Aug 28, 2023·edited Aug 28, 2023Liked by Data Humanist
Your piece made me recall stories I heard from some of those private equity firm types who told me of the first cons on the Russian people made by the oligarchs and foreign investors. Involved the privatization of publicly held businesses, like utilities, energy, manufacturing, all industries all previously owned by the Soviet State.
Every Russian citizen was given shares of stock in them as they were apportioned. Russians, uneducated on western financial instruments, private capital about the value of stock shares received their shares but had little appreciation for the inherent value in the stocks. And while they would be queuing up for bread lines or other lines waiting to purchase goods or register for other means of subsistence would be approached in line by people offering to buy their shares for tiny fractions of what they were worth. Hungry and oblivious, many Russians would take a few rubles for the stocks worth thousands. Happy to have received "free" bread that night.
Meanwhile the people who bought the shares were working for the oligarchs and foreign investors, receiving a few rubles for the shares they purchased with the money they were previously given. Allowing the oligarchs and foreign investors to round up vast wealth in stock holdings of those formally public companies that were privatized and allotted to ordinary Russian citizens.
Those types of corruption and predatory practices was commonplace. And fortunes were made. And turned the Russian people against the idea of capitalism, their only experience being getting ripped off by the wealthy greedy - just like they always had been told in the USSR. Yes. Putin endures. And the west isn't trusted. For damn good reason.
Very interesting,DH: you got at least one reader waiting for the next episode in the serial.
Ugh. Just wading through the memories of the snake pit of the Clintons and Boris: smarmy, dangerous & deadly.
Don’t watch TV since ‘Brought to you by Pfizer’, but subscribe to Vanessa Beeley, still living in and reporting from Syria. Currently reading “Operation Aleppo - Putin’s Military Intervention in the Syrian War”, from 2015, yet deja vu.
Why is it that whenever I hear/read Putin, or Russian spokespeople, or simply their citizens, they sound like grownups?
Your piece made me recall stories I heard from some of those private equity firm types who told me of the first cons on the Russian people made by the oligarchs and foreign investors. Involved the privatization of publicly held businesses, like utilities, energy, manufacturing, all industries all previously owned by the Soviet State.
Every Russian citizen was given shares of stock in them as they were apportioned. Russians, uneducated on western financial instruments, private capital about the value of stock shares received their shares but had little appreciation for the inherent value in the stocks. And while they would be queuing up for bread lines or other lines waiting to purchase goods or register for other means of subsistence would be approached in line by people offering to buy their shares for tiny fractions of what they were worth. Hungry and oblivious, many Russians would take a few rubles for the stocks worth thousands. Happy to have received "free" bread that night.
Meanwhile the people who bought the shares were working for the oligarchs and foreign investors, receiving a few rubles for the shares they purchased with the money they were previously given. Allowing the oligarchs and foreign investors to round up vast wealth in stock holdings of those formally public companies that were privatized and allotted to ordinary Russian citizens.
Those types of corruption and predatory practices was commonplace. And fortunes were made. And turned the Russian people against the idea of capitalism, their only experience being getting ripped off by the wealthy greedy - just like they always had been told in the USSR. Yes. Putin endures. And the west isn't trusted. For damn good reason.
Very interesting,DH: you got at least one reader waiting for the next episode in the serial.
Ugh. Just wading through the memories of the snake pit of the Clintons and Boris: smarmy, dangerous & deadly.
Don’t watch TV since ‘Brought to you by Pfizer’, but subscribe to Vanessa Beeley, still living in and reporting from Syria. Currently reading “Operation Aleppo - Putin’s Military Intervention in the Syrian War”, from 2015, yet deja vu.
Why is it that whenever I hear/read Putin, or Russian spokespeople, or simply their citizens, they sound like grownups?
Good analysis. Will be linking it tomorrow @https://nothingnewunderthesun2016.com/