Status Updates From Os camisas negras e a esque...

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was preparing for its fatal plunge into the free-market paradise, Bruce Gelb, head of the US Information Agency, told a reporter that the Soviets would benefit economically from U.S. business education because "the vipers, the bloodsuckers, the middlemen —that's what needs to be rehabilitated in the Soviet Union. That's what makes our kind of country click!" (Washington Post, 6/11/90)

ZiL, a Moscow plant, saw truck production slump from 150,000 to 13,000 a year & 40% of the workforce laid off. The remaining workers petitioned the Russian gvmt to take back control of ZiL.

Once, ZiL workers "had unshakeably safe jobs". They lived in apartments & attended schools provided by Zil. "I was raised in a country that cared about its workers," said one machinist, who was sorry he had opposed that system.

W/ private investment in the East, production did not grow as promised but dropped. 1989-1995, in the Czech Republic, nearly 80% of enterprises were privatized— industrial production shrank by 2/3.

Tech complexes in East Germany, employing thousands of workers, were taken over by giant West German firms… then closed. Under privatization, the former USSR scientific & technical infrastructure was disintegrating.

Once capitalist restorationists in Eastern Europe took power… they set about dismantling public ownership of production & the network of social programs that once served the public.

Former communist nations were being recolonized by Western capital…The once heavy & mutually beneficial commerce between [countries] was reduced to a trickle as their economies got tied into the extractive needs of global capitalism.

Yeltsin, “the democrat”, banned labor unions from all political activities, suppressed dozens of publications, exercised monopoly control over all broadcast media, & permanently outlawed 15 political parties.

He scrapped the constitution and presented the public with a new one that gave the president nearly absolute power over policy... For these crimes he was hailed as a defender of democracy by U.S. leaders

Democratization-via-suppression began before the actual overthrow of communism. In 1991, Gorbachev, prodded by Yeltsin, announced that the Communist party of the USSR no longer had legal status. Membership funds & buildings were confiscated. 6 leftist newspapers were suppressed, while all others enjoyed uninterrupted distribution. U.S. media hailed these acts of suppression as "moving ahead with democratic reforms."

[Anticommunists] grew impatient with the way democratic forms of resistance limited their efforts to install free-market capitalism.

In Russia, assoc. of President Yeltsin complained that "most representative bodies have become a hindrance to our [market] reforms."(1991) Apparently, the free market, said by "reformers" to be the foundation of political democracy, could not be introduced through democratic means.

honestly i love reading this and im learning sm