La "specialiste" Latynina

Le navire avait toutefois séjourné dans le port russe de Kaliningrad, ce qui permet d'imaginer une intervention de services secrets, d'après la spécialiste Youla Latynina. Pour elle, le cargo transportait une cargaison secrète. AP

Proclaimed an energy superpower, Russia under Vladimir Putin received more than $1 trillion in revenues from oil and gas. The bonanza brought the country's elite Swiss watches, villas on the Cote-d'Azur, and British football clubs. The Russian president has thirteen private residences and is building a dozen more. Julia Latynina, one of Russia's leading independent journalists, will explain that while Russia may have surpassed the United States on some such measures, the country's new wealth has not brought internal peace, functioning state institutions, or a modern economy. Instead, Russia has become the world's largest exporter of corruption and the largest importer of legal services from the European Court of Human Rights. Please join us for this discussion on the current nature of Russia's social order

Cependant, la respectabilité de ce think-tank n’a pas seulement été entamée par son racisme biologique et son égoïsme social, mais aussi par son niveau de corruption. Engrangeant des millions de dollars de mécénat des multinationales, le Cato Institute a cessé de défendre des idées pour défendre des intérêts. Il a notamment publié diverses recherches sur l’inoffensivité du tabac après avoir reçu des dons significatifs du cigarettier Philip Morris ; il a aussi dénigré l’alarmisme des écologistes face à l’effet de serre, après avoir reçu des mécénats d’Exxon-Mobil.

L’apport du Cato Institute à l’administration Bush ne se limite pas à la réfome des retraites, il inclut aussi un discours écologiste paradoxal accordant une liberté de polluer aux multinationales. M. Bush a d’ailleurs confié le département de l’Environnement à Gale Norton, l’ancienne rédactrice des discours électoraux du ticket Clarke-Koch [4]. Elle s’est opposée à la ratification du Protocole de Kyoto, visant à limiter l’effet de serre, et a bataillé pour l’exploitation pétrolière de l’Alaska malgré les risques environnementaux.

Le Cato Institute a réussi une spectaculaire percée dans les médias à partir de 1998. Non que cette date corresponde à un changement polique majeur, mais simplement parce le milliardiare Rupert Murdoch, propriétaire de Fox News et de nombreux journaux, y adhéra. Au conseil d’administration, il siègea aux côtés de son partenaire en affaires, John Malone, le distingué patron du cablo-opérateur Liberty Media (qui contrôle désormais Discovery et Noos).

Quittant le simple domaine de la contestation de l’hypertrophie de l’État, le Cato Institute a développé une phobie d’un éventuel rapprochement entre la Russie, la Chine et l’Inde, selon lui domageable aux intérêts états-uniens. Ainsi, il a longuement dénoncé la diplomatie conduite par Yevgeny Primakov et la constitution de l’Organisation de coopération de Shangaï. Simultanément, l’Institut a organisé des colloques en Russie et en Chine pour y apporter l’Évangile du libre-marché...

"Блеф Олимпиады-2014 в Сочи. ...ребята прекрасно понимают, что все это фуфло, которое они впаривают про Олимпиаду, – только для того, чтобы попилить федеральные бабки и забраться на заповедные земли...(Юлия Латынина в ЕЖе)"

To listen to Yulia Latynina speak for ninety minutes is to experience madness. This afternoon, I attended the Cato Institute’s special event, “A Superpower in What? A Look Into the Nature of Russia’s Social Order,” with keynote speaker Yulia Leonidovna Latynina.
Former Putin apparatchik (turned neocon) Andrei Illarionov (now Cato’s resident Russia scholar) gave a warm, spirited introduction. While he listed her professional accolades, Latynina oddly stood up and wandered off stage. Puzzled, I nearly missed hearing Illarionov praise her for “a dozen fiction novels” that apparently have made quite a “splash.” Smiling from inside an enormous helmet of red hair, Yulia leaned into the mic and kindly muttered that this was too generous an introduction.
Her speech (“address”? “sermon”? “stand-up routine”?) addressed her own patented concept of “residential superpowerdom.” What this amounted to was a PowerPoint presentation with slides depicting muddy, lousy Russian roads — juxtaposed with images Putin’s presidential palaces, Putin’s fancy wristwatches, and his various vacations to exotic, remote locations. The substance was “look at how corrupt and selfish these Russian tsars are” and the joke (yes, her presentation climaxed with a punch-line) was this: the U.S. president only has two official residences (the White House plus Camp David), whereas the leaders of the Kremlin intimidate and rob their way to a vast network of privileges and houses — so who would any third party observer think the true superpower (i.e., residential power)? Get it?
Later on, when asked about Kaliningrad, Latynina dismissed the protests, arguing that cutting social (medical and housing) benefits for pensioners and students was one of the few good things Putin has done since coming to power. “A disastrous remnant of the Soviet system,” she called it.
Latynina also explored why Putin pursues “costly and inefficient pipelines” rather than “the development of the domestic chemical industry” (her panacea for Russia’s backwardness). “It’s a philosophical issue really,” she explained. A chemical plant “requires the market” and Putin’s strategy “is to suppress the market — or even symbols of the market — whenever possible.”
This persecution of the market aside, Putin and his friends own companies and mansions abroad (cue slides with photographs of private planes on the runway and Google Satellite images of large properties) and they maintain citizenship in foreign countries. “Why don’t these people instead send their children to school in North Korea or Venezuela, if they hate the West so much?” she asked.
Next up is an elaborate panorama of Putin’s and Mevedev’s wristwatches, the segment Latynina later confesses she enjoyed “researching” the most. Putin sports a $60K watch, and Medvedev wears a $20K piece. This is followed by images of floundering bridge construction (Isle Russkii), botched missile tests (the S-400), delayed Sochi Olympics preparation, and photographs of the “Byzantine splendor” of Medvedev’s inauguration.
Her final point (in addition to the “residential superpower” joke that defined her narrative) was that the Russian leadership can get away with all this, as long as the petrodollars keep rolling in. “Everything depends on the price of oil, and everything else is just disturbances,” she finished.
The audience for this event was universally receptive to Latynina’s comments. During the Q&A that followed, two members of the Georgian media praised her journalism. In attendance were several notable-quoteables, such as Anders Aslund and Ariel Cohen. Dr. Cohen asked a fairly unremarkable question (which he, too, prefaced with compliments) about Medvedev’s recent “overtures.”
Latynina answered curtly, almost disrespectfully: no, there is no Medvedev; there is only Putin.
So there, on the one hand, was the Washington elite, propagating its version of events in Russian politics, and, off on her own, Yulia Latynina, whose perspective was undeniably distinct, if not in outright opposition. Among friends and laughter, there was real disagreement — though nobody seemed to acknowledge it.
And herein, perhaps, lies Latynina’s bizarre energy. She can be rude to Ariel Cohen (who, by the way, had to sit there and smile, as his question was indiscreetly shrugged off); she will tell the Washington expert community that they’re naive and backwards-looking in their Medvedev/Gorbachev-eroticism; and she says of something like the unrest in Kaliningrad that it’s an isolated, local incident, due mostly to the incompetence of местные figures. The seductive lunacy of Yulia Latynina is that she brews opinions and observations so off-the-wall, so peculiar, that her audience comes away wondering if it has witnessed a savant at work. Tickled by this curiosity, one can at least rest assured that this was the work of a fine entertainer.
Sure, it may just be a volatile assembly of random, mutually exclusive polemics, but Yulia Latynina is an artist — and madness is her masterpiece.