I found this report / interview on the +The Real News Network and posted the below in response. I am extremely left wing, a Christian Socialist actually, and I don't trust my government but I do love my country. And I make a small monthly donation to TRNN (just as I do to +NPR because the mainstream media sucks), but I have to say there are times I think their news reports should be described as Op-Eds because they seem to be opinion and not facts, or at least if there are facts they are not referenced to anything in the report. So here it is for you to consider and form your own opinion.....
You should have also mentioned Michal Hudson as an honorary graduate of the goebbels school of propaganda.Referencing his experience in Latvia while discussing the "persecution" of Russian speakers by Ukraine and the "plotting" against Russia by Ukraine, he says Russian speakers can't vote in most independent former Russian republics. This is so nazi sounding, for those of us who know anything about history and the falsehoods spread about the persecuted Germans in the former Czechoslovakia and Poland. He later mentions the Russian speaking political party in Latvia, Harmony Centre, who holds the most seats in the Latvian Saeima. So which is it? Can Russian speakers in these former Soviet republics vote or not? They can in Latvia ( http://vota.te.gob.mx/content/... ), Lithuania ( http://vota.te.gob.mx/content/... ), and Estonia ( http://vota.te.gob.mx/content/... ) and Russian speakers have been voting in Ukrainian elections since the country regained it's independence. I find it interesting Mr Hudson doesn't mention the sham of a referendum in Crimea held by the separatist.
I also find it amazing Mr Hudson actually states " And already you can see, in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, worry that Russia's going to invade. There's no need whatsoever for the Russians to invade. There is no tension at all." Well Professor, there was no reason for Russia to seize Ukrainian Crimea either. If fact, if Russia wanted to dispel the perception they are the aggressor in Central Europe they would have never sent troops to Ukrainian Crimea, never illegally seized boats of the Ukrainian Navy, never illegally seized Ukrainian Army and Airfields and the equipment there, and they would have never seized Ukrainian Crimea. They would have told the separatist they were on their own and would have prevented Russians from going to Ukrainian Crimea to inflame the situation.
Mr Hudson's economic concerns for Ukraine are justified (the greed of European, American and Russian corporations are a threat to the human rights and economic well being of all Ukrainians, no matter what language they speak). putin is playing the West, economically and militarily, just like hitler played Chamberlain and Daladier in Munich in 1938. Tension remains high in Ukraine, the Baltics and Central Europe because with 40,000+ heavy armor Russian troops on the Russian border, Russian Backfire Bombers violating NATO airspace and Russian naval aggression in the Black Sea nobody can be sure just what putin will do.
West Looks to Carve Up Ukraine & Privatize Industries Held by Kleptocrats
Michael Hudson: The financial grab for Ukraine's industries is simply war by another name, as other Eastern European countries have experienced a similar fate -
Transcript
JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.Hundreds
of pro-Russian protesters have seized public buildings in Eastern
Ukrainian cities. They're demanding referendums to secede from Ukraine
in order to become a part of Russia. Ukrainian officials have blamed
Putin for this continued unrest, but it should be noted that Ukraine is a
major transit route for natural gas exports to Europe from Russia, and
now Russia is warning Ukrainian officials that they need to pay back the
$2.2 billion debt owed to the Russian natural gas company Gazprom.
German and French officials are also working towards a quick
implementation of a $14-18 billion International Monetary Fund loan
package to the Ukraine.Now joining us to discuss all of
this is our guest, Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research
professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He
also taught in Latvia at the Riga Graduate School of Law. And his two
newest books are The Bubble and Beyond and Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents.MICHAEL HUDSON, ECONOMICS PROF., UMKC: Thank you very much, Jessica.DESVARIEUX:
So, Michael, in our previous interviews with you, you've been extremely
critical of the IMF deal, and also now that we know what's happening to
Ukraine. What's your assessment of what's really taking place in
Ukraine?HUDSON: Well, on the surface it's a financial war.
And finance really is war by other means, the way it's being conducted
today, because the objective of finance in Western Europe is the same as
that of war. It wants to appropriate land. It wants to appropriate
basic infrastructure, all the monopolies. And it wants to extract
tribute, and this usually in the case of debt service. So what Europe
wants is all of the property that the Ukrainian kleptocrats, the people
who rule the country and have appointed themselves the leaders, have
basically stolen when they registered the steel mills, the land, the
factories, everything in their own name, and they've kept Ukraine one of
the poorest countries in Europe, very low labor. And now the Western
Europeans say, wait a minute, we want you in Ukraine to do what the
Russians did. The Russians, like the Chinese, protected themselves
against the West by making a deal with Western investors. They let
Western investors come in and buy part of the raw materials, the land,
the monopolies that they had. And that's given Western investors a stake
in arguing against any move against Russia or China. The
Ukrainian leaders were not that way. They wanted everything for
themselves. They're in the most vicious war in Europe. And now Western
Europe has come to them and said, okay, now we're going to make a deal.
We're going to let you keep what you have, but you have to sell us part
of what you have, and we want you now to--we're going to encircle
Russia. We want you to make a very anti-Russian move. We want you to
do--essentially ban the Russian language from use in Latvia.Now,
imagine Canada banning the use of French. You'd have Montreal and
Quebec seceding and joining the United States. Imagine New York City and
America banning the use of Spanish. What people don't
realize in the press is that this banning of Russian has already been
promoted in the Baltics. When I taught in Latvia, for instance, I wanted
to invite a Russian economist to lecture at the Riga Graduate School of
Law, where I taught, and at the Stockholm School of Law in Riga. I was
told by the rector that there was a law in Latvia making it illegal to
give any class or a lecture in Russian in any public university and that
he and I can be put under arrest for even speaking Russian there. So
the result is I had to go to one of the Russian non-public universities
to have my friend come.So you've already had this
anti-Russian move in other post-Soviet countries. And the Russian
population there sort of accommodated themselves to it. They're not
allowed to vote. There's--they're apartheid states. The Ukrainian
leaders have been told by Europe, we want another apartheid state. We
want you to make such a social war on the Russian speakers that's large
in your population that Russia is going to do something intemperate. And
what we're going--and the first thing Russia has done, of course, is to
say wait a minute. If you've overthrown democratic leaders, we're going
to do what you mentioned at the beginning of this task: they're going
to stop giving the special subsidies of gas prices that they've been
giving. Russia had been selling Ukraine gas far below the
market rate in order to sort of carry Ukraine. Ukraine has always been
sort of an economic burden for Russia. The Western press said that
Russia has been raising its gas prices. But it hasn't really been
raising them; it's been just returning to the normal removing the
subsidy. Well, the IMF has already said that the first condition of the
bailout loan to prevent Ukrainian currency from falling more is going to
be to reduce the subsidy that the government has already been giving
the people on gas prices. So this is what the IMF usually does in Third
World countries when it removes a subsidy for bread or for other things.
It's removing the gas price. This is going to force Ukraine into a
foreign exchange problem, quite apart from the debt problem.And earlier this week, George Soros wrote an article in The New York Review of Books
where he outlines what he thinks should be done for the Ukraine. And
what he says--and I'll quote what he says at the end of the article. He
says Ukraine would "encourage its companies … by finding European
partners". In other words, Ukrainian kleptocrats should sell out their
companies or part ownership to the West. That's what Western Europe
wants right now. This is a resource grab in the Ukraine,
and it's a resource grab that goes hand-in-hand with a
blame-the-Russians. As a result of the riots in the Western Ukraine,
there's already a paralysis of the country. They're trying to blame the
Ukraine's problems, the austerity that the West is basically imposing on
Ukraine, they're trying to blame it on Russia and fan anti-Russian
feelings not only in the Ukraine, but also in the Baltics. In
Latvia, for instance, there's an election coming this fall. There's a
whole argument between the Russian-speaking party, which is the largest
party, the Harmony Centre, and the neoliberal austerity parties trying
to free the Latvians from being tied to all of the bad debts from the
real estate bubble that was created. There was a danger about a month
ago, according to the pro-Westerners, that, wait a minute, the Latvians
themselves are agreeing with the Russian-speaking party. They're
agreeing that austerity is bad. They're agreeing that they should tax
the landowners and tax the monopolists instead of taxing labor. And
this frightened Russia, because if you have just one country pushing
for a progressive income tax, pushing for a progressive policy, it can
spread. So what they did was step up their Cold War in the Ukraine in
order to frighten all of Central Europe about the Russian threat. And
already you can see, in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, worry that
Russia's going to invade. There's no need whatsoever for the Russians to
invade. There is no tension at all. And yet the Western press is making
it appear as if there are Russians massing on the Baltic borders. Well,
that's like America saying there are Canadians massing on our northern
borders. Of course they're massing there, because they live there. Same
thing with Mexico. The Mexicans aren't massing on our southern border;
that's where they live. There's an amazing anti-Russian hypocrisy in the
American press making Russia appear as if somehow it's the aggressor in
all this case, when what it's going to do is prevent this apartheid
state that's being created on the part of the Western Ukraine against
the Russian speakers, against Sevastopol, against Donets Basin and the
agricultural lands. These are the lands, essentially, that the Western
Europeans decide that they want to take over and they want to
appropriate to make the Ukrainian kleptocrats behave the same way
kleptocrats in other countries have done: sell part ownership to the
West and make a partnership for the West to come in and then tighten the
screws in the kind of class war that austerity has become in Central
Europe.DESVARIEUX: Alright. Michael Hudson, very interesting analysis. Thank you for joining us.HUDSON: Thank you.DESVARIEUX: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.
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