Why did the ex socialist European countries impose a very harsh capitalist system on themselves. Neoliberalism created winners and losers by about 50:50 in those countries, says Richard Wolff, but the winners took power and now they will not allow any socialism at all. Often, a very high percentage people in ex socialist countries want to return to the old system.
A Patron of Economic Update asks: "How did the people of the USSR come to accept the radical shift back to capitalism? Did they not retain an expectation that people should own their homes and means of production? The mass privatization of the Soviet economy was followed by a decade long depression and a huge rise in poverty. How did that affect public perception of capitalism and socialism? Post-Soviet states seem even less social-democratic than western European states, why is that?"
2 comments:
The ones who didn't accept it, drank themselves to death.
Survival of the fittest!
"The mass privatization of the Soviet economy was followed by a decade long depression and a huge rise in poverty."
State assets were acquired by oligarchs at fire sale prices. The Russian people were robbed.
Russian oligarchs are business oligarchs of the former Soviet republics who rapidly accumulated wealth during the era of Russian privatization in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Russian oligarch
The "loans for shares" program.
In 1995, facing severe fiscal deficit and in desperate need of funds for the 1996 presidential elections, the government of Boris Yeltsin adopted a "loans-for-share" scheme proposed by banker Vladimir Potanin and endorsed by Anatoly Chubais, then a deputy prime minister, whereby some of the largest state industrial assets (including state-owned shares in Norilsk Nickel, Yukos, Lukoil, Sibneft, Surgutneftegas, Novolipetsk Steel, and Mechel) were leased through auctions for money lent by commercial banks to the government. The auctions were rigged and lacked competition, being largely controlled by favored insiders with political connections or used for the benefit of the commercial banks themselves.[18] As neither the loans nor the leased enterprises were returned in time, this effectively became a form of selling, or privatizing, state assets at very low prices. —Privatization in Russia
Here's an oligarch:
Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky
In 2003, Khodorkovsky was believed to be the wealthiest man in Russia, with a fortune estimated to be worth $15 billion, and was ranked 16th on Forbes list of billionaires.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in the mid-1990s, he accumulated considerable wealth by obtaining control of a number of Siberian oil fields unified under the name Yukos, one of the major companies to emerge from the privatization of state assets during the 1990s (a scheme known as "Loans for Shares").
He was in prison for a time.
I was stabbed in the face: Freed Russian tycoon reveals the horror of his 10 years in jail on 'politically motivated' fraud charges
Most of these oligarchs were Jewish and the loans came from Jewish money in the West.
All this changed when Putin became president in 2000. Putin's previous employer was the KGB - a notorious Slavs-only club. Since he took power, most of the original Jewish oligarchs have fled. —The richer they come ...
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