Freedom House: Russia has declined to "not free" status
Russia is becoming less democratic because the United States has learned that yet another excellent method in which to get a piece of another country’s pie is through the establishment of democracy.
It is the freedom that democracy bestows that best allows a foreign country to steal a nation's assets through the same privatization that was shoved on Russia and that we plan to confer on Iraq even mulling an annual cash payout for all Iraqis if they would privatize their oil and gas sector. #msg-1197170 #msg-1869189 #msg-4207833 #msg-4823870
Note Freedom House is a front for CFR, Council on Foreign Relations. #msg-4355198
The Council’s membership network consists of people one would expect to be CFR members—David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Peter G. Peterson, George Soros, Maurice Greenberg, Robert Rubin, George P. Shultz, Alan Greenspan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard B. Cheney, and George Tenet—as well as individuals whose membership is more unexpected, such as John Sweeney, Jessie Jackson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Richard J. Barnet, and Daniel Schorr.
As Jonathan Steele points out in the Guardian this membership network contributes largely to the American "advisors" who have been directing and funding the entire Yushchenko operation, just as they did in the former Yugoslavia, with money pouring in not only from the U.S. Treasury but also from billionaire George Soros, who has his own interests in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. According to the Ukrainian Center for Political and Economic Research (UCPER), a poll of the mostly pro-Yushchenko Ukrainian NGOs reveals that foreign sponsors pick up 60 percent of the tab, including:
"'Vidrodzhenya' (Revival) sponsored by George Soros - 36.3%, 'Freedom House' (the U.S.) - 22.7%, 'Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative' - 22.7%, USAID - 22.7%, National Endowment for Democracy (the U.S.) - 18.2%, the World Bank - 13.6% (the total percentage exceeding 100%, since the respondents often named several sponsors). #msg- 4674009
And now this same group representative of U.S. leadership wants the contrived production they are sponsoring in Ukraine which they hope will lead to yet another bogus democracy to be the model for Russia. #msg-4740188
Putin has not choice but to drift toward authoritarianism as a means to protect Russia's sovereignty.
-Am
Freedom House: Russia has declined to "not free" status Dec 20, 15:56
MOSCOW (AP) - Freedom House, a U.S.-based organization that tracks the progress of political rights and civil liberties across the world, said Dec. 20 that Russia had fallen to the status of "not free" - far behind the democratic nations Moscow sees as its peers.
"Russia's step backward into the Not Free category is the culmination of a growing trend under President Vladimir Putin to concentrate political authority, harass and intimidate the media, and politicize the country's law-enforcement system," Executive Director Jennifer Windsor said in a statement.
"These moves mark a dangerous and disturbing drift toward authoritarianism in Russia, made more worrisome by President Putin's recent heavy-handed meddling in political developments in neighboring countries, such as Ukraine."
Freedom House said that on balance, the world saw increased freedom in 2004: 26 countries showed gains while 11 showed decline. Of the world's 192 countries, it judged 46 percent free, 26 percent not free, and the rest partly free. Eight rated as the most repressive: Burma, Cuba, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Turkmenistan.
The NGO found encouragement in democratic gains in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine, where popular protests forced the cancellation of the results of fraudulent elections over the past 13 months, and it marked "modest trends" in increased liberties in the Middle East, specifically North Africa, and in Muslim-majority countries in general.
"Although no Arab country gave evidence of improvement sufficient to merit a status change, modest gains were registered in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Qatar," Freedom House said.
It called Russia's retreat from freedom, entering the ranks of the unfree for the first time since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, "the year's most important political trend."
The former Soviet republics of Belarus, Armenia and Lithuania also saw setbacks - the first two due to the authorities' increasingly harsh response to dissent, and the latter because of "worrying questions about the full autonomy of Lithuania's political leadership" in the wake of President Roland Paksas' impeachment amid allegations of influence by the Russian mafia.
Freedom House, a Washington-based, nonpartisan group, was founded nearly 60 years ago by Americans concerned about threats to democracy. It conducts advocacy, research and training to encourage and nurture democracy.
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