I have always been fascinated by the end of the Cold War and the transition of the former Soviet Union to a capitalist economy. Perhaps just because it was the big historic news story of my youth.

The short story is a group of US economists led the Soviet economy into capitalism via “Shock Treatment”. In retrospect it appears to have been an abject failure. But little has been said about this in the mainstream. Just googling around today out of curiosity I ran across the article from 1990 in something called the Monthly Review. It discusses how the former USSR and later China made their largely unsuccessful transitions to a modern Western democratic capitalist societies.

As the same group of free market capitalists continues to exert influence in the US, despite their repeated failures overseas, one has to ask if these “failures” weren’t failures at all but part of a plan. As the corruption mounts in the US and our Billionaires begin to resemble the Russian Oligarchs, you have to wonder where the US is headed.

The Necessity of Gangster Capitalism