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[igotthisguitar]

The Rape of Russia
by Anne Williamson

The following is Anne Williamson's testimony before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services
of the U.S. House of Representatives, presented Sept. 21, 1999.

http://www.russians.org/williamson_testimony.htm

It shows how the historic opportunity given the U.S. to help transform Russia into a free, peaceful, pro-Western country was squandered in the form of a bruising economic rape carried out by corrupt Russian politicians and "businessmen", assisted by Bush and (especially) Clinton administrations engaged in political payoffs to Wall Street bankers and others, and by ineptitude and greed on the part of the U.S. Treasury and the Harvard Institute for International Development, assisted by fellow travelers and manipulators at Nordex, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve.

The losers were the Russian people and (mainly) U.S. tax-payers.

And the winners? Ms. Williamson names names, and that's why the elite media has shut out her book. She indicates their heroes are thieves, and they are afraid she may be right


. . . I should like to add just a few words about myself by way of introduction. I am the author of Contagion: The Betrayal of Liberty, Russia, and the United States in the 1990s, which will be available to Committee Members and the American public in time for the nation�s Thanksgiving holiday. Prior to beginning my work on the book, I covered just about all things Russian for a broad range of publications which included inter alia The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Mother Jones, Art and Antiques, Premiere, Film Comment and SPY Magazine. From the late 1980s until 1997, I maintained homes in both Moscow and the United States. And therefore I can say for much of the last decade I had the privilege of being a witness to a dramatic history and the pleasure and excitement of sharing with the Russian people their remarkable land, language and culture. And it is with a profound gratitude to and a deep respect for that noble, heroic and too long-suffering people that I speak to you today.

In the matter before us � the question of the many billions in capital that fled Russia to Western shores via the Bank of New York and other Western banks � we have had a window thrown open on what the financial affairs of a country without property rights, without banks, without the certainty of contract, without an accountable government or a leadership decent enough to be concerned with the national interest or its own citizens� well-being looks like. It�s not a pretty picture, is it? But let there be no mistake, in Russia the West has truly been the author of its own misery. And there is no mistake as to who the victims are, i.e. Western, principally U.S., taxpayers and Russian citizens whose national legacy was stolen only to be squandered and/or invested in Western real estate and equities markets.

The failure to understand where Communism ended and Russia began insured that the Clinton Administration�s policy towards Russia would be riddled with error and ultimately ineffective. Two mistakes are key to understanding what went wrong and why.

CONT'D ...

[jinju]

Balderdash....

actually let's not even DARE call anything done to Russia rape when Russia is guilty of physically raping half of Europe, not to mention Central Asia as well. The numbers speak for themselves. Millions of Poles, millions of other Central Europeans taken off to Siberian gulags for death and heavy labor. 8 million Ukrainians starved to death. Billions of dollars worth of treasure plundered and stolen. Actually, since most of it was priceless I wont bother putting a value on the losses. Billions of dollars of infrastructure destroyed. Intelligentsia targetted and exterminated in central Europe (Katyn the most dramatic example). This may be the 2nd biggest tragedy as these are the people that would have made the real difference in post war Central Europe. However the biggest tragedy of all was 50 years lost in slavery under a system that was tragic in both its brutality and ineptitude.

Thats just Central Europe. In Central Asia Russia left behind something called Stalin's chessboard: the resettlement of entire nations in such a matter that there will be war and conflict in that region till the end of time.

So you expect what? Us to cry for Russia? To have some sort of sympathy for them? I have NONE!