Just over a month after the coup, before any elections had been held, the new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, instituted the IMF’s austerity plan without condition, including, according to Forbes, “a 47 percent to 66 percent increase in personal income tax rates; a 50 percent increase in monthly gas bills; a 40 percent increase on gas tariffs for heating companies; and an increase in taxes on agribusiness.” He characterized this as a “kamikaze mission,” destined to cause a massive drop in short-term GDP and induce price inflation, but signed it anyway. “I will be the most unpopular prime minister in the history of my country,” he predicted.
In Biden’s speech to the Rada, he demanded they cut their old age pension programs so they could afford to pay back Ukraine’s foreign creditors rather than risk “tenuous support” from the international community. Due to high inflation and major cuts to the welfare state, many Ukrainians saw their living standards collapse. Meanwhile, corruption prevailed, with the wealthiest allowed to avoid taxes while officials embezzled as much as $15 billion of government funds in 2014 alone. When the Rada prepared to vote no confidence in Yatsenyuk’s leadership, Amb. Pyatt and Vice President Biden personally intervened to prevent it and instead arranged for the prime minister to resign on his own, so that he would not also bring down the rest of the cabinet, and force early elections, which could have helped the pro-Russian parties. Biden joked that he spent more time on the phone with Poroshenko than his own wife.
Oligarch Igor Kolomoysky was given the governorship of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and started using his TV channel 1+1 to attack opponents of his oil interests in the Rada. Another billionaire oligarch, Serhiy Taruta, chairman of the massive steel firm ISD Corporation, was made governor of Donetsk.
Seven months after the coup, new President Poroshenko signed the deal with the EU that his predecessor Yanukovych had rejected. The Ukrainian moratorium on foreign nations and corporations buying up land in the “breadbasket of Europe” was ignored. At that time, Ukraine was the world’s third-largest exporter of corn and fifth-largest exporter of wheat. At IMF insistence, the Poroshenko government allowed Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Monsanto and other major Western multinational agribusiness firms to consolidate control over millions of hectares of farmland.
By the end of the year, they had repealed Yanukovych’s neutrality law and again officially set their sights on membership in America’s NATO military alliance.
In 2015, Bloomberg News’s Leonid Bershidsky wrote that “Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process. The U.S. Embassy in Kiev is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.” He quoted Ukrainian investigative reporter Sergei Leschenko saying that “Pyatt and the U.S. administration have more influence than ever in the history of independent Ukraine.”
The next year, Nuland boasted to Congress that the United States had just about taken over the Ukrainian state, all in the name of the highest American values, of course. The U.S., she said, had given over $760 million in direct aid and another $2 billion in guaranteed loans. Almost unbelievably, she said that “U.S. advisors serve in almost a dozen Ukrainian ministries and localities and help deliver services, eliminate fraud and abuse, improve tax collection, and modernize Ukraine’s institutions.” American forces were training and equipping their police, soldiers and guardsmen, paying the salaries of legal aid attorneys, and were deeply “embedded” in Ukraine’s National Bank.
Despite or because of this, and unlike in the promises of the “Revolution of Dignity,” Bershidsky wrote that Ukraine was still run by “just another incompetent and corrupt post-Soviet regime.”
There is a lot of information concerning Jeffrey Sachs in this episode. He was able to stabilize the currency in Bolivia, Slovenia and Poland in the 1980's, but his team failed in Russia. Sachs has been very active in these 30 years. Now most of his talks are about ending the Ukrainian war. On March 16 he addressed the European parliament, or a special session of it. A Youtube channel called "TIMES NOW" has been live-streaming that address for 8 days. (Live streaming means it is in a continuous loop, with no pause at the beginning. You jump-in in the middle, wherever it is playing now.) The address itself is about 45 minutes, and is hard-hitting. A long Q&A follows.
He says many good things about Europe, and what their limitations are, because they have no independent foreign policy. Take a look, if you have the time.
Just over a month after the coup, before any elections had been held, the new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, instituted the IMF’s austerity plan without condition, including, according to Forbes, “a 47 percent to 66 percent increase in personal income tax rates; a 50 percent increase in monthly gas bills; a 40 percent increase on gas tariffs for heating companies; and an increase in taxes on agribusiness.” He characterized this as a “kamikaze mission,” destined to cause a massive drop in short-term GDP and induce price inflation, but signed it anyway. “I will be the most unpopular prime minister in the history of my country,” he predicted.
In Biden’s speech to the Rada, he demanded they cut their old age pension programs so they could afford to pay back Ukraine’s foreign creditors rather than risk “tenuous support” from the international community. Due to high inflation and major cuts to the welfare state, many Ukrainians saw their living standards collapse. Meanwhile, corruption prevailed, with the wealthiest allowed to avoid taxes while officials embezzled as much as $15 billion of government funds in 2014 alone. When the Rada prepared to vote no confidence in Yatsenyuk’s leadership, Amb. Pyatt and Vice President Biden personally intervened to prevent it and instead arranged for the prime minister to resign on his own, so that he would not also bring down the rest of the cabinet, and force early elections, which could have helped the pro-Russian parties. Biden joked that he spent more time on the phone with Poroshenko than his own wife.
Oligarch Igor Kolomoysky was given the governorship of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and started using his TV channel 1+1 to attack opponents of his oil interests in the Rada. Another billionaire oligarch, Serhiy Taruta, chairman of the massive steel firm ISD Corporation, was made governor of Donetsk.
Seven months after the coup, new President Poroshenko signed the deal with the EU that his predecessor Yanukovych had rejected. The Ukrainian moratorium on foreign nations and corporations buying up land in the “breadbasket of Europe” was ignored. At that time, Ukraine was the world’s third-largest exporter of corn and fifth-largest exporter of wheat. At IMF insistence, the Poroshenko government allowed Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Monsanto and other major Western multinational agribusiness firms to consolidate control over millions of hectares of farmland.
By the end of the year, they had repealed Yanukovych’s neutrality law and again officially set their sights on membership in America’s NATO military alliance.
In 2015, Bloomberg News’s Leonid Bershidsky wrote that “Americans are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process. The U.S. Embassy in Kiev is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.” He quoted Ukrainian investigative reporter Sergei Leschenko saying that “Pyatt and the U.S. administration have more influence than ever in the history of independent Ukraine.”
The next year, Nuland boasted to Congress that the United States had just about taken over the Ukrainian state, all in the name of the highest American values, of course. The U.S., she said, had given over $760 million in direct aid and another $2 billion in guaranteed loans. Almost unbelievably, she said that “U.S. advisors serve in almost a dozen Ukrainian ministries and localities and help deliver services, eliminate fraud and abuse, improve tax collection, and modernize Ukraine’s institutions.” American forces were training and equipping their police, soldiers and guardsmen, paying the salaries of legal aid attorneys, and were deeply “embedded” in Ukraine’s National Bank.
Despite or because of this, and unlike in the promises of the “Revolution of Dignity,” Bershidsky wrote that Ukraine was still run by “just another incompetent and corrupt post-Soviet regime.”
.
There is a lot of information concerning Jeffrey Sachs in this episode. He was able to stabilize the currency in Bolivia, Slovenia and Poland in the 1980's, but his team failed in Russia. Sachs has been very active in these 30 years. Now most of his talks are about ending the Ukrainian war. On March 16 he addressed the European parliament, or a special session of it. A Youtube channel called "TIMES NOW" has been live-streaming that address for 8 days. (Live streaming means it is in a continuous loop, with no pause at the beginning. You jump-in in the middle, wherever it is playing now.) The address itself is about 45 minutes, and is hard-hitting. A long Q&A follows.
He says many good things about Europe, and what their limitations are, because they have no independent foreign policy. Take a look, if you have the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2elUYpcbDG4
.