Oligarchs R Us
Deep politics swirl behind the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

There is big news brewing in Russia this week, and America is being sold a line of goods about what’s happening there. The coverage of the arrest by the Vladimir Putin administration of "businessman" Mikhail Khodorkovsky has featured such grossly, shockingly transparent propaganda that it could hardly have been worse during the Cold War. What’s more, some of my old friends—they know who they are—are participating in it.

This story, about the politically motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, the Croseus-rich tycoon who heads the oil company Yukos, is in fact an important story for the ordinary American. The clash between two of the world’s baddest gangsters—Putin and Khodorkovsky—is also a great symbolic battle, each side representing one of the two great remaining pretenders to global rule.

Putin represents the past, which also happens to be the American present: the fictional democracy, in fact a ruthless oligarchy of corporate interests, with the state as the castrated referee.

Khodorkovsky represents the future: no referee. Which is why our media establishment has chosen to take up arms for him. They are making his case into an open referendum on the neo-con revolution that until now has been fought in a largely clandestine manner here at home
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Many of us who spent the 90s in Russia became aware over time that the aim of the United States was to create a rump state that would allow economic interests to strip assets at will. The population in this scheme was to be good for consuming foreign goods produced abroad with Russia’s own cheaply sold raw materials. The aim was a castrated state, anarchy, a vast, confused territory of captive consumers, cheap labor and unguarded oil and aluminum.

Some of us who came home after seeing this began to realize that the same process is underway in the United States: the erosion of the tax base, the gradual appropriation of the tools of government by economic interests, a massive, disorganized population useless to everybody except as shoppers. That is their revolution: smashing states everywhere and creating a scattered global nation of villas and tax shelters, as inaccessible as Olympus, forbidding entry even to mighty dictators
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  thanks to Eschaton