If you're not familiar, a Russian billionaire, Mikhail Prokhorov, is heading towards buying a controlling stake in the New Jersey Nets NBA basketball team.
Billionaire nears deal to buy Nets
The New Jersey Nets appeared closer than ever to a move to Brooklyn yesterday after Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov agreed to purchase 80 percent of the team and 45 percent of a proposed arena by pouring $200 million into the cash-depleted venture spearheaded by Nets principal owner Bruce Ratner.
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nder the agreement, Ratn's Foresest City Enterprises group will retain controlling interest in the proposed Barcys Centeter in Brooklyn but relinquish authority over basketball operations. It also will give Prokrov's Onexix Groupup the right to purchase up to 20 percent of the Atlantic Yards Development Company, which will develop the area around the proposed $800 million arena.
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey/index.ssf?/base/news-14/1253756106171030.xml&coll=1Prokhoro like thehe other Russian oligarchs basically used mob tactics and connections to the Russian criminal underworld (which -as an aside- has deep ties to Brooklyn) to bust out former Soviet state owned businesses and amass huge fortunes on the backs of newly impoverished regular Russians.
There's a great article from 2000 about how this all came to be which i excerpted below. I suggest reading the whole thing. Basically a bunch of Harvard know-it-alls guidethe e Russian government to making sweeping drastic reforms with images of some Adam Smith paradise dancing in their heads. What actually happened was an easily predictable theft on a huge scale and a destroying of the Russian economy and turning Russia into some 19th centuryelell hole Upton Sinclair would recognize immediately.
There are community groups fighting the Atlantic Yards project who are now well outgunned and facing an opponent who is no stranger to using gangsterism to get what he wants. What is the NBA doing by allowing this kind of modern day robber barren to come into this country and give him a legitimate foothold here?
http://www.monthlyreview.org/200holm.htmRussia's descent into gangster capitalism began in the early 1990s when Russian market reformers attempted to introduce capitalism in one fell swoop—on the advice of Western advisors, particurly Harvrvard University "shock therapist," Professor Jeffrey Sachs and his capitalist provocateurs at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). In 1990 and 1991, as Gorbachev's reforprogram statalled and his government was collapsing, Sachs and his Institute colleagues advised Yegor Gaidar, Yelin's sirst e enomic czazar, to dismantle quickly most of the controls and subsidies that had structured life for Soviet citizens for most of the century. Sachs predicted a more or less smooth transition to a normal western-style capitalism, once the initial shock of price decontrol was over. In the early nineties, Dr. Sachs bragged about how his prescriptive shock therapy had cured Bolivia's hyperinflation in nine days. Eastern Europe's and Russia's reform, he allowed, might take longer. Sachs could think this because, like most mainstream economists, he has a completely ahistorical underanding of e economics. Like Adam Smith, Sachs believes that the "propensity to truck and barter" is built into human nature. So he supposed the transition to capitalism would be a natural, virtually automatic economic process: start by abandoning state planning, free up prices, promote private competition with state-owned industry, and sell off state industry as fast as possible—and economic growth and prosperity would follow.
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The result was an unmitigated disaster. In the first year of reform, industrial output collapsed by 26 percent. Between 1992 and 1995, Russia's GDP fell 42 percent and industrial production fell 46 percent—far worse than the contraction of the U.S. economy during the Great Depression.
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Sachs' reforms gave the "New Russian" entrepreneurs their freedom, to be sure. But instead of investments rationalizing the economy along capitalist lines, Russia's new bourgeoisie just plunged into a hellish free-for-all of "grabification"—a brutal suggle to steaeal everything they could get their hands on. They plundered the nation's wealth of natural resources, sold state-owned gold, diamonds, oil, gas, Siberian forests, even plutonium, and unloaded them on the West to amass their private fortunes. And, as we've seen in the money-laundering scandals of late, they also privatized billions of dollars of western aid.
Instead of plowing their stolen wealth into productivity-enhancing investments, as Sachs' reformers had hoped, they have, for the most part, just socked their loot away in secret western bank accounts or squandered it on yachts and villas on the French Riviera. By the mid-nineties, Russia's red bourgeoisie had stashed more than 150 billion dollars in foreign bank accounts, investments, and properties. At home, they've "invested" in furs, limousines, and high living. And they've hired private armies of gun thugs to defend their stolen wealth and possessions (from each other). But this is only until, as the Thatcherite Economist frank acknowledgdged, the "legitimacy" of these stolen properties can be ratified by compliant governments—as were the enclosures in England or the vast land grabs in the nineteenth-century United States.
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