Oklahoma oligarch Aubrey McClendon with his niece-in-law, swimsuit model Kate Upton
This article was first published in the Daily Banter
At the end of the 1990s, after the total collapse of the mass-privatization experiment in Boris Yeltin’s Russia, some of the more earnest free-market proselytizers tried making sense of it all. The unprecedented collapse of Russia’s economy and its capital markets, the wholesale looting, the quiet extermination of millions of Russians from the shock and destitution (Russian male life expectancy plummeted from 68 years to 56 years)—the terrible consequences of imposing radical libertarian free-market ideas on an alien culture—turned out worse than any worst-case-scenario imagined by the free-market true-believers. (more…)
“The West let Russia down, and it’s a shame,” said Meadowcroft, a former British MP and veteran of 48 election-monitoring missions to 35 countries.
In a recent telephone interview with The eXile, Meadowcroft explained how he was pressured by OSCE and EU authorities to ignore serious irregularities in Boris Yeltsin’s heavily manipulated 1996 election victory, and how EU officials suppressed a report about the Russian media’s near-total subservience to pro-Yeltsin forces.
Great news about Obama’s new pick to head the CEA, Alan Krueger, the so-called “labor economist.” Yeah, he labors all right: He labors hard to be Larry Summers’ tennis partner. And believe you me, being Larry Summers’ tennis partner is like…
The New York Times finally got around to writing about exploitation of East European student-labor by US corporations–8 years after The eXile’s Jake Rudnitsky went under deep cover with a bunch of Russian and Ukrainian teenaged serfs working in Pennsylvania. Here is The eXile’s original article…
This article was first published in The eXile on February 19, 2004. Haiti popped into the news again, and I decided it was time to tell the whole military history of the place. It’s got to be the most amazing,…