When you hear about the russian oligarchs, this is how they got to be oligarchs. By 19 97, seven men owned 58 % of the entire russian economyand we're talking about gangsters and killers. You might remember, after poton took over, he put the oligarcha mihal korkotekovski, on traial, the guy who ran yukos oil. They had him in a cage in the court room. It was, it was quite a picture. Well, the western press made out like hotrakovski was just some political discident, a victim of political persecution. If that guy had been an american and done what he had done over there, over here, he would have been lucky to avoid death row. These gangsters were taking advantage to buy up the russian economy and shipping the money that they made out of the country into foreign accounts as fast as western banks could launder it for themad. Meanwhile, russian civil society and public health completely collapsed. I mean completely collapsed. Think about this. In the united states in recent years, we've had a lot of problems with deaths of despair, you know, drug overdoses, things like that. Unprecedented spikes in mortality from these things, as well as from cove ten. Drug overdose deaths are up a hundred, 37 % in the united states since two thousand with all f those factors combined, all of these things that have been hitting us at once, average life expectancy for the worst impacted demographics in the united states has dropped by about a year and a half. Average life expectancy. The life expect ancy of russian men dropped from the high sixties in 19 90 to the low timid fifties by the middle of the decade. And it's even worse than that sounds, because when you actually get into the numbers, life expectancy for women was basically unchanged. Life expectancy for young children and senior citizens was basically unchanged. Virtually the entire drop, this massive drop in life expectancy, was concentrated among russian men, just due to a massive spike and early deaths, deaths almost entirely due to suicide and violence and drug and alcohol poisoning. D you have any idea how many murders, suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol poisonings a country has to have for its life expectancy to 15 years? I mean, it was just a catastrophe. Life expectancy in countries that were hardest hit by the 19 18 spanish flue pandemic never dropped that much. It was just a total, full spectrum disaster. And again, it's happening at the same time that western financial institutions are picking the bones of the russian economy clean with the help of local gangsters nobody, to this day really knows how much was looted, but at least hundreds of billions of dollars were siphened out of the russian economy into foreign bank accounts, as regular russian people were literally starving to death and dying from lack of basic necessities. In 19 96, when the russians tried to elect some one other than boris yeltzen, the drunk puppet of the oligarchs, who had an approval rating of something less than ten %, we sent an army of consultants and others to go over and finance and run his campaign for him, make sure he got re elected, cause he was our guy. And the oligarchs who owned russia's television and radio stations and newspapers did their part to make sure that he won. Here's part of an article written by mark weisbrot. He's the director of the as the director of the centre for economic policy research, he wrote this in 19 99. What were they thinking when executives at the bank of new york saw billions of dollars floating in from the home computer of a russian business man with ties to organize crime there? Did they really believe that these were just ordinary profits. The biggest money laundering scandal in history has prompted calls a fresh look at the role of american and i m f funds in russia. To say this is long overdue would be an understatement. The corruption is certainly mind numbing in scale and scope, with some of the west favorite reformers, including konstantin kagalowski, the former russian representative at the i m f, at the center of the investigation.