Commentary — Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Sachs was recently in the news for calling Hillary Clinton a warmonger. He is certainly right on that conclusion, although he is wrong when he calls her a servant of the military-industrial complex. She is a whore for the Zionist supremacist complex, of which Sachs is a leading luminary.
It deserves mentioning that not only did Sachs, as an advisor to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s, help a Jewish mafia heist the most valuable assets of the Russian state, his policies also led to a massive increase in the Russian death rate, as the following article demonstrates.
Did Privatization Increase the Russian Death Rate?
Update: The authors of the Lancet study respond here.
That’s what a new study published online today in The Lancet, an independent medical journal, says.
The authors of the study write that the rapid and widespread privatization of state industries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries during the early 1990s increased the death rate 13 percent.
The researchers defined mass privatization as “a program that transferred the ownership of at least 25 percent of large state-owned enterprises to the private sector in two years by selling them with citizen vouchers and giveaways to firm insiders.”
As communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the former Eastern bloc countries saw dire health consequences: more than three million people died prematurely, according to the United Nations.
Yet not all countries fared poorly. Whereas the life expectancy of Russians fell almost five years from 1991 to 1994, Croatia and Poland, for example, “recorded steady improvements of almost one year of life expectancy during this same period,” the study says.
The differences, the authors say, largely stemmed from the pace of the transition. Rapid privatization programs led to a 56 percent increase in unemployment, and that increase in joblessness played a central role in the increased death rate.
“Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatization workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis,” according to a Lancet press release.
The researchers added that privatization’s harmful effects on life expectancy were mitigated in countries like the Czech Republic where people could better rely on various forms of nongovernmental social support.
As the former Eastern bloc countries began making the transition from communism to capitalism, considerable debate emerged among economists as to how this transition should ensue. Some advocated “shock therapy,” a term that denotes an immediate and rapid transition to capitalism. Others, however, recommended a more gradual approach.
In making their argument, the authors of the study — David Stuckler of the University of Oxford, Lawrence King of the University of Cambridge and Martin McKee of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine — criticized Jeffrey Sachs, the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
Mr. Sachs, a leading advocate of the “shock therapy” school of thought, served as an economic adviser to a number of the Eastern bloc countries, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Russia.
In a phone interview from Dakar, he disputed the study’s findings, calling them “completely wrong.”
“The definition of success and failure had nothing to do with rapid or not rapid” privatization, he said.
As Mr. Sachs explained in a letter to the editor that he sent to The Financial Times, “the term ‘shock therapy’ was first applied to Poland’s rapid transformation from communism.”
Indeed, in Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, he said, the transitions from communism to capitalism were rapid and yet largely considered successful.
On the other hand, the former Soviet Union, he said, witnessed something altogether different in part because of a lack of support from the White House and other Western institutions.
“In the case of Eastern Europe, we helped those countries partly because it was seen as they were going to be the new members of NATO,” he said. “When it came to the former Soviet Union, we did not help those countries because they were seen as strategic adversaries.”
In the case of Poland, he said that support included emergency aid to stabilize the currency and runaway inflation, an agreement to delay payment on debt without penalty and loans from the International Monetary Fund.
Mr. Sachs added that Russia’s health problems during the transition were part of a longer pattern of reduced life expectancy that began in the 1960s and stemmed in large part from the poor Soviet diet.
