Let’s talk about election meddling

 

As the minor spectacle of the US mid term elections approaches, the spectre of ‘Russian interference’, scarcely mollified by incontrovertible evidence of entrenched corruption within the Democratic National Committee made public by wilileaks in 2016, raises its head again in the media. Without a shred of evidence, apart from indictments against 12 handpicked witnesses (who absent an extradition treaty between the two countries will never be allowed to testify), the current round of preemptive hysteria seems to reveal more about the accuser than the accused.

Rather than waste time on unsubstantiated and hysterical allegations, it might be more edifying for us to consider a very real and well documented case of election meddling, which took place in 1996 and was widely publicised in the pages of Time Magazine, the New York Times, and other venerated organs of Western liberal propaganda. I speak of course of the U.S. coup to install the corrupt and incompetent Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation for a second term in a decade which saw the wholesale plunder of Russian assets, the rise of a new class of corrupt oligarchs, the collapse of Russia’s social economy and the forced prostration of its people before the altar of neoliberal economics.

The horrors wrought upon the Russian state by Western neoliberal shock-therapy throughout the 1990s, tho seldom admitted to by their perpetrators, cannot be overstated. Historian Luciana Bohne describes the period as the Neoliberal Great Terror, in which the Russian people endured an economic genocide, sinking into poverty, starvation and unemployment, experiencing hardships far greater than anything endured under Stalin’s watch. Between 1992 and 2000 mortality rates increased by 60% with between 5 and 6 million surplus deaths and 170,000 homocides, GDP fell by 50% (a greater drop than experienced under German occupation during WWII), 70 million people fell into poverty, average male life expectancy decreased to 57, abortions and suicides increased while birth rates fell, and diseases which had been previously eradicated such as measles, diphtheria and tuberculosis began to reappear in plague proportions.

So much for the triumph of capitalism. That this was considered a moral victory by Washington’s policy makers speaks to the abject cynicism of the neoliberal project.

Alas the victory was to be short lived, and Yeltsin’s successor would soon put the Russian economy on the path to recovery, much to the chagrin of Western power elites. In 18 years of Putin's Russia GDP has risen from barely $200bn to over $2tr - from $1300 to $15,000 for every man woman and child. Inflation has dropped from 35% to 6%, national debt has dropped from 80% of GDP to just 8%, pensions have increased by 2000% while the average income has risen from $1500 to $30,000. (Meanwhile in the West, inequality continues to grow unchecked while real incomes stagnate, homelessness has reached epidemic proportions among a growing class of working poor, while corporate tax cuts continue to siphon money from the real economy into offshore tax havens.)

But it’s not just Russia’s economic recovery that has the West worried.

The idea of Russian meddling in U.S democratic processes is simply ludicrous when one considers the level of graft and corruption already endemic to the US electoral system (the 2000 election of George W Bush being an obvious case in point). Nonetheless Russia has indeed thrown a spanner into the works of US foreign policy, helping bring to a close the 7 year war on Syria while delicately balancing the roles of peacemaker and power broker in the wider regional conflict. All this while actually reducing it’s military spending by 20%.

In resuming its rightful place on the world stage, Russia has put paid to several myths which were put about in the 1990s, chief among them being Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement of the End of History; the triumph of liberal democracy and the arrival of a post-ideological world order. Although communism may have been sidelined, so too has the unquestioned hegemony of transnational corporatocracy and global finance. What has emerged is a new strategic balance in which the Atlantic powers (US, Britain and France and their allies), no longer call the shots. The “American Century” is over, and the only option left on the table, short of all out nuclear war, is a return to an inclusive, rules-based international order based on the principle of state sovereignty.

It’s no wonder the US power elites have their pants in a twist. So long as Trump pays so much as lip service to a future which now seems inevitable, they will continue to call for his impeachment, while accusing Russia of undermining US democracy.

Truly, Americans have no sense of irony.