Veteran American journalist and Russia specialist Mark Ames wonders why President Vladimir Putin and other Russians are not angrier at the U.S. than they seem to be, given what Bill Clinton, Wall Street, and Harvard advisers did to take advantage of drunken president Boris Yeltsin and predator oligarchs to hobble the Russian economy and make the very life-span of Russia’s 99 percent much shorter.

 Ames knows whereof he speaks.  He spent a decade reporting from Yeltsin’ and Putin’s Russia, witnessing its transformation from an American “colony” to it’s “number one threat.”  Brava to Telesur’s Abby Martin and Mark Ames for filling in the blanks regarding a critical period in U.S.-Russia relations, about which few Americans are aware.

Published on January 23, 2017 (27 minutes)

Ames explains how deeply the US government, along with Western capitalist institutions, cheered, shaped and exploited the Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, paving the way for the political system they all condemn today.  Everyone can profit from hearing some real history of the immediate post-Soviet period and the U.S. role in it.  Ames was there and on the money – so to speak.