A couple years ago the neocons made public their desire to suspend Russia’s membership in the G-8 group of industrial nations (a globalist forum pushing “macroeconomic management,” in other words facilitating neoliberal globalist loan shark control over the economic policies of “developing countries,” or defenseless countries ripe for looting). It is no secret the Straussian neocons are miffed over Putin’s treatment of the billionaire Russian Oligarchs, a cabal of fraudsters and embezzlers connected to the Russian Mafia. In fact the Oligarchs are at the heart of the neocon animosity toward Russia and Vladimir Putin, who is no push-over like the drunkard Boris Yeltsin.

For neolibs over at the World Bank, the widespread theft of Russian assets by the Oligarchs during the implosion of the Soviet economy represents “the quintessence of Russia’s transition to capitalism,” a natural reaction to a “predatory and corrupt Russian bureaucracy,” never mind that economic “liberalization” (or rather “neoliberalization”) produced “chaos, hyperinflation, industrial collapse,” and widespread misery for the Russian populace, according to a study conducted by James K. Galbraith, Ludmila Krytynskaia and Qifei Wang of the Conference on Globalization and Development Problems.

In 1998, 60 percent of the Russian population lived in poverty and 25 percent were living in extreme poverty. In 1992, the latter figure was 11 percent. “Since 1991 more than two million premature deaths have resulted from increases in alcoholism, suicide, murder, infectious diseases, and stress-related ailments,” writes David M. Kotz. “A recent study estimated that 2 million children have no family caring for them, of whom only 650,000 are in orphanages. The rest live in abandoned houses or in the sewer system of large cities.” For the neoliberal financial parasites and the Russian Oligarchs, such massive misery was a boondoggle. “Russia’s new oligarchs made fortunes exporting oil, speculating in securities, and lending money to the government. Anxious to obtain a share of these gains, foreign portfolio capital began to flow in, culminating in a $44 billion inflow in 1997. That year Russia had one of the world’s best performing stock markets, as oil and bank stocks were grabbed up by domestic and foreign investors.”

According to the neocon criminal organization, the American Enterprise Institute, where Bush harvests his “minds,” the arrest and prosecution of Yukos Oil Oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky for embezzlement, money-laundering, attempted murder, theft and fraud represents a “scandal of Watergate proportions” and “comparable to Stalin’s purges of the 1930s or the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968.” Khodorkovsky was convicted and sent to the YaG-14/10 labor camp at Krasnokamensk for nine years. His arrest and prosecution, according to Marshall I. Goldman, a prominent expert on the Russian economy and the associate director of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, interviewed by the Council on Foreign Relations, “has really scared the domestic and foreign business communities. That’s not to say that people have stopped investing. Some are investing, but others have gone off in a different direction. Foreign direct investment in Russia is less than in Poland and other East European countries and is, at best, a tenth of what it is in China,” a dire situation for parasitical neolibs and neocons alike.

Other Russian Oligarchs have flown the coop and now live in Herzliya, a posh suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel. “Some of these crooks have fled Russia for the protection of Israel, where defrauding Gentiles is not considered a crime,” notes Focal Point. Khodorkovsky and the Oligarchs Roman Abramovich, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky are Jewish—thus their persecution is of course virulent anti-Semitism, as the Forward newspaper reminds us (the prosecution and imprisonment of Khodorkovsky “does not represent a new wave of Russian antisemitism,” according to Forward, it “represents a very old wave, and it accompanies the revival of old modes of action that may have been buried but never died,” in other words Russians cling persistently to anti-Semitism, as do the goyim in general, never mind that Khodorkovsky and his ilk are responsible for kids sleeping in sewers and pensioners starving to death).

In October, 2003, neocon éminence grise Richard Perle demanded Russia be expelled from the G-8 for prosecuting Khodorkovsky and running his ransacking neolib oligarchic partners off to Israel (where the now comatose Ariel Sharon refused to extradite them). According to Simon Saradzhyan of the Moscow Times, “Perle, who believes that the White House should contain the Kremlin rather than cooperate with it, has criticized the campaign against Yukos shareholders from the beginning” and “Perle may be using the Yukos affair to push his vision of foreign policy that would contain Russia rather than elevate it to the status of a strategic partner.”

Now we learn “Moscow had informants inside U.S. Central Command whose information on the March 2003 invasion of Iraq was relayed to dictator Saddam Hussein days before American troops ousted him from power,” according to Rowan Scarborough of the Moonie, er Washington Times. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service has denied the accusation. “Similar, baseless accusations concerning Russia’s intelligence have been made more than once,” Foreign Intelligence Service spokesman Boris Labusov told the Associated Press. “We don’t consider it necessary to comment on such fabrications… To my mind, from my understanding it’s absolutely nonsense and it’s ridiculous… Somebody wants to say something, and did—and there is no evidence to prove it.”

However, in Bushzarro world, evidence is not required, as large numbers of clueless Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with nine eleven and traipsed with Osama bin Laden. Now they will be told the back-stabbing Putin connived with Saddam Hussein, a rather suspiciously timed accusation in light of Russia’s meddlesome role in deflecting the neocon set-up of Iran. Obviously, killing Slobodan Milosevic was not enough to get back at the Russians. Now they must be accused of working hand-in-hand with Saddam Hussein as well.