Headline July 31st, 2012 /

In 1990 Everything Belonged To The State. 

By 1997 Over 75 Percent Was Held Privately!

In context sweep, just hear this: in 90s reported The Guardian, that only 13% of the youth conscripted for the Russian Army actually showed up, and of those, according to the Committee of Soldiers Mothers of Russia, an advocacy group, about 1000 commit suicide. 

Their pay was less that 2dollars a month. So at the time, more than half the Russian People lived below the poverty line with incomes that were 40%/cent lower than in 91. Former PM Sergei Stepashin summed up as such: ' For Russia, to restore a sense of National pride, you had to think about things as mundane as living like a human being! 

The average Russian pension was 25dollar a month!'' So a historically powerful question arises that : ''How a handful men in the country ended with 30% of one-seventh of the entire World's resources?!?'' Mikhail Khodorksky, a leading Russian Oligarch, the Chairman of Russia's second largest Oil Company, Yukos, also the former Chairman of Menatep, a failed Bank, answered with a straight face. He explained that in Russia ''there was a total absence of Managers.''

He makes it sound as if he had done the government a favour by taking a two-million-barrels-a-day Oil enterprise off its hands! But it was reported and charged that Menatep used government money held for Salaries to make a sweetheart bid for Yukos in a less-than transparent auction. 

Such auctions were part of the infamous 'loans-for-shares' scheme designed to help the cash strapped Russian government pay its debts and speed privatization. In the mid-90s, private Russian banks were given shares in state enterprises in return for loans. 

These shares were to be held in Trust, and if and when they were turned into equity, the Banks could bid for them at auction. Many of the auctions were outrageously rigged. ''The loans-for-shares auctions were conducted according to the same principle of clan tribute and cronyism that had reigned in Russia during Soviet years,'' Matt Taibbi wrote in the eXile. 

''The only difference was the scheme punished the average Russian economically in way that was much worse than the Sovet System had!!'' By 97. It was no longer unusual for employees to go six months to a year without receiving their meager salaries! 

Russian Newspapers reported scenes of people collapsing from hunger in the streets in the towns surrounding the industrial centers. It is just so obvious that the beneficiaries of the auctions were the Oligarch Banks! In 99, the ''baby billionaire'' Vladimir Potanin, who was just 36, sailed a 250 yacht into Nice, with a ''bevy of Russia's most stunning models, and the money flowed like chilled champagne!''

Good night & God bless!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice of the Voiceless