putin_live_140318_2Another major change in the planetary alignment.

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Putin Launches Eurasian Economic Union
by Dean Henderson

Last Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and Kazakhstan President Nurultan Nazarbayev to launch the Eurasian Economic Union. The move comes on the heels of a $400 billion natural gas deal he signed with China and announcements that Russia will use rubles instead of dollars to conduct most international trade.

Western aggression in Ukraine was the last straw for the Russians, who saw this movie before in their own country.

(Excerpted from Chapter 17: The Caspian Sea Oil Grab: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

The Russian Wall Street Mafia

In the late 1990's. while the Four Horsemen gorged on Russian and Central Asian oil, Wall Street investment bankers were facilitating the oil grab and ripping off the Russian Treasury.  Salomon Smith Barney's Philbro Energy oil trading subsidiary set up shop in Moscow.  Goldman Sachs was hired by Yeltsin to lure foreign capital to Russia.  Heading the Russian Goldman Sachs team was Robert Rubin, later Clinton Secretary of Treasury.  CS First Boston took a 20% stake in Lukoil, in partnership with BP Amoco.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar was in charge of Russia's IMF-mandated economic reforms.  Gaidar knew that the oil and gas sector was the key to Rubin's plan.  Russian opposition parties cried foul, saying US economists and the IMF were taking control of Russia's economic and political system.  In 1994 Clinton FBI Director Louis Freeh, flaunting Constitutional restraints, personally opened an FBI office in Moscow. [749]  In 1997 Freeh's FBI led a half-hearted investigation into a growing conflict of interest scandal involving top-level Harvard economists who had been overseeing Russia's privatization program in tandem with Rubin and Gaidar.  Russia criticized the FBI probe, calling it a whitewash of the facts.

The controversy centered on the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), which ran several of Russia's privatization schemes.  HIID Directors Jonathan Hay and Jeffrey Sachs held investments in multinationals which benefited from an $89 million World Bank loan to Russia which HIID had arranged.  Russia's top securities regulator Dmitry Vasiliev spotted this and other irregularities, terminating HIID's contract with the Russian government. [750]  But not before the Wall Street investment bankers had gotten rich at the expense of the Russian Treasury, leading to the Russian economic collapse of 1998.

In 1999 the Bank of New York, which worked with CS First Boston in selling off Russian ownership in Lukoil, was indicted by a New York court for laundering over $10 billion in drug money for Russian mobsters, all of whom held Israeli passports.  According to Dr. Aldo Milinkovich, consultant to numerous New York financial firms, "The Israelis have infiltrated and manipulated the post-Soviet economy in Russia in pretty much the same way they have infiltrated and now manipulate Washington and Wall Street."[751]

At the center of the scandal was Bill Casey Hardy Boy Itzak "Bruce" Rappaport, who set up a clearing affiliate called Benex which laundered drug money for three wealthy Russian/Israeli bankers.  Mikhail Khodorkovsky was one of the wealthiest people in Russia. He ran Menatep Bank until it was shut down.  In November 2003, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a crackdown on Khodorkovsky, relieving him of his controlling share in Yukos Oil.  Shlomo Mogulevich has been called the "Meyer Lansky of Russia" and was described by US law enforcement as a major arms and drugs trafficker.  Konstantin Kagalovsky was in charge of doling out IMF/World Bank funding to the Yeltsin government. [752]  All three held Israeli citizenship.

Rappaport, the National Bank of Oman crony, began buying Bank of New York shares during the 1980's. He set up Bank of New York-Intermaritime in Geneva.  The company owns Swiss American Holdings, SA Panama, which the US government identified as key to a 1998 money laundering scandal involving Antigua Prime Minister John Fitzgerald. [753]

Rappaport arranged US financing for purchase of an Antigua melon farm by an Israeli Mossad agent named Sarafati.  The Israeli Defense Ministry funneled arms through Rappaport and Sarafati's farm to Columbian cocaine kingpin and death squad godfather Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.  Mossad and British commandos trained Medellin Cartel death squads in a CIA program funded by President Reagan's much-touted Project Democracy.

The Panamanian ship Sea Point that delivered Gacha his weapons was owned by CIA's hand-picked Panamanian President Guillermo Endara, who was installed after the Noriega putsch.  In 1989 that same ship had been busted off the Mexican coast carrying a massive shipment of cocaine.  Endara and Gacha co-owned the Panamanian drug laundry Banco Interoceanico. [754]

Corruption was the modus operandi during the economic privatization of Russia, the Caucuses and Eastern Europe.

In 1996 Ukraine's government-owned aircraft factory sold a small fleet of Antonov-32B twin-engine turboprops to Columbia cocaine cartels. [755]  In 1997 Pratt & Whitney, subsidiary of US defense giant United Technologies, was fined $14.8 million for diverting $10 million in US military aid into a slush fund controlled by Israeli Air Force officer Rami Dotan.  Saudi billionaire Sulaiman Olayan owned a big chunk of United Technologies, as did James Baker.  The slush fund was used for CIA/Mossad destabilization efforts in Central Asia . [756]

A 1997 Russian FSB report cited Alfa Group for involvement in drug trafficking.  Top company executives had met with representatives of the Cali Cartel.  The report stated that Alfa worked with a Chechen crime family, which was in charge of the drug smuggling.  An Alfa Group subsidiary is Tyumen Oil, which teamed up with Brown & Root in an oil and gas development project that received ExIm Bank financing. [757]  Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was Chairman and CEO at the time.  In mid-February 2001 Alfa Group bought Marc Rich Holdings from its namesake fugitive Israeli financier. Rich now lives in Switzerland after he was pardoned by President Clinton as he exited the White House. Rich is an associate of Rappaport.
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