The Most Censored News with Lee Camp hosted by comedian/ writer/ raconteur/ provocateur/ saboteur Lee Camp is a twice-weekly look at the most censored stories within corporate media hosted by the new video platform Behind the Headlines – a MintPress video project that is 100% viewer supported.
Camp both brings to light stories that are (intentionally) ignored by the corporate media and digs deeper when the mainstream media only reports on the surface-layer reality. Having been a professional stand-up comic for 20 years, a writer for The Onion, and the host/head writer of Redacted Tonight, Camp is also uniquely suited to bring humor to these topics.
Now that the U.S. has publicly accepted that what is happening in Ukraine is a proxy war and Ukraine won’t win, the focus has moved to who will get to plunder what from Ukraine after the war.
Benjamin Norton of Multipolarista reports, “On July 4 and 5, 2022, top officials from the US, EU, Britain, Japan, and South Korea met in Switzerland for a so-called ‘Ukraine Recovery Conference.’“
A Ukraine Recovery Conference sounds good, right? I bet they recommend volunteering in elder care facilities, free housing for everyone in Ukraine having a rough time and maybe funding a free public transit system. No?
Norton continues, “[They met] to plan a series of harsh neoliberal policies to impose on post-war Ukraine, calling to cut labor laws, ‘open markets,’ drop tariffs, deregulate industries, and ‘sell state-owned enterprises to private investors.’“
In other words, they’re just repeating the normal gameplan of the U.S. Empire. Destroy an area of the world, then put in drastic and cruel capitalist policies that enrich a tiny number of people and don’t help suffering people.
This plan to pillage Ukraine didn’t start when the proxy war did this past February. New evidence shows that the U.S. and other Western countries had been planning to privatize the Ukrainian economy since at least 2018.
Between 2018 and 2021 the Ukraine Recovery Conference had a different name – the Ukraine Reform Conference. According to a document for the 2018 conference the, “ultimate goal of the reform is to sell state-owned enterprises to private investors…” That original goal hasn’t changed.
When you think about it, selling state-owned enterprises to private investors is taking something that belonged to all the people of Ukraine and giving it to a handful of billionaires. That’s just theft on a massive scale.
As much as this sounds like pillaging a country, if the Ukrainian people wanted it to happen, then it wouldn’t be my place to argue.
But, as Norton reports, Ukrainians aren’t in favor of the pillaging of their nation, “[The URC] acknowledged that they were very unpopular among actual Ukrainians. A poll found that just 12.4% supported privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOE), whereas 49.9% opposed it.”
But when have the objections of a nation’s people mattered to the powerful interests trying to steal their resources?
Despite being unpopular with Ukrainians the powers behind these conferences have urged Ukraine to cut taxes on corporations and wealthy capitalists, funded consultants to sell neoliberal market reforms to the Ukrainian people, and successfully championed assaults on the rights of Ukrainian people.
Norton connected these reforms to the Washington-led shock therapy forced on Russia after the dissolution of the USSR and the horrific results that followed. He wrote, “A 2001 UNICEF study found that these harsh neoliberal reforms in Russia caused 3.2 million excess deaths, and pushed 18 million children into poverty, bringing about rampant malnutrition and public health crises.”
Watch the full report below.
Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of Behind The Headlines’ new series: The Most Censored News With Lee Camp. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.