also saying Putin was quite happy to for Russia to become a resource supplier.

Peter Pan said...

Germany is a vassal for the US and it is heavily industrialized. The objective could have been to make Russia an ally by investing in their economy and helping its people. The remaining Russian nukes wouldn't have mattered. Are Frances's or UK's nukes of concern to its allies?

Russia was ignored and alienated thanks to economists and their ideology.

Kaivey, it depends on the level of governance in the oil exporting country. Norway, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Nigeria have oil wealth. Norway is a democracy while Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. Venezuela is a democracy but its government is incompetent. Nigeria is a kleptocracy governed by corruption and brutality.

Deindustrialization is associated with the decline of civilization. If it happens, it will be global.

Tom Hickey said...

When I was young I always wondered why oil rich countries did not industrialize. With all those resources they could become hi tech superpowers, I thought. Then I read that if you are a resource country then that messes up the exchange rate for exporting manufactured goods. Now that's odd, it means you're better off having no resources, i.e, being a poor country, and then making yourself rich by manufacturing.

The economic rationale is "comparative advantage." The problem for resource-rich states that are dependent on exporting natural resources is "Dutch disease." They are heavily dependent on commodity prices.

Another reason is that is much more difficult to industrialize without foreign investment and technology. For countries starting essentially from scratch, it probably make more sense to start with developing resources and then create a foundation for later industrialization through funding education, R&D, etc., as well as develop a suitable culture.