The Uncomfortable Truth About Whole Foods and Amazon's Grocery Monopoly
January 29, 2018 in Blogs
Of all the derangements of contemporary American political culture—and there are many—the gormless liberal pursuit of a shapeless Russia conspiracy has got to be the dumbest. Anyone can see the actual outlines of contacts between the Trump family, business organization and campaign (as if there was any meaningful distinction separating the three): the perennially under-capitalized Trump long ago burned most of his bridges to the major organs of American finance and has, for most of the last couple of decades, depended on foreign cash from people and institutions even less concerned with due diligence than our own Wall Street casinos.
I have no doubt that some within the Russian state saw in Trump’s desperate need for cash a potential avenue to modest influence, but really, would these savage oligarchs be so foolish as to imagine that a man so mercurial, so petulant, so uninformed, and frankly so stupid would be the path to an actual realignment of Russo-American foreign policy? Did these evil geniuses, any more than any of the rest of us, actually imagine he would win?
Try telling that to the internet’s dedicated sleuths. A collection of speed-sniffers, hack novelists and extremely minor Clinton hangers-on, they have spun out an elaborate fantasia on a Russian theme. It is, I admit, almost majestic in its baroque intensity. Among other charmingly silly errors of basic fact, many seem convinced that Russia remains a communist state, that the hammer and sickle still fly over the Kremlin (which they frequently mix up with St. Basil’s Cathedral), that the KGB still exists.
It’s a weird conceit. Russia may be one of the least communist states in the world, and whatever its former spies and commissars may have once believed, they were perfectly pleased to rush in and make money once Western shock therapy broke the country and its economy like an egg. If any state is a successor to the latter days of the Soviet Union—gerontocratic, sclerotic, limping toward a crackup it can’t yet see coming—I’d argue it ain’t Russia at all. …read more
Source: ALTERNET
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