Why Should We Listen to Jeffrey Sachs?

He is generally on the right side of Ukraine/Russia, but what game is he playing here? Listen? Sure, of course. Trust? No way in hell.

Last week Columbia economics professor Jeffrey Sachs made an appearance on Democracy Now, to talk about US foreign policy regarding Russia and China. That he should appear on this venue is a signal in itself, considering what Amy Goodman’s Ashkenocracy Now so clearly is, a (the?) voice of Jewish mainstreamish left socio-politics today. Sachs, if you don’t know, is also Jewish. That he was there to make this linkage between Russia and China should also be considered; I have previously criticized Max Blumenthal and Grayzone for doing the same thing, pushing the paradigm of a contemporary reprise of the old cold war with communism. And Grayzone is a parallel operation to ANow, a voice of Jewish alternative mainstreamish left socio-politics; GZ’s Aaron Mate used to work at ANow, and both Blumenthal and Mate worked for co-ethnic Paul Jay at Real News, another parallel op.

What I found most interesting was how close to the line the discussion got at several points, but of course never crossed, and also how Sachs (re)defined his disastrous role in privatization of post-communist eastern Europe in the 1990s. In the process of that he framed himself as a kind of hero of capitalist transition in Poland (the former paradisus judaeorum and the most Jewish state in the world between the wars), but prohibited from doing the same in Russia by the Bush/Clinton administrations and US-USSR/Russia politics of the day.

We should revisit his role in Russia in the ‘90s, and I will do so by quoting from a May 1998 article in The Nation titled The Harvard Boys Do Russia:

“Through the late summer and fall of 1991, as the Soviet state fell apart, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists participated in meetings at a dacha outside Moscow where young, pro-Yeltsin reformers planned Russia’s economic and political future. Sachs teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of ‘shock therapy’ to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades. Shock therapy produced more shock—not least, hyperinflation that hit 2,500 percent—than therapy. One result was the evaporation of much potential investment capital: the substantial savings of Russians. By November 1992, Gaidar was under attack for his failed policies and was soon pushed aside. When Gaidar came under siege, Sachs wrote a memo to one of Gaidar’s principal opponents, Ruslan Khasbulatov, Speaker of the Supreme Soviet, then the Russian parliament, offering advice and to help arrange Western aid and contacts in the U.S. Congress.

“Enter Anatoly Chubais, a smooth, 42-year-old English-speaking would-be capitalist who became Yeltsin’s economic czar. Chubais, committed to ‘radical reform,’ vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism. The U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), without experience in the former Soviet Union, was readily persuaded to hand over the responsibility for reshaping the Russian economy to H.I.I.D., which was founded in 1974 to assist countries with social and economic reform.

“H.I.I.D. had supporters high in the Administration. One was Lawrence Summers, himself a former Harvard economics professor, whom Clinton named Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs in 1993. Summers, now Deputy Treasury Secretary, had longstanding ties to the principals of Harvard’s project in Russia and its later project in Ukraine.

“Summers hired a Harvard Ph.D., David Lipton (who had been vice president of Jeffrey D. Sachs and Associates, a consulting firm), to be Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary for Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. After Summers was promoted to Deputy Secretary, Lipton moved into Summers’s old job, assuming ‘broad responsibility’ for all aspects of international economic policy development. Lipton co-wrote numerous papers with Sachs and served with him on consulting missions in Poland and Russia. ‘Jeff and David always came [to Russia] together,’ said a Russian representative at the International Monetary Fund. ‘They were like an inseparable couple.’ Sachs, who was named director of H.I.I.D. in 1995, lobbied for and received U.S.A.I.D. grants for the institute to work in Ukraine in 1996 and 1997.

“Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born émigré and already a tenured professor of economics at Harvard in his early 30s, became director of H.I.I.D.’s Russia project. Shleifer was also a protégé of Summers, with whom he received at least one foundation grant. Summers wrote a promotional blurb for Privatizing Russia (a 1995 book co-written by Shleifer and subsidized by H.I.I.D.) declaring that ‘the authors did remarkable things in Russia, and now they have written a remarkable book.’”

So we have clarity on the players here, let me note that like Sachs, Summers, Schleifer and Chubais are Jews. [U.S.A.I.D. was often a CIA front as well.] Summers would go on to be Clinton’s last Sec of the Treasury, succeeding Goldman Sachs Jew Robert Rubin, and then would return to Harvard as its first Jewish president, before being fired for his role in this matter when Harvard was fined $26.5M by the US government for violating terms of their contract, most prominently the insider trading involving Schleifer and his Wall St. (Jewish) wife Nancy Zimmerman. Schleifer was born in the USSR and came to the US under Jackson-Vanik, probably the first success of the neocons in US government which among others gave us the “Russian” mafia (virtually entirely Jewish), and he was fined $2M of that personally. Summers did save Schleifer’s job at Harvard before being booted himself, but he would rise again under Obama.

Another Jewish player who has to be noted is the critically important Dem eminence grise George Soros, also addressed in the Nation article:

“Anne Williamson, a journalist who specializes in Soviet and Russian affairs, details these and other conflicts of interest between H.I.I.D.’s advisers and their supposed clients—the Russian people—in her forthcoming book, How America Built the New Russian Oligarchy. For example, in 1995, in Chubais-organized insider auctions of prime national properties, known as loans-for-shares, the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university’s endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros were the only foreign entities allowed to participate. H.M.C. and Soros became significant shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia’s second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose reserves exceed those of Mobil. H.M.C. and Soros also invested in Russia’s high-yielding, I.M.F.-subsidized domestic bond market.

“Even more dubious, according to Williamson, was Soros’s July 1997 purchase of 24 percent of Sviazinvest, the telecommunications giant, in partnership with Uneximbank’s Vladimir Potanin. It was later learned that shortly before this purchase Soros had tided over Yeltsin’s government with a backdoor loan of hundreds of millions of dollars while the government was awaiting proceeds of a Eurobond issue; the loan now appears to have been used by Uneximbank to purchase Norilsk Nickel in August 1997. According to Williamson, the U.S. assistance program in Russia was rife with such conflicts of interest involving H.I.I.D. advisers and their U.S.A.I.D.-funded Chubais allies, H.M.C. managers, favored Russian bankers, Soros and insider expatriates working in Russia’s nascent markets.”

The Williamson book transcript making the rounds on Wall St. then was never published, and the word on that was that Soros made sure it didn’t happen, using a carrot and/or stick. Something else the Nation article didn’t further address was this consequence of neoliberal privatisation, the rise of the first generation of “Russian” oligarchs, but that was addressed in retrospect in the Guardian in July of 2007 in an article titled The Richer They Come… :

“Few ordinary Russians will feel much sympathy for the losers. Any admiration for the gusto with which the country's 50-odd billionaires live their lives is more than outweighed by outrage at the way many of them made their money. And in a country where anti-semitism is still rife and openly expressed, nationalist rabble-rousers have made much of the fact that of the seven oligarchs who controlled 50% of Russia's economy during the 1990s, six were Jewish: Berezovsky, Vladimir Guzinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman and Valery Malkin. That fact is incontestable - but it is the result not of some grand conspiracy, but of the way the Soviet Union restricted Jews' ability to assimilate and rise up in society. While ethnic Slavs dominated all the best career slots in the highly bureaucratised official society, Jews who wanted to get ahead were forced into the black market economy. When communism collapsed and the black market was legalised as free market capitalism, the Jewish entrepreneurs had a head start.

“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. But this probably has more to do with their failure to observe the new rules in Putin's Russia than their religion. During his time in office, Putin - who is due to step down next year - has established a new law: leave politics to the Kremlin. Or else.”

Imagine that, demanding that governance be left to the government and not a deep state made up of billionaire oligarchs harboring historical resentments - can you imagine if that happened in the US? And I love the way that engaging in organized crime was redefined as being “forced into the black market economy” just because they “wanted to get ahead”. But, hey, they at least “named the Jew”, which is more than one can expect in the US mainstream media.

All of this was the first step down the yellow brick road which has led us to the war in the Ukraine today. Putin flashed those oligarchs the caution sign, Berezovsky and Gusinski and others left the country and Khodorkovsky was jailed for financial fraud and tax evasion. The “American” version of a Russian oligarch, the notorious “Putin’s greatest enemy” Bill Browder (Jewish natch, and the grandson of Earl Browder, the head of the US Communist Party in the 1930s and ‘40s) was also charged and driven out of the country, but he used his ethnic pull (and Khodorkovsky’s money) to get his Magnitsky Act (applying personal sanctions to Putin’s inner circle) passed into US law in 2012, this despite having given up his American citizenship in 1998 in order to avoid paying taxes on his growing pile of loot accumulating offshore. Another important signpost along the yellow brick road.

But back to not naming the Jew. Sachs wrote a blog in June about the war which starts with this:

“The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement.  The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons.  As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle. If Europe has any insight, it will separate itself from these US foreign policy debacles.

“The neocon movement emerged in the 1970s around a group of public intellectuals, several of whom were influenced by University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss and Yale University classicist Donald Kagan.  Neocon leaders included Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan (son of Donald), Frederick Kagan (son of Donald), Victoria Nuland (wife of Robert), Elliott Abrams, and Kimberley Allen Kagan (wife of Frederick).

“The main message of the neocons is that the US must predominate in military power in every region of the world, and must confront rising regional powers that could someday challenge US global or regional dominance, most importantly Russia and China.”

Now that’s pretty ballsy, clearly stating that this war is a consequence of neoconservatism. Then he actually names ten members of the neocon cabal going back to the beginning in the ‘70s, although there are a few more members who should really be on this list:

Bill Kristol - son of the father of neoconservatism Irving, who was co-founder with Robert Kagan of the Project for a New American Century think tank in the late ‘90s.

Richard “the Prince of Darkness” Perle - who partnered with Wolfowitz in Sen. Scoop Jackson’s office in the ‘70s, the Reagan administration in the ‘80s and again under Bush this century, helping sell the Iraq war, and also dated Strauss’ daughter at one point.

Douglas Feith - also a partner with Wolfie and Perle along that Jackson-Reagan-Bush path, and ran the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans which minted the Iraq WMD “intelligence”.

Albert Wohlstetter - another Univ of Chicago professor in the ‘60s, who was Wolfie’s mentor there (he knew Wolfie’s father back in Germany) and was also the intellectual father of the CIA’s Team B approach to the USSR in the mid-’70s under Bush Sr., the counter to Nixon’s detente which became the foundation of the Reagan approach to reviving the cold war in the ‘80s. He also worked for CIA front RAND Corp.

John Podhoretz - son of Norman who succeeded him at the neocon rag Commentary magazine.

Midge Dector - wife of Norman and mother of John, who was also an important player in neoconservatism from the start. She was also the mother from another marriage of Rachel Abrams, wife of Elliott Abrams.

Richard Pipes - Harvard professor of Russian history who headed the CIA’s Team B.

Daniel Pipes - son of Richard, public intellectual and Harvard scholar of Middle Eastern history/affairs.

Now what do all of these people, the ten Sachs named and the eight I added here, have in common beside neoconservatism? They are all Jews. Every single one. Neoconservatism is and always has been a Jewish foreign policy philosophy and movement, and of course driven by Jewish-specific motivations. So who are Sachs’ critical neocons in the Biden administration beyond Nuland? One assumes Sec of State Blinkin, Deputy Sec of State Wendy Sherman, National Security Advisor Sullivan and Director of National Intelligence Haines. Like Nuland, all Jews.

The conflicts named by Sachs were the war on Serbia under Clinton, when Madeleine Albright was Sec of State, Bill Cohen Sec of Defense and Sandy Berger National Security Advisor, again all neoconish Jews; Iraq and Afghanistan under Bush Jr., and I don’t need to go into the sea of neocons infecting that administration (incl Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Abrams); Libya and Syria under Obama and Sec of State Hillary Clinton, and I previously went into what I think of the sellout Clintons in my open letter to Kim Iversen. The targets? As always with neoconservatism, the most-threatening neighbors of beloved ethno-state Israel, and hated mother Russia, the unfriendly homeland of the Ashkenazim in the 19th century.

So Sachs is clearly talking about the work of Jews here, but he doesn’t say that, not one toe slips over the line. And the blog slips away from the Jews after that, retreating into generalizations on US global intentions. Later on he says this:

“The neocon outlook is based on an overriding false premise: that the US military, financial, technological, and economic superiority enables it to dictate terms in all regions of the world.  It is a position of both remarkable hubris and remarkable disdain of evidence.  Since the 1950s, the US has been stymied or defeated in nearly every regional conflict in which it has participated.  Yet in the ‘battle for Ukraine’, the neocons were ready to provoke a military confrontation with Russia by expanding NATO over Russia’s vehement objections because they fervently believe that Russia will be defeated by US financial sanctions and NATO weaponry.”

Now, I think that’s a falsification of the motivation here, and what would constitute victory. I believe the neocon intention of provoking this conflict was to further demonize and isolate their New Hitler Putin, the man who put the brakes on the Jewish oligarchization and takeover of the Russian state two decades ago, the project with which Sachs was so directly involved. In that they have been entirely successful, although the consequences (99% to the goyim, let’s remember, whether in Ukraine, the rest of Europe or in the US) may be worse than expected. The real hope was/is that Putin will be ousted internally and replaced with a more-pliable patsy like Yeltsin was and like what we have seen in the US with every president since Clinton.

Except for Trump, that is, our New Hitler, and the Biden administration has been as obsessed with destroying Trump as destroying Putin, that project currently headed by the Jewish Attorney General Merrick Garland. But that’s another matter…

So why is Sachs now pleading for the end of armed conflict and a solution arrived at through negotiation? Because that goal has essentially been achieved, and not every Russia/Putin-hating activist Jew is willing to commit global suicide over neocon ethnic intentions. Russia will never be welcomed back into the “family of nations” until Putin is gone, there’s no question about that. Jews can play the long game, as they have on Iran, the ultimate neocon target in Israel’s middle east. Sachs warmed up for all this with his belated plea for withdrawal from Syria, years after that conflict began and after it had become a failed state. Job done, let’s move on, fellas.

Anybody who wants to embrace the “wisdom” of Jeffrey Sachs needs to look back over two decades of rising animosity between the US and Russia that began with Sachs’ shock treatment privatization plan for installation of neoliberal economics (itself sourced from the Univ of Chicago in the ‘60s-’70s and its pied piper Jew Milton Friedman) that resulted in the rape of the Russian economy and the rise of the semibankirshchina (seven banker) oligarchs, which put all of us on the yellow brick road to war in Ukraine a quarter century later. Until Sachs can address this openly and honestly and completely he should be dismissed as as the covert ethnic operative he has apparently always been.

For more on this virulent ethnic view of Russia, watch this video of a revealing discussion between three Jewish neocon journalists Jamie Kirchick (the discussion built around his then-new book The End of Europe), Julia Ioffe (another “Russian” gift to America courtesy of Jackson-Vanik) and Bret Stephens (mentor to the notorious toadyist Bari Weiss) in 2017 that took place at 92Y, “Israeli-occupied territory” right in Manhattan: