Severe Economic Crisis in Russia Looms
And Russia’s domestic income prospects are no better; in fact, some commentators are already talking about Russia running out of budget cash. Economy Minister Andrei Belousov openly admits that Russia needs annual growth running well above 4% — double what it expects over the near term due to plunging tax revenues from fading energy profits — in order to meet Russia’s already anemic level of social spending on a sick and endangered population. Russia saw its share of the world population fall by half over the last half century, and that will happen again in the next. Russia doesn’t rank in the top 110 nations of the world for life expectancy, and the drumbeat of analysis showing a demographic collapse is relentless.
Instead of proposing solutions, Putin has already begun lashing out, in neo-Soviet fashion, in personal attacks at cabinet ministers who are showing signs of being unable to deliver planned spending, and even Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev has come in for a drubbing.
In another neo-Soviet move, as disturbing for what it says about the Russian political system as for what it tells us about the Russian economy, in order to make short-term ends meet on the budget, Medvedev ordered the seizure of assets of Rosneftegaz, a state-controlled holding company. How long it will be before the Kremlin turns its eye towards private and foreign assets is anyone’s guess, and this is a major reason why smart foreigners want no part of the Russian market.
As was the case in Soviet times, a major cause of budget pressure for the Kremlin is its frenzied attempt to match the United States on military spending. Russia has shown itself no less willing to roll tanks into Georgia than the USSR was to roll them into Hungary, and in fact, with Putin at the national helm, the KGB has far more power now than it ever dreamed of having in Soviet times. Just as in the Soviet era, Russia simply can’t maintain an arms race with the U.S. and simultaneously provide the basic level of assistance its population needs; its economy just doesn’t have the fundamentals or the dynamism to stand that type of pressure for long. It will crack and collapse just as the USSR’s did not long ago.
Standing in stark contrast to the EU’s bold confrontation of the Putin regime have been the craven policies of the Obama administration. Obama and his Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, have shown themselves only too eager to do the exact opposite: appease Putin in any way possible. They not only looked the other way as Putin booted USAID out of country because of its efforts in support of Russian democracy, they actively supported Putin by shutting down Radio Liberty and pressing Congress not to impose any human-rights related trade sanctions on Russia.
As a result, those who stand for American values rightly feel betrayed, and they are stunned and bitter. Leading opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov openly accuses Obama of pursuing a policy of appeasement under the euphemism “reset.” He writes:
In response to the aggressive anti-democratic campaign led by Putin and members of his chekist clan, the Obama administration continues its cowardly retreat from its democratic principles. Although the Obama administration has said it is committed to defending freedom and human rights in the world, it has meekly given in to the Kremlin on two key institutions that have made invaluable contributions toward building democracy and civil society in Russia.
America has come a long way since the days of Ronald Reagan, when it was cheered around the world as a great beacon of hope for those seared in the flames of withering injustice from dictatorial regimes like Putin’s. If Americans are proud of their history, they should consider this fall from grace as the enter their polling booths in November.
“In another neo-Soviet move, as disturbing for what it says about the Russian political system as for what it tells us about the Russian economy, in order to make short-term ends meet on the budget, Medvedev ordered the seizure of assets of Rosneftegaz, a state-controlled holding company. How long it will be before the Kremlin turns its eye towards private and foreign assets is anyone’s guess, and this is a major reason why smart foreigners want no part of the Russian market.”
I’ve always thought that there are some countries that just can’t handle democracy. They’ve never had a history of it, they have never been good at it, and it has never been ingrained in their national character to maintain and protect it. If Russia turned back into a Soviet-style tyranny tomorrow, I don’t think most Russians would care, let alone fight it. Putin is no different than any of the old Soviet dictators and I think Russians basically yearn for the order some all-powerful tyrant gives them. I really believe that if the Russian people get their basic necessities and their vodka, they will put up with just about anything for a long, long, time. Most Russians probably hated the Soviet Union, yet look how long it lasted anyway, even with crazy people like Stalin running the show. Seems to me that Russians are getting tired of this experiment with democracy and soon will be back to some form of central dictator. It probably won’t be communism, but some form of oligarchy with a strong central ruler like Putin.
Some countries can’t handle democracy because they’ve never had it. They also probably don’t even want it. And they surely don’t want to nurture and protect it, not with a guy like Putin in charge. So get ready for the Soviet Union 2.0. And I don’t think we’re going to like what we see.
Russians may not be able to handle democracy but their not going back to pure Communism anytime soon.
Every country can handle democracy. Just like every location can grow rice.
To have a sucessful democracy that will last a few generations, you just need the right culture and the right founders. The culture includes and engaged people who are self policing and responsible for themselves. The right founders? well Got a spare Adams, Jefferson and Madison, plus a Washington to hold it all together for the first decade? I was affraid you didn’t. (I don’t have them either)
If by “Democracy” you mean “Consitutional Republicanism”, you’re right that most countries couldn’t handle it. This isn’t becuase “they’ve never had it before”. If that were true, America never would have existed.
Those countries can’t handle it, because they don’t have a cultural understanding of human freedom and natural rights. The people in those countries don’t understand natural rights, nor would they accept such rights as natural. Their entire lives, and generations before them, they’ve lived under the rule of people who don’t understand or care about these concepts.
For many people, such an understanding could only come very slowly and incrementally, at best. Even then, those people would have to be willing to violently tear down the old structure and instill the new. That’s tough. It’s tougher if you don’t do it in a way that’s tempered with mercy and understanding.
Look at the French Revolution for such an example. Over 30,000 French citizens murdered by the same “freedom fighters” who originally sought to emulate what America had done successfully. The French attempted to do it with a secular vision. That can’t work.
If one doesn’t accept the concept of a higher power that bestows natural rights on men, then the possibility that different men can come along and arbitrarily remove or modify those rights will always present a major danger to such an endeavor.
“…endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights…” is a critical part of our success and continued existence.
Well said.
Our liberty is built on a Judeo-Christian heritage, and all the denials of the leftists and libertarians cannot change that, or create lasting liberty where that heritage does not exist.
Thus the decades-long assault on morality from the left, more recently aided by the addled acolytes of Atlas.
So democracy is rooted in judeo christian heritage, and without that heritage, it is impossible for democracy to thrive…you mean like in ancient Greece? How about in Europe, where atheists and the “barely religious” vastly outnumber observant christians, and have for generations?
Hi, Luke.
Reading for meaning is really important. Mark said “our liberty” is rooted in Judeo-Christian values.
He did not say “Democracy” was rooted in Judeo-Christian values.
That’s a critical difference. I won’t bother with the rest of what you said, since your opening premise is based on bogus information.
Ancient Greece had slavery, and its “democracy” was not an universal suffrage, nor was there anything like a bill of rights to certify liberties.
Modern Europe is heir to the Judeo-Christian heritage. Notions of liberty were transmitted through religious traditionalists like John Locke.
Many of the countries in Europe today may have universal suffrage, but any liberties enjoyed by the peoples are curtailed by the bureaucracies to a degree that in America only the most rabid Obamaniac would consider them “free.” Second Amendment, anybody?
AMEN
We also had the unique situation of being in an isolated place at the start of our history. The early colonists were dropped off the boat and it took months for the boat to make a trip one way. That necessarily meant that our earliest people had to learn how to be self-governing, self-reliant and independent in order to simply survive. It’s a lot easier for the Founding ideals to take root in that kind of population heavily-laden as it was with that kind of stock.
People in countries like Russia or the Middle Eastern nations haven’t had to make do and survive to grow that independent spirit. You could argue that there are people in the Siberian hinterlands that might have it, but they have their hands too full just surviving to worry about whether or not they have rights. Perhaps Siberia is just too harsh and grinds people down too much. And the Middle Eastern peoples have always had too strong a tribal culture and nature to become independent.
Great point. Having hosted several people from Europe and Russia, I’ve heard the complaints about how often buildings in America “seem cheeply made…in my country, things are built to last for hundreds of years.”
Well, sure, because you don’t have competition in your country. The State will fund a loser to keep it going. There’s less innovation, less change. Maybe you have more security, but it makes you slow, fat, and complacent. There’s a reason America outproduces most European/Asian countries by factors of 2 – 4.
Here, if a business fails and the building is sold, the next guy will probaby want to change the layout, or tear it all down and start from scratch with his “own idea of what makes the perfect office/shop/facility”. As is so typical with our culture, most of us willingly sacrifice security for freedom. This reason more than any other explains the rags-to-riches stories that pervade our history.
The 30,000 was just Paris. Search [ vendee genocide ] and you’ll see the untold, countryside, future Lenin-model, part of the Reign of Terror, which as you indicate, came along only toward the end of the revolutionary period. After hope and change had failed, as it were.
Great point! Imagine the new State, the guys who originally helped tear down the elites to erect a new, freer society, outlawing free speech. Imagine them outlawing relgion, even to the point where they renamed the days of the week so Christians wouldn’t know which day was Sunday.
I certainly didn’t intend to diminish the horrors of the French Revolution.
–and i didn’t mean to nag –it’s just that, after all my years of thinking that what had happened ‘outside Paris’ was just a little spate of state-executions here and there, i only very recently learned that it was a state military campaign, and is now known as ”Vendee Genocide”, that Lenin referred to it often in his salad days, meaning that the later Bolshevik terror methods (see ‘Tambov rebellion atrocities’) already had a proto-Marxist ‘cover’, and that the death toll was somewhere between 450,000 and 600,000, over a couple of summer campaigns in the near-Paris countryside.
The then population of Paris and France was about 600k and 25mm, nowadays a bit over 2mm and 65mm –so the half million killed off then would today be like a million and a half.
So then or now, if all the killing had been confined to Paris, the world would’ve observed in real-time the new state, in rising to the new revolutionary motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, killing off three quarters of the capital city.
Great for you to remember the horrors of the vicious campaign against La Vendee. This is the first of all modern, savage, Governmental attempts at mass-murder; even genocide…
The right to keep and bear arms is the prime right from which all other rights flow. When the people have the firepower to defeat the forces of any government, then they will be a free people and in control of their lives. This has held true for thousands of years and continues to hold true now. This is also “why” governments are always opposed to the right to keep and bear arms. It is extremely “dangerous” to try to oppress people who own and know how to use guns. This is why every dictator in history has attempted to disarm the people he ruled. I am an atheist and I don’t believe there is anything like the “God” many people believe in. Six million Jews died in Nazi extermination camps because they were disarmed by Nazi law. How many people died in the USSR during the time the Communists were in power? How many people have died in China under Mao and his successors? Disarmed people are always those who get oppressed, often killed. Armed people can only be oppressed after they have been disarmed. I don’t believe in “God”, but I do believe in my 30-06 and my .357.
Absolutely correct. Government is a gun. All authority derives from the use, or the threat of the use of force.
I know an Obama appointee was criticezed for saying the same thing by quoting Mao, but both she and Moa are correct. Just because Mao was a mass-murder doesn’t change the truth of it.
At the same time, I believe it’s for this very reason the citizenry must remain armed in order to protect their freedoms. Government SHOULD exist to protect our Natural Rights, but the power of government breeds corruption and a slogan I recently read is all too true….
An armed person is a citizen. An unarmed person is a subject.
Except America did experience Constitutional Republicanism long before declaring independence. Britain was a Constitutional Monarchy, at least officially. It’s just that the United States went to an extreme Britain never did: no king at all, nor any rulers for life, no dictatorial powers for the executive, and an extremely narrow definition of treason while explicitly securing the right to criticize and mock the government and any religion.
I’m sorry, but would you mind pointing to the specific point in time, or to the specific document that shows Americans living under a Constitutional Republic?
As a student of American history, I’d be very interested to see an example where that’s true prior to 1791.
Thanks.
Not to quibble nor argue Jaycen, but the Constitutional Republic ideas can be traced be the the Magna Carta in the 1300′s where by the King of England agreed to the Rule of law and basic freedoms of people.
+1
“…some form of oligarchy with a strong central ruler like Putin…”
Well, that’s what Soviet Communism amounted to. A Central Committee with a whole bunch of greedy nincompoops, led by the greediest among them who, for a while, “had the goods” on the rest, and administered by an equally greedy “Nomenklatura” of technocrats who didn’t much care who was on top just so long as “they got theirs”, all the while paying lip service to so-called Communist Ideals which everybody knew never worked and could never work in reality. Running the country today are Putin and His Oligarchs, basically the “dregs” of the previous “system”, who got rich by its collapse but have, themselves, no better ideas about creating a modern society or state to safeguard it.
Even the late, murdered, Czar Nikolaus and his corrupt minions had more brains than this bunch, as well as a better, more progress-oriented vision of Russia’s future.
From Feudalism, to an Autocratic Empire, to Dictatorial Communism, to Dictatorial Oligarchism, the people have been given NO chances since BEFORE Peter the Great, which really means no chances EVER, to learn about the wonders of a Constitutional Republic’s democratic methods backing genuine Capitalism and Free Speech and Free Enterprise. These things have never, ever, existed in Russia, certainly not on any meaningful scale within any meaningful length of time. And, definitely never as the model for the entire country.
So, you may be quite right to conclude that Russia has become defacto unable to adopt these things, let alone create them. (John Locke and Adam Smith were not widely studied, ever, and Karl Marx and Lenin, who were, no substitute, to say the least! Whatever is presented in their schools and universities today is also unlikely to be an improvement!) So, things are likely to remain this way for as long as the current coterie of plundering, self-aggrandizing, clever but idea-less, dimbulbs are running the joint. Will anything “fix” this? A civil war, maybe another dictatorship? Not likely. Not anytime soon.
The people would need to learn a whole new “model” of social organization, first, a model which today no longer exists, even approximating its pure form, anywhere in the world. Even we seem, nowadays, to be having our difficulty keeping this model alive. A hundred years ago, we might have been a shining example, but nobody was looking too closely, and we weren’t “advertising” much.
Today, we’re talking about “pushing the reset button” in our relationship to Russia. We really ought to be more concerned with pushing that button in our relationship to ourselves. If we did, we might well become again that shining example for all to emulate. This time, the whole world would be looking. And, some would be persuaded to emulate, perhaps even Russia.
So, coming Nov. 6th, WE should start. Let’s “start” by “resetting” this cockamamie Administration trying to make us become what Russia was, and for good reasons failed to become. The “Reset” needs to begin in every voting booth, spread to the White House, and not end in the Senate. “Spreading the wealth around”, Obama-style, is NOT where it’s at. That’s what Putin’s been doing, and all the “Premiers” and “Czars” before him. Look what it got them, besides their own filled, unproductive, pockets. WE need to tell our budding versions of this “NO, YOU didn’t build that”! WE, the people, DID! And, “now get out” and “get out of our way”, so “we can do it again”. “Don’t come back for at least a century.” That’s what we need to start telling our new “Tsars and Oligarchs in spe”, on Nov. 6th. Let’s DO IT !
Re: Libertyship46 at comment number 1
Please put less condescension and more insight into the topic. Americans have never had to suffer through generations of being violently murdered for dissent, while Russians have lived under autocracy backed by secret police since the Czarist times (the Okhrana, the Czar’s KGB equivalent dates at least from the 1800′s). In the early Soviet days, especially following a civil war that already wrecked the whole nation, things went from bad to worse.
By the latter half of the USSR, any people who might have had the spine to stand up for their rights had either been shipped out to Siberia, had their spirits broken, been murdered, or fled into exile. Do you know the comment about “the nail that stands tallest gets hammered down first”? Domestic policy since before Stalin coined the phrase.
How well would north Americans have done after that kind of history? Suppose that the long dark century of tyranny over the US finally choked to death on its own unsustainability. The people have no tradition of, or literature about, or prior examples of successful democratic or rule-of-law movements. The pioneer spirits who might have started such have been weeded out by almost a century of (un)natural selection. The survivors have learned to submit and survive. “Break the law to grab what you can” is a mantra to live by.
Who’s going to whip up a democratic nation in an impoverished economy that’s tanking ever faster? Especially if the whole country is busy being taken over by armed gangsters (many of them former Special Forces or espionage agents, so a touch more dangerous than thugs in the ‘hood or Prohibiton-era bootleggers like Capone)?
That’s where present-day Russians find themselves. Do you think your analysis really summed them up fairly, and it’s all their fault for not being like you stellar exemplars?
A very important analysis. Thank you Kim.
Obama is American Yeltsin. Best in destroying his own country .
The obvious solution to all Russian economic woes is to borrow from the Chinese and lay the debt on the grand children. It works, for a short time, and requires no fiscal discipline by the leadership.
Ultimately, however, the conflict is resolved with a gun.
The Associated Press ran a story on this out of their Pittsburgh bureau on Monday:
“Next Cold War? Gas drilling boom rattles Russia”
Basically, they’re trying to figure out a way to prevent the U.S. from exporting its excess shale natural gas to Europe, since it threatens to cut the price to as low as it is in the U.S. (where gas drilling activity in even some of the higher-cost shale areas has dropped off because so many of the lower-cost formations closer to the surface are still open for development). And of course, the AP story’s Cold War analogy also fits with those on the left in America, who 30 years ago were trying to keep the U.S. from improving their military defense in order to help the Soviets, and now also have the goal of helping Vlad and his government’s gas production income by using anti-fracking efforts to shut down drilling in the Marcellus Shale formations in the northeast (with New York and it’s you-know-he’s-running-for-president-in-2016 governor Andrew Cuomo still trying to figure out which way the environmentalist wind will be blowing for years from now before he makes a decision on allowing shale drilling upstate).
Already, certain US officials are already calling for a ban on natural gas exports – specifically Congressman Ed Markey (D-MA), a long-time opponent of nuclear power.
Please note that the current low prices for natural gas are probably unsustainable. They are the result of over-drilling and appear below the long-term marginal price of natural gas based on fracking costs and well depletion curves. That’s causing financial problems for companies like Chesapeak Energy, a huge natural gas producers. This is part of the boom-and-bust cycle and will eventually dampen out to a somewhat higher price. Technology and gas field development will affect that new baseline price of course.
For the US to get into the LNG export business will also drive domestic prices higher as domestic and international prices equilibriate over time.
So, long-term US prices will head upward again but we’ll be better off all told, as a country.
There is absolutely nothing that government can’t foul up. Make it a authoritarian socialist state run by KGB thugs and assorted other mobsters, and you have a massive disaster. There will be quite a lot of millionaires at the top though.
Obama & the Democrats must be gnashing their teeth, “why not me” they’re crying. What’s a country for if you can’t loot and wreck it.
If Gazprom goes bust, what, then, does Europe do for a supply?
Yes, the US has a lot of natural gas, but we don’t have facilities to liquefy it and ship it elsewhere. Development of such a facility is a multi-year deal, what with the permitting process and then construction.
“If Gazprom goes bust, what, then, does Europe do for a supply?”
The company going bust doesn’t make the natural gas vanish. It just means some other company, group of companies or government is going to own the resources. Presumably new owners will still want to sell it and will have to offer it at competitive prices, otherwise it will get left in the ground and the Europeans will buy from someone else.
Or maybe the Europeans will rethink their resistance to nuclear power. Or start mining coal again. Or go seriously green and build far more wind turbines and solar panels.
New nuclear power plants in Eastern Europe would be a poke in the face to Gazprom:
http://tmp.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/08/sticking-it-to-gazprom.html
If Russians are different, it’s probably because Moscow is so far from the sea and the western navies that’ve for the last couple centuries been able to bombard coastal port cities, and related, Moscow’s repeated burnings (and threats of) by the Golden Horde and the like, throughout the dark ages, from across the eastern steppe –a thousand years of ghastly raiding and another singular feature of Muscovy. Somehow, the tribe from the Volga always came back, even after Genghis Khan and his sons made a fair effort to sink roots and quit the family horseback horde raiding the European agrarians biz.
You’ve been down this road before LR:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/caucasus_unrest_threatens_2014.html
“The global recession has hit Russia four times harder than it has the U.S. Strapped for cash, Russia’s development plans in Sochi are woefully far behind, and the chief of the projects has already been replaced twice. The government’s budgetary reserve fund is on the verge of exhaustion, meaning Russia will soon be plunging into massive deficit spending, and it will have no choice but to start cutting corners in Sochi and everywhere else in the national budget. Security may well be one of the first casualties of that necessity. ”
You wrote that over three years ago and everything you predicted turned out to be completely wrong. That will happen again here. Not that you’ll ever admit being wrong of course. You’ll just keep predicting doom year after year after year without ever having to face up to being wrong since you remain completely anonymous.
not to worry, Vlad.
Dear Leader is best buds with Putin. Comrades in statist demagoguery.
As soon as Dear Leader is free of the annoying restraint of having to be elected, he will destroy fracking, and all will be well for his buddy.
Romney’s already had an aircraft forced landing, week or two ago –of course, added private plane security won’t protect him from upper-storey open windows, elevator shafts, or Polonium tea, so he still needs to stay frosty.
This couldnt have happened to nicer guys. I think its funny that the countries who gloated the loudest about our tough times, are falling faster than we are. Now if we can only elect Romney, we will reclaim our rightful spot as the undisputed power. I think its clear that Romney will do away with the restrictions on fossil fuels, as well as confront Putin, instead of kissing his rear!
“Vise” — “energy vise”
Soon Pennsylvania and Ohio will have more millionaires per capita than any where else on the planet.
Unlike the Russians they will not spend it on Ukrainian hookers and NBA franchises.
It is in Europe’s and Russia’s interest to solve the gas pricing dispute.
Contrary to your view, pragmatism and not ideology is the driving force between EuroRussian relations. A mutually acceptable formula will be found.
Even with a decline in prices and loss of contracts in Europe (very unlikely), Russia can easily find other markets in Asia. Russia has many options and skilled leadership that takes advantage of those options.
Total Russian debt stands at @15% of current GDP. For a nation with the biggest land mass on the planet, abundant natural resources and an educated population, constantly predicting her imminent collapse (in direct contradiction of reality), is more of a psychiatric issue than a economic one.
jgets certainly doesn’t get it… Hasn’t it occured it to you that if the Russian leadership is that pragmatic and the population so educated and politically conscious, Russia with her so obviously inexhuastible resources should be per capita the richest country in the world?
How come that after almost ten years of the unbroken rule of PUTVEDEV regime Russia is still a medieval kingdom equipped with nuclear weapons?
Russia has its problems as do the rest of the nation states on the planet.
Why it obsessively concerns Mrs. Zigfeld, is in the final analysis, her business.
1)The Russian standard of living (for most of the population) has been increasing for the past ten years. Unemployment rate (5.4%)is the lowest in the past 13 years. Your point about not having the highest per capita (income?)is meaningless.
2)Technically, Great Britain is closer to “a medieval kingdom equipped with nuclear weapons” since it is a monarchy… Russia is a federal semi-presidential constitutional republic. It just doesn’t suit your cold war brainwashed perception of one.
Evidently a weak malleable Russia is preferable to you, but you should have asked the Russians what they thought about that first. If the Russian people decide to evict Mr. Putin from the Kremlin, they will, and it’s their business.
That said, most “normal” American, European, and Russian folks I know get along just fine amongst themselves. Regardless of the fact that they are lead by a “crypto-Muslim commie” or a “brutal dictator”, or “weak and indecisive eurocrats”. Thank Heaven for that!
Wait until Romney puts missles in Poland.
You seem to think that strenghth is more impoartant than goodness.s
You seem to think wishful thinking is more important that fact.
One more pathetic fool excuses another totalitarian regime.
So were those who have been excusing Hitler.
So was Walter Duranty for Stalin.
So was Edgar Snowe for Mao.
Hitler after all enjoyed much greater economical succes than Putin and with much smaller natural resources to his disposal. At that time however, fools like you didn’t give a damm that his succes was based on an unsustainable credit, gigantic sums of money stolen from Jews and slave labour. How all it ended, we know wery well.
So is PUTVEDED regime enjoying its artifical and temporay boom which is based on inflated oil and gas prices. Those prices are about to collapse as Romney (providing that that fool wins election) will embark on pushing America towards energy independence (after having stolen this idea from Sarah Palin. Then the EURABIA will follow like a sheep.
I can only wonder, where the money will then come from to finance the completion of Putin’s bilion dollar palace in Crimea and how the ordinary Russian folks will cope with the again falling standart of their already miserable lives?
As for going along with the Russian folks? I have been going extremely well with Russian folks long befeore you have been probably born and my former country men from Poland have always been mutually friendly towards the people of a former Soviet Union and have always been supportive of their struggle against Soviet tyrany.
Equally here in EUNUCHALIA I have quite a few Russian and Ukrainian firends whom I use to meet occasionally in the local Melbournian Russian club Matrioschka so your lecture about getting along with Russians is meaningless.
This is all about the semi-genocidal PUTVEDEV regime and not about the Russian people.
Obviously, there is lots of reasonable contempt for the majority of Russians who are ignorant and dumb enough to keep eleccting the genocidal maniac as their Presiedent.
Equally such an opinion would be justyfied in respect to Germans if they elected a former SS or GESTAPO operative as their Chancellor.
It doesn’t change the fact that the majority of Yanks are almost as cretinised as are their Russian counterpatners for having elected the cripto-comie and islamofascist at the same time that is called b. HUSSAIN obama despite virtually a conurcopia of information about that degenerate avaiable on the internet.
It must also be honestly stated that my own EUNUCHALIAN FOOTY APES are even dumber and more ignorant than HOMO-SOVIETICUSES.
I’m not trying to excuse nor justyfy the excesses of Julia Gillard, Obama, Zapatero, Brown, Papandreu and others; they all are the same degenerate demons as PUTVEDEV. In fact I hate them all with equal intensity.
You on the other hand seem to be quite happy that those criminals managed to take over their countries and keep plundering their wealth.
However, it looks like their reign is coming to an end and the reconing shall follow…
This is a typical mind of a slave…
I’m sorry if my remarks upset you so much. But you haven’t addressed the issue in the slightest. Other than calling the multi-year sustained high price level of hydrocarbons “an artificial and temporary boom”, the rest of your comment is absolute rubbish bordering on mental illness. With all due respect for your age of course…
Putin stole the last election, plain and simple.
Obviously, someone who is slavishly devoted, just like yourself, to the genocidal regime that is tortmenting Russia and her people betrays much more symptoms of a sewere mental ilness than someone who has an opportunity to share his rich experience derived from living in a similar totalitarian regime and understands very well mentality of the PARASITES that head those regimes.
Idiot. Your multi-year sustained high prices of hydrocarbons are undoubtedly result of Putin having outsmarted the Yanks in his drive to make Russia a leading producer of gas and oil and in the future, perhaps the leader of the oil/gas mega-cartel; the strategy concocted by his predecessor and former boss, Jurij Andropov.
This drive was one of the reasons for murdering the entire Polish political and military leadership at Smolensk. Deceased Polish President Lech Kaczynski was strong advocate to open and exploit the newly discovered rich shale oil deposits which stood in the direct way of Putins strategy.
Pathetic fool like you can in no way upset me because your experience or rather a total lack of it spiced with your childish infatuation with PUTVEDEV’s “stron armed” regime your makes you non-partner in any reasonable discussion.
This post was in response to jgets rant, just wrongly placed.
This is the response to the jgets’post above only wrongly placed
My above comment is in response to jgets’last rant only wrongly placed. Apology…
You keep referring to Putin’s “genocidal regime”, care to give us an example that can stand up to scrutiny?
You state that Putin “murdered” the Polish political and military leadership. Those unfortunate people died in an airplane crash. No one, not one government in the West characterized it as an assassination you despicable hatemonger.
If Poland exploits her shale gas that’s her business. Russia couldn’t stop that any more than you could screw in a light bulb without assistance.
…not sure if the lightbulb joke fits well into your original ‘hands-across-the-borders’ peacemaking stance, mr jgets.
Imagine that you are a Polish patriot, and no sooner than the Kremlin, 70 years later, finally officially admits the truth about Katyn Forest 1940, and Kremlin then invites the entire Polish pro-western political/military leadership to Smolensk, the city of the Katyn forest, to commemorate the ‘settlment’ of that signal atrocity of the brief Hitler/Stalin alliance (wherein some 22,000 leading professionals –military and civilian –as much of the entire pro-western male echelon of Polish society that could be detained by the Russian secret police –was peacefully inticed by degrees into hands-bound captivity and then transported to Smolensk to be murdered secretly in the surrounding Katyn forest) and then the remnants of the murdered, 70 years later, flying back to the scene of the crime at Kremlin invitation in order to (via the victim forgiving the criminal) ‘bury the past’, somehow happens to, on descending over the Katyn Forest on approach to the airport at Smolensk, fly into the ground short of the runway and kill every soul on board.
Leaving nothing but the worst of the worst sort of questions for the Polish nation –once again, and with a flourish.
Of course the weather was bad, and it was by (usually characterized as) extremely high probability an accident. However, accident or not, Kremlin supporters who would wish to use the event as a threat or intimidation (‘see what we are capable of doing?’), would drift toward such as that lightbulb joke.
Mr. Larsen
My light bulb comment was to disparage Bogdan not the Poles.
Had our Australian friend not proceeded to sling epithets in my direction, I would not have had to respond in kind. I believe bullying, verbal or otherwise, should be confronted. In other words, “he was askin for it”
Of course I sympathize with the the painful memories of the Polish people. Katyn was a crime, but the crash was an accident and a tragedy.
I acknowledge that Poland has suffered at the hands of both Germans and Russians. Poland and Germany are now partners in the EU. Hopefully the same cooperation can evolve with her eastern neighbor as well.
That aside. Ill take this as an opportunity to thank you on your well thought out posts in general at PJM. You make us all richer with your insights.
Thanks for the kind words, mr jgets –naw, i’m all for rapprochement, and admire so much about the Russian people, and did even before i was recently graced with Russian in-laws –and see first-hand their fine, warm, large-spirited ways.
But history is history, and Kremlin –though it has a huge geopolitical competitive advantage over western state-security structures in that the agents don’t face the prospect of defending themselves in public against a hostile party every two years, has to accept that the other side of that same coin is that there’s no absolution breaks between now and the first Bolsheviks.
Mr Larsen,
You are welcome and congratulations.
I will try not to be long winded.. In reference to your link, Russian thinking (on a governmental level) is a product of her geography rather than ideology and religion. You cannot ultimately defend or govern Russia without contingencies for total mobilization. On the contrary, without this contingency planning, Russia would be overrun or fragment from within. That is the lesson of History.
For me, the challenge has been to mutually secure Russia’s Western borders and integrate Russia in EuroAltantic economic and security architecture. I must admit we have failed in not utilizing the opportunity that arose after the demise of the USSR. To put it superficially, we should have taken in Russia, the Ukraine. and Belarus into NATO along with the other East European States when the opening arose. It would be much too long to to get into justifying that statement in a blog comment. So just accept it for now.
Integrating Russia into Europe is the key. A broader, stronger “West”, including Russia is the counterweight to Islam and China. Of course our shortsighted policies of pushing Moscow into the embrace of China have been counterproductive, imho. Of course it hasn’t helped that Russia has clung to authoritarianism either, it is going to be a slow process forward. But if a way could be found to reconcile the two, the benefits would be great. This will take exceptional leadership, which unfortunately is absent for the time being.
Additionally, I believe a concerted effort by both the “West” and the “Related West” (Russia and Orthodox Christianity) is an absolute necessity in tackling what I believe to be our time’s greatest existential threat, radical Islam.
It’ll be much too long to get into that issue right now…
Yessir, it is a book-length topic that unless it can be put into a whole, suffers mightily by being described in part and in short form. One thing that can be said, the fall of the USSR was not the simple event we are given to understand it as, and if it is as it appears, then the tragedy of mankind is that it swiftly came under the care of Bill Clinton, whose attack on the Slavs and NATO expansion in the former satellites must have been known to resonate in Russia as another western invasion a la Napoleon and Hitler, and must have been seen as the certain restoration of the soviet KGB, via the Bosnian War guaranteed election of nationalist (and KGB chieftan) Vlad Putin.
One of the main brain-trusters on that sequence is also the guy who saved fannie and freddie from interruption of their holocaustic several years destroying the western economies and markets, and also now happens to be Obama’s National Security Advisor.
It’s almost obvious enough to make one wonder about the post Vietnam Democratic party in general, if it is not executing KGB foreign policy. For recent example, the $700bbl that Start II (Obama signed after it sat shelved-for-cause for a generation) saved Russia, Putin is putting into re-arming, including 1600 new 5G combat aircraft, just as Obama has scattered the F22 program to the winds, just as it’s now known via Bob Woodward’s new book, the ‘accidental’ cascading-collapsing effect on the US military of the so-called ‘sequestration’ now almost upon us, was not only not accidental, but was Obama himself’s own idea. Of course, this is no surprise to anyone who understands John Kerry, and notes that Obama appointed him of all people to the ‘sequestration’ committee –which recall, was charged with making a fiscal deal and incentivized by the horrific prospect of the unacceptable damage of sequestration. Some ‘unacceptable’.
The guy who started this slow-motion surrender to totalitarianism, Bill Clinton, remember was sponsored by Arkansas senator William J. Fulbright, who as chairman of the senate foreign relations committee (as is Kerry now) kept an entire special team of LBJ-driven FBI agents busy trying to buy LBJ an edge in the Vietnam War by delaying Fulbright’s reporting the minutes of his committee meetings ASAP to his contacts in the KGB.
At least Clinton’s wife didn’t end up being secretary of state or something. What? She DID?
Feh. Enough out of me. But i do appreciate the congratulations and will pass it along –
Bullseye, Mr. Larsen
Putin is regarded as Russian Ronald Reagan. Putin kicked out weak liberals from government, restored economy and restored Russian armed forces as second most powerful after US. You can see why liberal weenies and communists constantly disparage him.