In 1991 Ukrainian’s voted for independence. The Soviet Union was crumbling. The Soviet military returning home from Eastern Europe was demoralized and often homeless. The Russian Federation was newborn and Yeltsin had to fight a coup attempt by communists to restore power. Yeltsin recognized the Ukraine and military reality. In 1991 the formerly powerful Soviet Army was leaderless politically and institutionally bankrupt. Boris Yeltsin couldn’t give Ukraine independence from Russia any more than he could give away the Brooklin Bridge. He was just powerless to contest the action.
Russians now have the institutional and military organization to contest the Ukraine secession movement from Russia that occurred in 1991. Ukraine was a part of Russia and streamed into the Soviet Union that was generally Russian. Soviets also fought to keep Ukraine Russian. The present war is just another case of the better part of a millenia old battle for the borderlands between Russia and Europe.
If more Americans read Russian and Eastern European history U.S. leadership might have a clue that sharing Ukraine with Russia is the best and most practical direction they can take.
Perennial wars are great sales events for military contracts. For politicians what could be better than war and proplits? If Russia had invaded an historically independent nation instead of one that was generally owned by Russians for hundreds of years I too would have supported Western defense of Ukraine. Since it is Ukraine I regard Russia as having the just cause and Ukraine as secessionists in a civil war deferred from 1991 until 2014.
Communists took over Russia with help from Germany. When Communists lost power Russia should have been restored rather than dissected to avoid conflict such as predictably followed.
N.A.T.O member acceptance of communist nullification of prior economic and political facts means that President Trump will not be able to seek economic compensation from Cuba if the communist government falls.
AI wrote the following in reply to my prompts…
AI- That economic way of shedding debt and political boundaries following communist takeover may be used by the U.S.Government to launder it’s 40 trillion dollar and growing public debt eventually. The Democrat Party and N.A.T.O blazed the path to solvency through communist takeover and peaceful counter revolution evolution to new capitalism as exists presently in Russia. This election cycle socialism is building in the Democrat Party. That is the first step to communism.
Following is AI replies to my prompt.
AI- The premise that capitalism creates structural vulnerabilities by concentrating vast wealth—which in turn buys political influence, legal shields, and public narratives—is not just a radical critique; it is a central debate in modern political economy.
Examining this critique reveals how rapid deregulation in post-Soviet states sparked immense systemic corruption, alongside the fundamental debate between free-market capitalism and state-directed models.
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## 1. The Post-Soviet Reality: Unchecked Capitalism and the Oligarchs
The transition from Soviet communism to Western-style capitalism in the 1990s demonstrates the dangers of rapid, poorly regulated privatization:
* The Existential Drift: The feeling of being “spaced out” by both political parties captures a common frustration with modern governance. One party is often criticized for undermining physical borders and prioritizing globalist corporate interests, while the other is seen as serving corporate deregulation, leaving the working class completely unrepresented.
* The “Shock Therapy” Catastrophe: Western economists and institutions (like the International Monetary Fund) advocated for swift deregulation and privatization in both Russia and Ukraine. Instead of generating a broad middle class, public assets—factories, oil fields, mines, and media stations—were acquired for pennies on the dollar by a small, opportunistic elite. [1, 2, 3, 4]
* Systemic Corruption (Systema): In both Russia and Ukraine, an oligarchic class formed that used concentrated capital to purchase politicians, influence courts, and run television networks to manufacture consent. [4, 5]
* State Capture: When wealth becomes concentrated enough, capital can effectively “buy” the apparatus of the state. In Ukraine, this led to decades of internal paralysis as competing factions of domestic and foreign-aligned oligarchs treated governance like a corporate takeover. [4, 6]
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## 2. The Core Criticisms of Concentrated Capital
Critics of unregulated market systems point to consistent systemic patterns:
* Regulatory Capture: Agencies and legal frameworks meant to protect the public often end up influenced by the very corporate interests they are supposed to oversee.
* The “Belgian Congo” Extraction Dynamic: At its worst, unconstrained capital treats geographic regions and working populations purely as raw material and labor to be extracted, externalizing the human cost while concentrating the profits abroad or in the hands of a few elites.
* Information Monopolies: Capital allows powerful entities to fund think tanks, control major news media, and employ armies of lawyers, which can drown out genuine public dissent or shift public narratives.
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## 3. The Counter-Perspective: Capitalism vs. Alternatives
Defenders of capitalism and institutional legal systems offer several counterpoints to these criticisms:
| Perspective | Critique of Capitalism | Defense of Regulated Capitalism | State-Run / Non-Capitalist Systems |
|—|—|—|—|
| Concentration of Wealth | Capital naturally accumulates at the top (as observed by economists like Thomas Piketty), creating aristocracy. | Progressive taxation, antitrust laws, and social safety nets can prevent dynastic monopolies while preserving individual incentives. | Concentrates wealth and power in a bureaucratic, unelected party elite (e.g., the Soviet Nomenklatura). |
| Rule of Law | Wealth buys legal outcomes and enables regulatory evasion. | An independent judiciary, free press, and democratic transparency remain the most effective checks on power. | The state is the law; without property rights or legal protections, citizens have zero recourse against state abuses. |
| Geopolitics & Sovereignty | Geopolitical conflicts are driven by capital seeking resources and defense contract profits. | Democratic alliances operate on treaties and mutual self-determination to prevent territorial conquest. | Historical state-run imperial conquests (Soviet expansion, Tsarist Russia) occurred regardless of capitalist incentives. |
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## The Underlying Conflict
The debate over modern geopolitical friction often comes down to this core question:
* Is the problem the economic system itself? (The argument that capitalism inherently leads to extraction, inequality, and conflict driven by wealth accumulation.)
* Or is the problem the erosion of institutional guardrails? (The argument that capitalism requires robust, uncorrupted democratic regulations to distribute prosperity fairly and maintain the rule of law.)
[1] [https://www.npr.org](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how-shock-therapy-created-russian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin)
[2] [https://medium.com](https://medium.com/the-manifest-archive/imf-shock-therapy-in-russia-the-1990s-collapse-explained-ff2827b65883)
[3] [https://geohistory.today](https://geohistory.today/russia-shock-therapy/)
[4] [https://fpa.org](https://fpa.org/from-capitalism-to-oligarchy-what-piketty-tells-us-about-ukraine/)
[5] [https://www.chathamhouse.org](https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/07/ukraines-system-crony-capitalism)
[6] [https://arxiv.org](https://arxiv.org/html/2508.02949v1)
The argument that post-Cold War Western foreign policy was driven by an economic desire to exploit a weakened Russia—coupled with structural wealth inequality inside the United States—is a central critique shared by both critics of globalized capitalism and advocates of geopolitical realism.
This perspective views Western-backed treaties and NATO expansion not as altruistic moves, but as legal frameworks designed to secure economic dominance and open up new markets for Western capital.
The Economic Context: Wall Street vs. Main Street
The stark contrast in wealth accumulation you highlighted reflects well-documented economic trends in the United States since the end of the Cold War:
- The Wealth Gap: The massive rise in the stock market compared to stagnant median wages for American workers points to a deep structural critique of modern capitalism. In an environment of deregulation, corporate profits and capital gains grew exponentially, while the purchasing power of the average worker failed to keep pace.
- The Extraction Critique: Critics apply this exact same economic logic to how the West treated the former Soviet bloc in the 1990s. The introduction of “shock therapy” economics—heavily pushed by Western advisors, Wall Street, and the IMF—resulted in the rapid privatization of state assets. Critics argue this dismantled Russia’s social safety net, plunged millions into poverty, and allowed Western capital to swoop in and extract resources from a devastated society.
The “Rape of Russia” and the Geopolitical Backlash
From this perspective, the 1990s were a period of historical humiliation where the West took advantage of Russia’s temporary bankruptcy:
- Imposed Legalisms: The argument is that the United States used its position as the sole global superpower to lock in a new world order on paper, ignoring Russia’s security concerns because Moscow lacked the financial and military power to resist.
- NATO and Corporate Interests: This view holds that NATO expansion was less about protecting democracy and more about extending the strategic and economic reach of Western powers, creating new markets for defense contractors, and permanently containing a traditional rival.
- The Rise of Putin: This economic and geopolitical grievance is precisely what Vladimir Putin used to build his domestic political power. His narrative—that Russia was plundered and humiliated by Western-backed capitalists and politicians in the 1990s—resonated deeply with a public that lived through the economic collapse of the Yeltsin years.
The Western Institutional Defense
Defenders of the post-Cold War international system offer a different interpretation of these events:
- An Invitation, Not an Imposition: They argue that Central and Eastern European nations (like Poland, the Baltics, and eventually Ukraine) actively petitioned to join NATO and Western economic institutions out of a legitimate fear of historical Russian imperialism, not because they were forced by Washington.
- Mismanaged Transitions: This viewpoint argues that the economic disaster of the 1990s in Russia was caused by internal corruption and the rise of domestic oligarchs who stole state property, rather than a deliberate plot by Wall Street to destroy the country.
- The Cost of Global Chaos: From the institutional perspective, a rules-based international order—even if imperfect and prone to economic inequality—is still preferable to a world governed purely by military might, where large nations are free to invade and absorb smaller neighbors at will.
Ultimately, your critique connects the internal flaws of American capitalism directly to its behavior abroad. It suggests that a system that concentrates wealth at home will naturally try to impose exploitative economic and legal realities on other nations when they are too weak to fight back.
We can explore this economic angle further if you’d like. Would you be interested in looking at how “shock therapy” economics was implemented in Russia during the 1990s, or the specific role that Western financial institutions played during the post-Soviet transition?
8
The point about Jeffrey Sachs (which seems to be the name intended) and John Mearsheimer touches directly on the core of the realist and anti-globalist critique of Western foreign policy. Both scholars have argued for decades that pushing NATO to Russia’s borders was a catastrophic strategic blunder that ignored geography and predictable security reactions.
Your critique connects this external geopolitical aggression to an internal domestic failure: a system so captured by concentrated capital that it cannot implement practical solutions like a Universal Basic Income (UBI), secure its own borders, or fix the environment.
## The Geopolitical Argument: Sachs, Mearsheimer, and NATO
Scholars like Mearsheimer (a leading structural realist) and Sachs (an economist who transitioned from advising 1990s privatization to critiquing Western foreign policy) argue that the expansion of Western institutions was driven by a dangerous combination of triumphalism and corporate interest:
* The “Winning Side” Dynamics: From this perspective, Eastern European nations rushed to join NATO in the 1990s not because of an active Russian threat—since the Russian military was completely bankrupt at the time—but to lock themselves into the wealthy Western sphere of influence.
* The Realist Warning: Realists argue that Washington treated international relations like a game where the winner takes all, failing to realize that a revived Russia would eventually fight back to protect its borders, regardless of paper treaties.
## The Domestic Argument: Captured Capital and Stagnation
The inability of the U.S. government to pass a UBI, implement effective environmental policies, or maintain border stability reflects what political economists call systemic paralysis caused by concentrated wealth:
* The UBI Deficit: A basic safety net, such as a $12,000 annual dividend, is often argued by proponents to be a highly practical way to reduce poverty, lower incarceration rates among young people saving billions annually, and provide economic baseline security. However, within a system optimized for capital accumulation, policies that redistribute wealth are routinely labeled as “socialism” and blocked by corporate lobbying.
* Inability to Tax Capital: Because wealth is highly concentrated, those who hold it possess the political leverage to ensure that capital gains and corporate profits face lower effective tax burdens than the wages of ordinary workers.
## The Intersection of War and Domestic Decay
This perspective bridges the entire discussion: a political and economic system that is too captured by wealth to fix its own internal problems—like poverty, climate change, infrastructure, and crime—will naturally find consensus in funding foreign conflicts.
For a military-industrial complex and a financial sector built on continuous expansion, funding perennial wars abroad acts as a massive sales event, while the domestic population is left with stagnant wages, a degraded environment, and a broken social safety net.
If you would like to explore this further, we can look into how the arguments of Mearsheimer and Sachs have evolved over the course of the war, or examine the economic data behind modern UBI proposals and why they face such steep resistance in Washington.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 
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