We Have It All ~ Video

Part 12
Was Freeland an "Accidental Journalist," or Groomed for the Job?
Although the official narrative states that Freeland's journalistic career began in her early 20s when she suddenly started writing for some of the world's largest corporate newspapers while she was in Ukraine, the reality is that Freeland had started along this path as early as 1986. In that year, at age 18, Freeland got a Canadian government-funded summer job with the University of Alberta's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS). The CIUS, a part of the University of Alberta in Edmonton had been created through Alberta government funding in 1976. Freeland's job involved writing articles for a CIUS print project called the Encyclopedia of Ukraine.[ii] Kubijovych, who was her grandfather's former wartime boss, was the mastermind behind this encyclopaedic effort to rewrite Ukrainian history. He had just died in 1985, the year before Freeland started writing articles for his encyclopedia.
After leading Ukrainian collaborationists throughout WWII, and overseeing Chomiak's job running carefully-selected news through the Ukrainian media pipeline, Kubijovych took control of another colossal task ‑ the routinisation of the collective Ukrainian memory. That this encyclopaedic national-memory project suffered from some glaring lapses, such as Holocaust amnesia, is not surprising considering Kubijovych's central role in rallying Ukrainians to put their bodies, hearts and minds into supporting the Nazi's war efforts. Contributing to this exercise, in what sometimes amounted to institutionalised memory loss, seems to have been Freeland's very first step into the paid world of wordsmithing.
Then, in the late 1980s, at about age 20, just before heading off to Harvard for her BA, Freeland worked for The Ukrainian News[iii] in Edmonton. This was the second, ultranationalist stepping stone in her journalistic career. For many decades, this Ukrainian-language weekly, has been a strong print-media vehicle for strident ultranationalist Ukrainian perspectives in Canada.[iv] In her work for this paper, she must have been guided by its editor and publisher, Marco Levytsky. He has led this Canada-wide Catholic Ukrainian newspaper since 1982, when he took over its editorial helm from Freeland's Ukrainian dido, Michael Chomiak.[v]
For the 35 years since then, Levytsky has used this newspaper to promote his community's brand of patriotism for Ukraine, its support for Ukrainian WWII veterans and the acute Cold War politics for which they should be famous. Some historians have critiqued Levytsky's repeated reliance on forged documents (i.e., fake news) to whitewash Ukrainian complicity in the Holocaust.[vi]
Levytsky has also embroiled Ukrainian émigrés in controversy by writing articles and editorials supporting such prominent members of their community as Myron Kuropas. Professor Kuropas has, over many decades, continued to fixate on ruminations that Jews played a major role in victimising Ukrainians before, during and after WWII. Despite editorial support from Levytsky at The Ukrainian News, Kuropas has been accused of antiSemitism.[vii] As an early stepping stone on Freeland's career path, working for The Ukrainian News likely helped to confirm her already deeply ingrained perceptions about Ukrainian politics.
A third stepping stone in Freeland's early journalistic career was The Ukrainian Weekly, a US-based newspaper catering to the interests of Ukrainian nationalists throughout North America. Freeland's byline appeared in this newspaper in 1988 and 1990 when she was a BA student in "Soviet Studies" at Harvard. As might be expected, her contributions followed the paper's extremely antiSoviet/anticommunist approach. While constantly poking the finger at Soviet flaws and blindspots, this periodical has helped the nationalist Ukrainian community to turn a blind eye from the horrors of its Nazi collaborationist past. Besides featuring a bi-monthly column by Myron Kuropas, The Ukrainian Weekly has relied heavily on news material supplied by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). The newspaper has literally used thousands of stories fed by RFE/RL[viii] which was the CIA's main media juggernaut throughout the Cold War, and continues to pump out vast amounts of US-government propaganda.
The RFE/RL was created in the late 1940s as a massive CIA propaganda program. Its website now proudly claims credit for having spread "news and information to audiences behind the Iron Curtain" which "played a significant role in the collapse of communism."[ix] After 25 years of secret CIA financing, other US government agencies took up that responsibility. With a current budget of over $100 million per year, the RFE/RL remains the largest weapon in the US government's propaganda arsenal against former Soviet states. Nowadays, this mighty Wurlitzer is funded by a combination of US government sources and private monies from such oligarchs as George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. The RFE/RL has not only been a cash cow for pushing US-sponsored propaganda, it has also played a significant role in funding many journalistic careers.
Like other aspiring mainstream journalists writing about Ukrainian nationalism and other issues critical of the Soviet Union, Freeland also received a helping hand from the RFE/RL. In 1990, during the Soviet Union's last days, Freeland helped conduct an interview for Radio Liberty with a founder of Ukraine's separatist movement, "Rukh."[x] The interview ‑ conducted for Radio Liberty at the University of Alberta's CIUS ‑ was initially published in The Ukrainian Weekly. The interview was later edited and packaged as a chapter in a book coordinated by the RFE/RL.[xi]
The Ukrainian Weekly regularly advertised books glorifying the Waffen SS Galicia, and memorialised elders in their community whose journalistic endeavours during the war had assisted the Nazi war efforts, including staff from Krakivs'ki visti and Dilo.
The conclusion of an article by David Marples and Chrystia Freeland in 1988 appeared on the very same page of The Ukrainian Weekly as an ad for a book glorifying the heroes of the Waffen SS Division Galicia.[xii] (See that black-and-white ad in the left column, below.) This was the same Nazi military division that her grandfather's two newspapers had passionately urged Ukrainians to join in 1943.
The book, called Fighting for Freedom: The Ukrainian Volunteer Division, with 128 pictures, is one of many proNazi books written by Richard Landwehr which romanticise the Nazi SS. Ads for Landwehr's book glorifying the Waffen SS Galicia appeared in at least sixteen other issues of The Ukrainian Weekly in 1988.[xiii]
(Continue reading this article)
Note the Waffen SS Galician symbol (a lion with three crowns) in each of the following images. The third image below is a public monument commemorating the Waffen SS Galicia in Oakville Ontario:







Note the Waffen SS Galician symbol (a lion with three crowns)
in each of the following images. The third image below is a public monument commemorating the Waffen SS Galicia in Oakville Ontario:

 

Sources and Notes
Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studieshttp://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5Cc%5Ca%5Ccanadianinstituteofukrainianstudies.htm [ii] Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Newsletter, November 1986, p.14.https://archive.org/stream/ciusnewsletter102cana/ciusnewsletter102cana_djvu.txt
[iii] Chrystia Freeland, "My Country & My People," December 12, 2014.
https://www.blacklocks.ca/guest_commentary/my-country-my-people-2/

[iv] "During the Cold War, in its reporting on Soviet history," says Swedish-American historian Per Anders Rudling, "Edmonton's Ukrainian News followed the standard, shrill narrative found in much of the Ukrainian émigré press."
Per Anders Rudling, personal communication with Richard Sanders, January 17, 2017.
To illustrate this, Rudling cites a 1983 article from Ukrainian News which, in describing the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, spoke of the “diabolical plans of the red Muscovite fascism.”
Ukrainski visti, November 16, 1983, p.2.
http://coat.ncf.ca/Ukrainski_vistiNov1983.jpg

[v] Gloria M. Strathern, Alberta Newspapers, 1880-1982: An Historical Directory, 1988, p.9.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=FRDFGO1LqgsC​

[vi] To promote his apparent belief in the "fake news" that WWII-era Ukrainian political and military formations ‑ the OUN-UPA and the OUN(B) ‑ were not antiSemitic and did not take part in the Holocaust, Marco Levytsky has repeatedly relied on two forged documents: (1) the supposed autobiography of Stella Kreutzbach/Krentsbakh and (2) the so-called The Book of Facts. For scholarly critiques of Levytsky's use of these forgeries, see:​

Per Anders Rudling, "The OUN, the UPA, and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacturing of Historical Myths," The Carl Beck Papers, November 2011, pp.14-15, 25, 29-32.
http://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160 ​

John-Paul Himka, "Falsifying World War II History in Ukraine," Kyiy Post, May 8, 2011.
https://www.academia.edu/577931/_Falsifying_World_War_II_History_in_Ukraine_
Karyn Ball and Per Anders Rudling, “The Underbelly of Canadian Multiculturalism: Holocaust Obfuscation and Envy in the Debate about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,” Holocaust Studies, Vol.20, Issue 3, 2014.
http://www.academia.edu/12207336
John-Paul Himka, "Collaboration and or Resistance: The OUN and UPA during the War," Ukrainian Jewish Encounter Shared Narrative Series: Conference on Issues Relating to World War II, Potsdam, June 27-30, 2011.
https://www.academia.edu/577915/Collaboration_and_or_Resistance_The_OUN_and_UPA_during_the_War

[vii] John Paul Himka, Brama, March 23, 2005
http://www.brama.com/news/press/2005/03/050323himka-kuropas.html

John Paul Himka, "Letters to the Editor," Ukrainian Weekly, March 6, 2005.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2005/100517.shtml​

Michael Slotznick and Leonard Grossman, "AJC board members comment on columns," Ukrainian Weekly, September 21, 1997.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1997/389718.shtml

[viii] A google search of the archives of the Ukrainian Weekly yields about 6,250 results from back issues of the newspaper which mention RFE/Radio Liberty. Most of these appear to be examples of the Ukrainian Weekly reprinting RFE/RL materials.
https://www.google.fi/search?q=site:ukrweekly.com+%22rfe/rl%22+OR+%22radio+liberty%22+OR+%22radio+free+europe%22
[ix] History, REF/RL website
http://pressroom.rferl.org/p/6092.html
[x] Initial publication of this two-part interview with Dmytro Pavlychko by Chrystia Freeland and David Marples states that it "was conducted for Radio Liberty" and was published in The Ukrainian Weekly "with RL's permission."
David Marples and Chrystia Freeland, "Inside Ukrainian SSR politics," Ukrainian Weekly, August 5 and 12, 1990.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/archive/1990/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1990-32.pdf

[xi] This book, contained a chapter by David Marples and Chrystia Freeland, called "Inside Ukrainian Politics: An Interview with Dmytro Pavlychko," Ukraine: From Chernobyl to Sovereignty, 1992.
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-1-349-12860-0​

This book was edited by long-time RFE/RL staff person, Roman Solchanyk, who later went to work for the RAND Corp., a private military-intelligence organisation created by Douglas Aircraft Co. to conduct long-range planning of weapons and intercontinental war strategies. RAND is perhaps most famous however for having employed Daniel Ellsberg, who became a famous whistleblower for releasing the RAND's "Pentagon Papers" in 1971.
[xii] David Marples and Chrystia Freeland, "Memory of Ukraine's famine emerges from official historic amnesia," Ukrainian Weekly, August 28, 1988, p.13.
http://www.ukrweekly.com/archive/1988/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1988-35.pdf
[xiii] Ads for Fighting for Freedom: The Ukrainian Volunteer Division, appeared in at least 16 issues of Ukrainian Weekly in 1988: January 12; April 24; May 22, 29; June 26; July 15; August 7, 14, 21, 28; September 4, 18, 25; and October 2, 9, 16.

The Chomiak-Freeland Connection (ncf.ca)
https://coat.ncf.ca/research/Chomiak-Freeland/C-F_12.htm

 

Part 13
In 1989, Freeland was Declared an "Enemy of the Soviet State"
Ever since those early beginnings, in the heady days before the Soviet Union was finally broken apart, Freeland has always remained a hardcore activist promoting her nationalist community's uncompromising political views. In 1989, at the age of 21, when Freeland was an exchange student in Lviv, she was deeply involved in "Rukh."
In the spring of 1989 Freeland had a full page article called "Popular Movement Radicalizing Ukraine" in Student. This was the paper in which Freeland had appeared ten years earlier, at age 11, when interviewed by Michael Chomiak's son, her uncle Bohdan Chomiak. Freeland's 1989 article expressed her one-sided view in support of Rukh and explained why it posed a such a serious threat to the Soviet state. Speaking of this dissident movement's potential political impact, Freeland said "this battle promises to have a profound effect on the Soviet Union."[ii] While Freeland's article compares the Rukh movement to a "battle," she affects an unbiased and objective stance on Ukrainian nationalist aspirations. Freeland's article did not mention her personal involvement as a political activist who was then engaged in the "battle" for Ukrainian independence about which she was reporting. (This parallels her grandfather's conflict of interest as a reporter covering an OUN assassination trial while simultaneously working for a law firm defending the OUN in court.)
Freeland's activism with Rukh was more than just casual. She was a delegate at the inaugural meeting of the Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society which played a pivotal role in creating Rukh, "her photograph appeared in Ukrainian newspapers," and she "acted as an editorial assistant to the weekly newspaper News from Ukraine" which promoted Rukh.[iii] That year in Ukraine, she addressed the 1,000 delegates who attended Rukh's founding congress. (See photo above.) She was one of only two foreign delegates who attended this pivotal Lviv event.
Just before this first Rukh convention, USSR authorities used a state-run newspaper, Pravda Ukrainy, to denounce Chrystia Freeland by name. So incensed were they about her meddling involvement in Ukrainian political groups, and her open efforts to influence upcoming Ukrainian elections, that they actually called her and a Ukrainian-American colleague "enemies of the Soviet state."[iv] At that time, the Soviet government also lodged a diplomatic complaint against Freeland with the Canadian embassy in Moscow. They apparently complained that Freeland had broken Soviet laws, presumably because as a foreigner she was not supposed to get actively involved in radicalized dissident groups that were working to split the country apart. Go figure.
When the KGB asked Freeland to come down to their office for questioning, she simply said no. They however did not insist and she was never questioned. But despite her defiant refusal to answer any police questions about her strident political activities in their country, Freeland was permitted to stay on in the USSR and to continue her defiant political activities.[v] This is all rather ironic now considering Freeland's recent aspersions in the Canadian corporate media accusing the Russian government of meddling in Canadian politics and undermining our democracy by working behind the scenes to reveal that her grandfather was a Nazi propagandist.
It is worth comparing this fake news story about Russian meddling in Canadian politics with the very real case of Freeland's meddling in Soviet politics since 1989. In that year there were several articles in the Canadian press about Freeland's involvement in Soviet politics. These articles show that Freeland, her family, the ultranationalist Ukrainian community and the corporate media, all turned from the same page in their response to Soviet concerns about Freeland's very real involvement in their internal political process. Not only did these Canadian communities all rally around Freeland to support her right to be deeply involved as a political activist in the affairs of another country, they all belittled the Soviet government's concerns about this meddling in their political process.
At the time of this 1989 incident, a colleague of Freeland, Ostap Skrypnyk,[vi] actually was questioned by Soviet police, for about one hour. Like Freeland, he was a Ukrainian student from Alberta who had worked for the CIUS on the Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Both Freeland and Skrypnyk, had permits to be in Lviv to study, but were deeply involved in antiSoviet Ukrainian politics. According to the government's Pravda Ukrainy newspaper, Skrypnyk was detained by police when found putting up posters around midnight on March 23-24, 1989. These posters called for "cells of the Ukrainian National Movement" to be established within the Soviet Army. They also encouraged militia workers to carry out acts of sabotage. The posters, which called on Ukrainians to completely boycott the upcoming elections, said: "Not a single registered candidate ought to win."
Furthermore, the Soviet government said that Skrypnyk had travelled around the country without obtaining the necessary permits. They also said he had met with "suppliers of misinformation to the American Radio Liberty and foreign nationalist publications."[vii] (Emphasis added.) Soviet authorities suspected that Skrypnyk was not really in Ukraine just to study, but that his primary purpose was to interfere in Soviet electoral politics. As it turned out, Skrypnyk never did complete the university degree that he was said to be pursuing during his period of political activism in Ukraine in 1989. His c.v. notes that he did complete his BA, between 1979 and 1986, but mentions no further degrees. After returning to Canada from Ukraine, Skrypnyk began a 17-year career as Executive Director of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (1991-2008). In 2004, he and other executive officers of the Congress met with Prime Minister, and congratulated the Canadian government for funding 500 "election observers" that Canada sent to Ukraine. The UCC was very involved in selection of those "objective" observers. As Skrypnyk states in his curriculum vita:
"As the [UCC] Executive Director, I was responsible for organized the UCC Presidential Election Observer missions to Ukraine in October 2004 and November 2004 with over 500 participants."
Since then Skrypnyk has himself acted as an "election observer" in Ukraine 2012 and 2014.[viii]
One of the ultranationalist Ukrainian publications that covered the Skrypnyk incident was Student. It voiced rather strident praise for Skrypnyk's efforts saying:
"It is time to live the rights, and not just demonstrate about them. Anything else is just empty ideology and fucking around. We have to dance as free a dance as our muscles and minds can allow."[ix]
This was the same issue of Student which contained Freeland's article which equated the Rukh movement with a "battle" and said that it was "Radicalizing Ukraine."
The Soviet government also cited a meeting between Skrypnyk and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in Edmonton. A CSIS official confirmed that this meeting had taken place but called it a voluntary, ''protective security briefing" which they offered to all Canadians travelling to the USSR for extended visits. If this is the case, then Freeland too must also have been invited to these CSIS meetings. Would she have turned down such opportunities to work with Canadian authorities against their common enemies, the Soviet and later Russian governments? Her goals regarding Ukrainian relations with Moscow have certainly overlapped with those of the Canadian government for almost 30 years. Freeland may then have perceived it to be her civic duty to comply with Canada's secret police, just as she had correspondingly declined to meet their Soviet equivalents.
Now, as Canada's Foreign Affairs minister, Freeland's relationship with CSIS is more advanced than it was in 1989 when she was a 21-year-old student activist fighting in the "battle" for the Ukrainian nation's independence from the USSR. But over the decades, one key issue has remained consistent. The Canadian government and Ukrainian ultranationalists like Freeland are still in agreement that the Kremlin is the enemy. Another recurring theme is the fixation on foreigners, and/or foreign powers, which are said to be meddling in domestic politics. In Freeland's case, Ukrainian nationalist newspapers proudly reported that she was very involved in the Rukh movement, which eventually drove in the wedge that split Ukraine from the USSR.
In the case of exposing Michael Chomiak for the Nazi collaborator that he was, Canadian media have taken Freeland's lead in spinning the story to blame Russia for the scandal that is swirling around her having covered up her grandfather's fascist past. As usual, the ironies and hypocrisies are boundless.

 

Sources and Notes
Bohdan Chomiak is a prominent businessman in Ukraine, where he has been living for more than two decades. Freeland wrote about visiting him and his new Ukrainian wife in their "high-ceiling apartment" in Kyiv during Ukraine's regime change in 2014.

Chrystia Freeland, My Ukraine: A Personal Reflection on a Nation's Independence and the Nightmare Vladimir Putin Has Visited Upon It, 2015.

She did not mention that Bohdan Chomiak is a "defaulting payor of support" being sought by the Alberta government's "Maintenance Enforcement Program" for "court-ordered child support, spousal and partner support."

Help us find payors – listed by region, Alberta Justice and Solicitor General
https://justice.alberta.ca/programs_services/mep/pages/helpusfindlistdebtors.aspx​

[ii] Chrystia Freeland, "Popular Movement Radicalizing Ukraine," Student, March-April 1989.
https://archive.org/stream/student1989march2110unse#page/4/mode/2up
[iii] David Marples, "Canadian exchange students face difficulties in Ukrainian SSR, Ukrainian Weekly, May 7, 1989.http://ukrweekly.com/archive/1989/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1989-19.pdf
[iv] "Pravda Ukrainy published a slanderous article ... accusing [a US guest] Prof. Hunczak and Ms. Freeland of being enemies of the Soviet state. This maneuver backfired, however, as the [founding Rukh] congress invited the accused to the podium and enthusiastically greeted them." Jaroslaw Koshiw, "An Eyewitness Account: Triumphant founding congress of the Popular Movement of Ukraine for Perebudov [Perestroika, i.e., Restructuring]," Ukrainian Weekly, September 24, 1989, p.13. http://ukrweekly.com/archive/1989/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1989-39.pdf
[v] David Marples, "Canadian exchange students face difficulties in Ukrainian SSR," Ukrainian Weekly, May 7, 1989, pp.1,4. http://ukrweekly.com/archive/1989/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1989-19
Ostap Skrypnyk's paternal grandfather, Stepan Skrypnyk, was a veteran in Ukraine's first war against Soviet Russia, which was fought to gain Ukrainian independence (1918-1922). Stepan was the nephew of Symon Petliura, a controversial journalist, politician and leading nationalist "hero" of that war. His troops took part in the mass murder (pogroms) of Jews, which he only tried to stop after they were almost complete.
Lars Fischer, "Whither pogromshchina – historiographical synthesis or deconstruction?" East European Jewish Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 3, December 2008.
http://www.woolf.cam.ac.uk/uploads/pogromschina.pdf
[vi] Stepan Skrypnyk became the first patriarch of the modern Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, 1991.
Roman Woronowycz, "Ukraine commemorates centennial of Patriarch Mstyslav's birth," Ukrainian Weekly, May 10, 1998, p.1.
http://ukrweekly.com/archive/1998/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1998-19.pdf
Ostap Skrypnyk's father, Yaroslav Skrypnyk, was involved in various ultranationalist organisations. He was the national president of the Ukrainian Self-Reliance League, a VP of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee's national council, and ‑ at the time of Ostap's arrested ‑ was VP of the World Congress of Free Ukrainians (WCFU). The WCFU, now called the Ukrainian World Congress, still reveres Stepan Bandera as a "national hero of Ukraine" and "dispels the unsubstantiated allegation that under Bandera’s leadership the OUN collaborated with the Nazi regime."
"UWC President meets with the Chairperson of the European Parliament's Delegation to the EU-Ukraine Parliamentary Cooperation Committee," UWC press release, December 21, 2010.
http://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/news.php/popup/1/news/454
[vii] David Marples, "Canadian exchange students face difficulties in Ukrainian SSR," Ukrainian Weekly, May 7, 1989, pp.1,4. http://ukrweekly.com/archive/1989/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1989-19 Marco Levytsky, "Canadian embassy protests harassment of exchange student in Lviv," Ukrainian Weekly, April 23, 1989, p.3. http://ukrweekly.com/archive/1989/The_Ukrainian_Weekly_1989-17.pdf
[viii] Ostap Skrypnyk
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ostap-skrypnyk-6b1b836/
[ix] Andrij Kudelka, "Canadian Student held by Police," Student, March-April, 1989, p.1.

https://archive.org/stream/student1989march2110unse/student1989march2110unse_djvu.txt
(Note: This issue of Student also contains a critical review of the way Ukrainians are portrayed in a book called Old Wounds: Jews, Ukrainians and the Hunt for Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1988.)​

The Chomiak-Freeland Connection (ncf.ca)
https://coat.ncf.ca/research/Chomiak-Freeland/C-F_13.htm

 

Part 14
A Chomiak-Freeland Fixation on Jewish Oligarchs running the Kremlin
The most curious similarity between the journalistic oeuvres of Freeland and her grandfather is that they both advanced a peculiar fixation on conspiracy theories about wealthy Russian Jews who they believed were exerting inordinate control over the Kremlin. For Chomiak's part, the newspapers under his lead helped fuel the Nazi's "Big Lie" about a supposed plot between Moscow's top politicians and a powerful clique of Jews thought to be pulling the Kremlin's strings.
Freeland too has repeatedly perpetuated very similar themes in postSoviet politics. Since the mid1990s she has returned again and again ‑ in articles, speeches, interviews and books ‑ to focus on the economic and political power exercised behind the scenes by a small pact of Russia oligarchs who are said to be mostly Jewish.
After serving some of the world's largest corporate media outlets as a freelancer in Lviv Ukraine, Freeland moved to the Russian capital. She soon became The Financial Times' Moscow Bureau Chief. During her years there, Freeland interviewed some of Russia's top oligarchs. In one very influential 1996 Financial Times article, called "Moscow's Group of Seven," a Jewish oligarch named Boris Berezovsky is said to have boasted that he was among seven wealthy Russian men ‑ six of whom were widely identified as Jewish ‑ who, he claimed without any proof at all, controlled 50% the country's entire economy. This article, led by Freeland's byline, named all the "bankers" and described them as "a tight-knit group," a "pact," "a new centre of power in Russia," and an "elite pooling their efforts" to "control Russia's two top television networks, a popular radio station and a growing number of national newspapers ‑ assets they are happy to use to advance their agenda."
This article, headlined by Freeland, cited unnamed "critics" who were said to have described these men as an "unelected oligarchy whose rise to power jeopardises the country's chances of becoming a democratic state with an open market economy based on the rule of law." Thus scapegoated, this small mostly-Jewish clique of bankers were also said to be "very dangerous," "insolent," "not subject to any rules," and a "mafia" with whom Russian politicians had made a "Faustian bargain." (Faust was a character of fiction who sold his soul to the devil. It is an interesting choice of tropes to target Russian leaders for conspiring with Jewish financiers in the mid1990s because it made illusion to a very famous German legend which had been immensely popular with the Nazis during the Third Reich.[ii])
Harvard Political Science professor Daniel Treisman has stated that in the "famous 1996 Financial Times interview," Freeland's "desire to reduce Russian events to a simple morality tale seems to take over."[iii] Because this simplistic narrative "is difficult to fit with the evidence," Treisman said, "Freeland, perhaps because her view on this is widely shared, does not bother to provide much."[iv] Although Freeland's "story line," Treisman continued, "fits ... Western opinion on Russia .... it does not fit well with the statistics."[v]
Treisman further lamented that, despite all of the facts proving otherwise, "till the 50 percent claim was widely repeated as if credible...." Going as far as to say that the "claim was demonstrable nonsense," Treisman calculated that these seven men actually held only 6% of Russia's GDP. He admitted however that, with some very convoluted manipulations, the figures might conceivably be inflated to 10%, or possibly even 15% at the very most, but certainly no where near 50%.[vi]
The "Faustian bargain" that Freeland referred to was known as the "loans for shares" deal. Treisman however showed that "n fact, only three of the seven original oligarchs ... won anything in loans for shares." He also pointed out that Freeland's repeated focus on the so-called "outsiders," composed mostly of Jewish oligarchs, was also unfair. This, he explains, is because "the loans for shares winners were a small subset of Russia's wealthy at the time, and an even smaller subset today."[vii] Treisman also points out that "[t]he biggest beneficiaries were not the so-called 'oligarchs,' but Soviet-era industrial managers"[viii] It is this group of so-called "red directors," who ‑ contrary to Freeland's narrative ‑ received most of the Russian state resources that were privatised. These "red directors" however were very rarely Jewish. In fact, according to Serguey Braguinsky, a business professor at the University of Maryland, only 1.7% of the "red directors" were Jewish.[ix]

But despite all of these serious problems making the actual facts match her narrative, Freeland used her media platform to confidently repeat again and again the now-popularly accepted fake news about the political control wielded by a small "tight-knit" "pact" of Russian oligarchs who were mostly Jews. She returned to this theme, for example, in her blockbuster book, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism (2000).​

In a chapter in that book, called "The Faustian Bargain," Freeland tied her German metaphor about the devil even more closely to religious imagery. Freeland says that the deal, which made the whole Russian "economy ... irredeemably warped" and "its government unquestionably corrupt":​

"turned out to be a Faustian bargain, laying a corrupt, inegalitarian foundation for everything that came after it. In a way, it was Russian capitalism's original sin."[x] (Emphasis added.)

In reviewing this book, Treisman took exception to Freeland's extravagant use of hyperbole to overstate her inaccurate message:​

"The [loans for shares] program was a 'Faustian bargain,' wrote one journalist [Freeland], a 'fiendishly complicated scheme,' in which the liberal ministers had sold their souls to a cabal of unscrupulous tycoons, who — switching metaphors ‑ quickly metamorphosed into a 'Frankenstein's monster.' .... (Freeland, 2000, pp.22-3, 169-89)"[xi] (Emphasis added.) ​

Over the years, Freeland has repeatedly used her "Faustian bargain" metaphor to describe Russia's "loans for shares" program. It became one of her favourite, go-to expressions for provoking the imagination of her readers about the Kremlin's "original sin" with a "Frankenstein's monster" of mostly Jewish bankers.[xii]​

Freeland's choice of tropes also included some other interesting Germanic references. Besides Faust's bargain with the devil, Freeland also drove home the diabolical nature of the deal by using the word "fiendishly." Derived from the Germanic root Feind, this word for enemy conveys the meaning of a "devil," "demon" or "Satan." ​

Freeland also made an allusion to Mary Shelley's 1818 novel about a golem-like "monster" created by "Frankenstein."[xiii] Franckenstein is of course a very German name which recalls "The Franks," a 4th century grouping of powerful Germanic tribes that ruled Western Europe.​

In her book, Sale of the Century, besides using suggestive German terminology and stretching statistics to suit a particular "morality tale," Freeland overstated the Jewishness of the Faustian "Group of Seven." Vladimir Potanin, the one nonJewish member in this cabal, was by far the wealthiest of all the Russian oligarchs. In fact, Potanin was the only Russian on the Forbes' list of billionaires for 1998 and, even then, he only had $1.6 billion, ranking him 199th out of the world's 209 billionaires. Even Canadian Kenneth Thomson, the 2nd Baron of Fleet and owner of the Globe and Mail, had nine times more money ($14.4 billion)[xiv] than Potanin. (Freeland was the deputy editor of the Globe and Mail, 1999-2001. This paper came to Freeland's defence by spreading the fake news that the scandal about her grandfather's role as a Nazi newspaper editor was a Russian conspiracy to undermine Canadian democracy.)
The much-repeated and already overly exaggerated claim that a monstrous cabal of mostly Jewish bankers owned 50% of the Russian economy, was later overblown beyond all proportions when Freeland took this fake news and ran with it. For example, in a Harvard Business Review interview about her book Plutocrats (which won the National Business Book Award), Freeland stated very clearly that "In Russia, as it happened, most of the oligarchs were Jewish."[xv] This stretched the original falsehood about Jewish predominance within a self-selected group of seven Russian oligarchs, to the outrageous allegation that most Russian oligarchs were Jewish. Freeland's spin on a spin took what began as "demonstrable nonsense" and whirled it to a whole new level of mass media mythology.
Other major mainstream journalists jumped into the ring of this media circus. For example, John Lloyd (who like Freeland is a former Financial Times' Moscow Bureau Chief), followed the release of her 2000 book with an article which quoted her about the oligarchs of Russia. In it, Lloyd stated unequivocally that "In a country where Jewishness is best kept quiet, nearly all of the oligarchs are Jewish."[xvi] A similarly-false blanket statement was made by Ian Birrell in the Guardian newspaper's 2012 review of Freeland's book, Plutocrats. Birrell stated outright that "most Russian oligarchs, for example, were Jews clever and driven enough to get degrees from top universities under the old Soviet system – and often they are immigrants."[xvii] (Emphasis added.) (This journalist ‑ who often writes about fake news but can't see his own contributions to the genre ‑ was a speechwriter for Conservative David Cameron during the 2010 election campaign which led to his becoming Britain's prime minister.[xviii])
So we have to ask, what percent of Russian oligarchs are actually Jewish? Anyone who searches the web trying to ascertain the Jewishness of Russian oligarchs will soon realise that this task is like negotiating a minefield of fascist hate speech. Many of the sources which immediately arise are extremely antiSemitic and proNazi. Clearly the issue of wealthy Jewish oligarchs controlling the Kremlin is alive and well, if not thriving among online fascists.[xix]
Thankfully, reputable academic research on this subject is also not difficult to find. Treidman's 2010 article for example cited the work of Serguey Braguinsky, a doctor of economics who analysed the first cohort of Russian oligarchs who emerged in the 1990s. His research on the "296 most prominent first-wave post-communist business tycoons" found that "while 13.98% of oligarchs were of Jewish ethnicity and 12.9% were other ethnicities (Georgians, Chechens, Tatars, etc.)," those of "Russian or Slavic (Ukrainian or Belorussian) ethnicity comprised 73.12% of the sample."[xx] While only 39 of the 296 Russian oligarchs were Jewish, this was still high, he notes, because only 0.16% of the population identified themselves as Jewish in Russia's 2002 census. Setting aside the complicating factor that some census respondents may have chosen not to identify themselves as Jewish, this was still a far cry from Freeland's popularisation of the idea in an interview with the Harvard Business Review, in which stated -- for the record -- that "In Russia, as it happened, most of the oligarchs were Jewish."[xxi]

 

Sources and Notes
Chrystia Freeland, John Thornhill and Andrew Gowers, "Moscow's Group of Seven," Financial Times, November 1, 1996.
http://coat.ncf.ca/research/Chomiak-Freeland/ FT_7bankers.doc

[ii] David Pan, "The structure of aesthetic pleasure in the Nazi Reception of Goethe's Faust," Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (P. Swett, C. Ross, F. d’Almeida, editors), pp.87-106.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=vSSGDAAAQBAJ​

[iii] Daniel Treisman, "Blaming Russia First," Foreign Affairs, November 2000, pp.10-11.
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/treisman/Papers/blamin.pdf
[iv] Daniel Treisman, "Blaming Russia First," Foreign Affairs, November 2000, pp.10-11
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/treisman/Papers/blamin.pdf
[v] Daniel Treisman, "Blaming Russia First," Foreign Affairs, November 2000, p.13.
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/treisman/Papers/blamin.pdf
[vi] Daniel Treisman, "'Loans for Shares' Revisited," Post-Soviet Affairs, July-September 2010
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci...or shares Post-Soviet Affairs for website.pdf
[vii] Daniel Treisman, "'Loans for Shares' Revisited," Post-Soviet Affairs, July-September 2010, p.23.
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci...or shares Post-Soviet Affairs for website.pdf
[viii] Daniel Treisman, "'Loans for Shares' Revisited," Post-Soviet Affairs, July-September 2010, p.1
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci...or shares Post-Soviet Affairs for website.pdf
[ix] Serguey Braguinsky, "The Rise and Fall of Post-Communist Oligarchs: Legitimate and Illegitimate Children of Praetorian Communism," The Journal of Law & Economics, May 2009, pp.13, and "Table 6. Basic demographics of old and new oligarchs," p.47.
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTINVTCLI/Resources/JUNE7&8PAPERBraguinsky.pdf
[x] Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism, 2000, p.22.
[xi] Daniel Treisman, "'Loans for Shares' Revisited," Post-Soviet Affairs, July-September 2010, p.2.
https://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci...or shares Post-Soviet Affairs for website.pdf
[xii] Here are a few other examples of Freeland's well-worn use of the devil-conjuring phrase "Faustian bargain" to depict the Kremlin's deal with mostly-Jewish oligarchs.
Chrystia Freeland, "To Russia with love," New Statesman, June 19, 2000.
http://www.russialist.org/archives/4376.html
Chrystia Freeland, "The quiet revolutionaries," Financial Times, December 4, 2004.
Chrystia Freeland, My Ukraine: A Personal Reflection on a Nation's Independence and the Nightmare Vladimir Putin Has Visited Upon, May 12, 2015.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=sJMkCQAAQBAJ
Chrystia Freeland, "My Ukraine, and Putin’s big lie," Quartz, May 22, 2015.
https://qz.com/402855/chrystia-freeland-my-ukraine-and-putins-big-lie/
[xiii] Mary Shelley wrote in the preface to Frankenstein (1818) that her novel was written in imitation of "German stories of ghosts."(p.x). Listed below are some texts which discuss her novel within the context of the antiSemitism of gothic literature. Also of interest is the connection between Frankenstein's monster and Jewish folklore about a mythical creature called the golem. Jewish folktales describe the golem as a creature created by Rabbis to protect the community. In some versions of the fairytale, the golem turns against its master. Curiously, the Jewish community in Chelm, Poland, is closely connected to a famous, early tradition of golem stories. The antiSemitic newspaper edited by Michael Chomiak, called Cholmer Land, catered to the Ukrainian community in and around Chelm which the Nazi's had empowered during the Holocaust.

Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew, 2017.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=omJBDgAAQBAJ​

1. Scrivener,Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock, 2011.
   https://books.google.fi/books?id=JYnFAAAAQBAJ

Cathy S. Gelbin, The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808-2008, 2011.
https://books.google.fi/books?id=5HkzGcG9YeAC
[xiv] Forbes List of billionaires, 1998
http://stats.areppim.com/listes/list_billionairesx98xwor.htm
[xv] Economy: "The Rise of the Global Super-Rich," Harvard Business Review, December 13, 2012.
https://hbr.org/ideacast/2012/12/the-rise-of-the-global-super-r.html

[xvi] John Lloyd, "The Autumn Of the Oligarchs," New York Times Magazine, October 8, 2000.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/08/magazine/the-autumn-of-the-oligarchs.html​

[xvii] Ian Birrell, "Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich by Chrystia Freeland – review," The Guardian, November 1, 2012.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/01/plutocrats-super-rich-freeland-review
[xviii] Ian Birrell
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ian-birrell
[xix] During the course of my research, I created a "Custom Search Engine" (CSE) to scan the contents of 67 of the world's largest antiSemitic, neo-Nazi and "white power" websites. This was useful, for example, in identifying the number of times that racist websites referenced ultranationalist Ukrainian leaders and their periodicals as references. Using this CSE, I found that a search of these 67 hate sites, for the words "russian," "Jewish" and "oligarchs," yielded about 114,000 web pages that included all three terms.
[xx] Serguey Braguinsky, "The Rise and Fall of Post-Communist Oligarchs: Legitimate and Illegitimate Children of Praetorian Communism," The Journal of Law & Economics, May 2009.
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTINVTCLI/Resources/JUNE7&8PAPERBraguinsky.pdf
[xxi] An interview with Chrystia Freeland by Sarah Green, Economy: "The Rise of the Global Super-Rich," Harvard Business Review, December 13, 2012.
https://hbr.org/ideacast/2012/12/the-rise-of-the-global-super-r.html

The Chomiak-Freeland Connection (ncf.ca)
https://coat.ncf.ca/research/Chomiak-Freeland/C-F_14.htm

 

Part 15
Freeland's Kremlin-Oligarch Theory goes Global with Jewish Plutarchetype
In her 2012 book Plutocrats, Freeland expanded upon her earlier book's focus on the supposed preponderance of Jewish oligarchs controlling the Kremlin, to examine "the rise of a new super-elite" of the "global super rich" who control much of the world's economy. In the first chapter, when introducing her readers to a newly devised definition of the term "plutonomy," she describes the "striking" "emergence of this new virtual nation of mammon."[ii] (Emphasis added.)
Freeland's phrase, the "new virtual nation of mammon," is itself "striking," at least for anyone who may be interested in the use of language to conjure people's imagination. "Mammon"[iii] is a longstanding antiSemitic epithet that, for hundreds of years, has been wielded to great effect as a linguistic weapon against Jews. It was, for instance, employed throughout the Middle Ages during Christianity's holy wars against Jews. It was in fact part of the repertoire of linguistic devices used to rouse people into frenzied murderous pogroms.
Although the word "mammon" simply meant "riches" in Mishnaic Hebrew, its use in the New Testament led to the creation of a whole Christian mythology around the fake news that Mammon was a false Jewish God of money. ("Ye can not serve God and Mammon," Matthew 6:24) "Mammon simply means money or wealth in the Hebrew of the time," explained Rabbi Julian Sinclair, "but most English versions of the Gospels leave the Hebrew word untranslated, which lends to the love of money a Jewish sound."[iv]
For centuries, many European Christians used the heavily-loaded word "Mammon" in their crusade to demonise all Jews by associating them with a specific archetype, namely, the diabolical worshippers of money. Historian Paul L. Rose has researched the "long ancestry" of abuse around misuse this term. He explains that the term "mammon" was instrumental in spreading the idea among Christians that "Jews were the demonic servants of a false devil-god of money opposed to God and the truly human."[v]
Freeland's phrase the "nation of mammon" loads the key word even further by implying that the worship of money is tied to a specific "nation" of people. "Nation" ‑ from the Latin natio meaning "people, tribe, kin, genus, class, flock" ‑ now generally refers to a large grouping of people which shares a specific language, culture or ethnicity. Which "nation" of people are we supposed to associate with the Hebrew word "mammon"?
Many articles and books have since repeated Freeland's catchy phrase for plutocracy, the "new virtual nation of mammon."[vi]
Use of the word "mammon" as a veiled swear word against Jews had never faded from memory. It has been in continual usage for centuries, and has a definite popularity among certain online communities. It can, for example, be found on more than 500,000 webpages housed within the world's 67 largest internet "hate sites."[vii]
It is possible that Freeland has no idea that the word Mammon has been used by antiSemites for centuries. But perhaps, as a professional wordsmith, she have known better than to use it. Considering the Jewish ethnicity of many of the plutocrats whom she chooses to highlight, it may not be just a mere coincidence that she selected this particular turn of phrase.
Freeland's book Plutocrats postulates what she calls an explanatory "model" using "archetypes" to explain how certain specific people manage to become plutocrats. Her idea has to do with how people with an "outsider's" perspective who become "insiders" are better able to exploit "revolutions," such as those in globalisation and technology. To illustrate her novel idea, Freeland begins by hand picking a few oligarchs from the US, Russia and Europe. These are men who she says fit her specific "archetype" for plutocrats.
The first three on her carefully selected list are all Americans who attended Harvard. This she explains is because "the archetype best equipped" to explain why some succeed in becoming plutocrats is: "Harvard kids who went to provincial public schools.” The three "literal examples" of her explanatory "model" are: Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Schwarzman and Lloyd Blankfein. All of these men, perhaps only coincidentally, are well-known Jewish businessmen. (Freeland did not mention that Zuckerman ranked 35th, with $17.5 billion, and that Schwarzman was 184th, with $5.5 billion, on Forbes' list of 1,153 of billionaires for that year, 2012.[viii] Blankfein did not even make it onto the 2012 billionaires' list, so it's not clear why Freeland draws him to the readers' attention, except that he fits her anecdotal "archetype."
Since Freeland chose to use billionaire Harvard students to argue her premise, she could have chosen from many other examples of Harvardian billionaires. It turns out that "Harvard has graduated some 52 billionaires, with a collective fortune of $205 billion."[ix] Freeland for example could have drawn her readers' attention to such Harvard billionaires as Bill Gates. But, although Gates was the world's second richest man in 2012 (with $61 billion),[x] he is not Jewish. Gates' wealth however was two and half times more than Freeland's two Harvardians combined (Zuckerman and Schwarzman), and Zuckerman never even graduated from Harvard.
It may be worth noting here that of the world's five richest men that year, four of them were raised in Christian families: Carlos Slim Helu (Catholic),[xi] Bill Gates (Catholic),[xii] Warren Buffet (Presbyterian)[xiii] and Amancio Ortega (Christian,[xiv] likely Catholic[xv]). Their combined wealth in 2012 was $211.5 billion, far more than wealth accumulated by the Jewish billionaires highlighted by Freeland. The fact that the world's top five oligarchs included a disproportionate number of Catholics may have been of interest to Freeland, as she herself has Catholic family influences. Her grandfather, Michael Chomiak, was deeply committed to the Ukrainian Catholic faith and was for a time, as we've seen, the editor of Canada's top Ukrainian Catholic newspaper, The Ukrainian News. And, as we've also seen, Freeland herself worked for that Ukrainian Catholic newspaper in the late 1980s.
But since Freeland seemed so keenly interested in drawing readers' attention specifically to Jewish billionaires, it might be worth noting that the one nonChristian billionaire in Forbes' top-five list for 2012 was Jewish, namely, Bernard Arnault. He is the CEO of LVMH a French company making luxury products enjoyed by the "super-rich." Although his company's major subsidiary, LV, was exposed in 2004 for having collaborated closely with the Nazi regime in Vichy France throughout WWII,[xvi] LVMH has not relinquished its ownership of LV.
A related story, that Freeland also did not mention, is that the fifth richest man in 2012, Ortega, owns a famously antiSemitic fashion company. In 2012, his firm was sued for $40 million by its former attorney for discriminatory policies against Jews, Gays and Blacks. Ortega's company has also been publicly denounced for profiting from the production of stylish handbags bearing swastika motifs, concentration-camp garb bearing the Star of David, as well as jewellery and T-shirts with Black faces saying "white is the new black."[xvii]
But these interesting truths about what Freeland did not say in her 2012 book Plutocrats have distracted us from our narrative about what she did say in elucidating her so-called "model" of the "super rich." To further exemplify her particular image of the global plutocrat, Freeland moved immediately from her listing of three relatively insignificant US plutocrats (all of whom were Jewish), to provide some Russian examples. Here she harks back to her earlier writings on the Kremlin's "Faustian deal" with Jewish bankers by stating that:
"Most of the Russian oligarchs who were clever and driven enough to get degrees from elite Moscow universities before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but were mostly Jewish and therefore not fully part of the Soviet elite, have a similar insider/outsider starting point."[xviii]
Then, for her final biographical anecdote to paint her initial portrait of what a global plutarch looks like, Freeland presents us with the case of Hungarian-American George Soros, a very famous businessman and financier, who she calls "another representative of the genre."[xix] It perhaps goes without saying that Soros too is Jewish. For decades, Soros has been a key player in pushing Ukrainian politics in directions generally favoured by Freeland and her three key communities (Ukrainian ultra nationalists, the Canadian government and the corporate media). Through his Open Society Foundation (OSF), which ‑ like Freeland ‑ is now banned from Russia, Soros took over much of the financing for the CIA-created Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Wurlitzer after the Agency began to privatise this propaganda arm of the US government.
Although Freeland was overly fixated on using Jewish examples to illustrate her plutarchic archetype, this is not to say that she is antiSemitic. In the acknowledgements for her 2012 book, Freeland notes that "Many plutocrats have helped me to understand their world and some have become friends (though that does not mean we always agree)." She then provides a list of 18 plutocrats, the first of which is George Soros, who has ‑ for decades ‑ been a great friend and very generous financial supporter of ultranationalist Ukrainian causes.[xx] Freeland's list also included several other Jewish plutocrats, including two from the original "Group of Seven" Russian oligarchs: Mikhail Fridman and Vladimir Gusinsky,[xxi] although she does not say which, if any, of these plutocrats are her "friends."
Immediately after provided the reader with an overwhelmingly Jewish preponderance of global oligarchs, to illustrate what we might call her "plutarchetype," Freeland then guides us even further down the rabbit hole. And, as Alice in Wonderland once said, things become "curiouser and curiouser." She (Freeland, not Alice) moves straight into a most surreal speculation about the nature of "plutonomy" that had been postulated by three Citibank investment advisors. These glorified stock brokers ‑ who Freeland calls "an elite team of strategists at Citicorp"[xxii] ‑ had come up with some seriously hare-brained, pseudoscientific speculations that how wealth acquisition and immigration patterns are influenced by genetically-determined dopamine levels in the brain. This, Freeland notes, they believe is "hard-coded in our DNA."[xxiii] What? The reason certain people become plutocrats may be a genetic thing?
But besides supposedly shedding light on why individual plutocrats get rich, the historical success of economic superpowers such as Britain, the US and Canada, are ‑ according to this wild speculation ‑ also explained by genetically-caused brain chemistry.[xxiv] Freeland favourably presents this outrageous notion and makes no effort whatsoever to expose it for what it is, ridiculously far-out conjecture on the supposed biological determinants behind the creation of "super rich" individuals and nations. The idea that certain specific groups of individuals are predestined by their genetic make-up to acquire vast amounts of wealth is a profoundly preposterous quack theory.
Freeland did not explain that the purpose of the Citigroup report, by her "elite team of strategists," was to get investors to buy stocks in certain specific luxury-oriented companies. One stock in particular that her experts were flogging in their dopamine report is worth mentioning, namely LVMH. This is the French company that had collaborated with the Nazis throughout WWII. Predictably, in the fine print appended to their bizarre report, the Citigroup's "elite" theorists were forced to divulge that the bank employing them owns (1) LVMH stocks, (2) is paid by LVMH for services rendered and (3) that they are personally compensated for boosting LVMH profitability.[xxv]
In other words, the whole exercise was an elaborate corporate confidence scheme in which this "elite team of strategists" were acting as witting "shills" for LVMR. Their work as accomplices in this corporate scam is to lead the investors (i.e., the "marks") to believe that they are receiving sage advice from an objective, unbiased source. As "shills" their personal goal included lining their own pockets by enticing the readers of their report to invest in specific companies that then kick back some of the rewards to them. This of course is all perfectly legal because the deceit is ostensibly disclosed, albeit in tiny print that most marks don't bother to read.