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Filed under: Russia
 One of the surest signs that Vladimir Putin's ship of state is sinking is that the Russophile rats are starting to jump off, into the icy sea, flailing desperately for survival.
Faithful Publius Pundit readers may remember how, over a year ago now, we dismantled some gibberish about Russia published by a fellow called Daniel Treisman, a professor out in California. Treisman, in one of the idiotic rants about Russia that will live in infamy as the neo-Soviet state consolidates, called Russia a "normal country." That's the photograph of Professor Treisman, in a sweatshirt, that he chooses to display on his university's website.
But now, it seems, he's decided to change his tune quite noticeably.
Last time we met him, Treisman was writing in Foreign Policy (albeit with a co-author). Now he's out on his own and has set his sights a bit lower, namely the Moscow Times. In an op-ed piece entitled "What Keeps the Kremlin up at Night," Treisman suddenly discovers that Russia not so "normal"after all, and all I can say is "better late than never." He doesn't, of course, see fit to apologize for past misdeeds.
Treisman states:
To observers of Russia's election campaign, one thing is clear: The Kremlin's political operatives do not want to leave anything to chance. Of eight would-be opposition candidates, all but three have been driven out, either disqualified or discouraged from running. National television reports with breathless excitement on every movement of the Kremlin favorite, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Lest anyone miss the point, polling stations have been told to hang posters accusing Medvedev's rivals of filing fraudulent income declarations. Before the State Duma elections in December, governors were reportedly ordered to deliver at least 65 percent of the vote for United Russia, and there is no reason to think such pressures have stopped.
That's not really very normal, now is it? Indeed, since, as Treisman states, Medvedev is certain to win no matter what the Kremlin does, some people might say it's the opposite of normal, and quite insane. Treisman prefers the term "paranoid" and suggests that, in fact, the Kremlin may simply be manifesting pure spite: "Cutting off its nose to spite its face, the administration chooses to tarnish its international reputation because it views the election monitors and the democracy-rating industries of Washington and Strasbourg as the preserve of anti-Russian hypocrites with self-serving agendas." Alternatively, Putin's actions may be seen, he says, as an effort to establish a perception within the Kremlin that he has a totalitarian grip on power so that no rival oligarch clans will dare to rise to challenge him. In the manner of Stalin, Putin is testing the local leaders who serve him, using the "elections" to weed out those who may be disloyal. Treisman adds: "Once they have dirtied their hands manipulating local elections, the governors are also less likely to metamorphose into anti-Kremlin campaigners for openness and liberal democracy."
Corruption also undermines Medvedev's authority, Treisman says, because if he won a real election he might think he had a mandate; this way, the Kremlin's power brokers can always remind him that corruption is the only reason he's "president." And electoral corruption keeps the maximum lid on revelations about financial corruption, including rumors that Putin himself has embezzled billions in state assets.
Yet in the end, someone as deluded as Professor Treisman just can't help jumping the rails. Not for one single second does he pause to attempt to offer us any advice about how we can resist this malignant regime as Cold War II begins in earnest (indeed, he doesn't even go so far as to acknowledge its existence), much less does he admit the hideous nature of his past errors in misleading us.
On top of that, he includes the outrageous statement that "the government's popularity is no surprise. Under Putin, real wages have tripled and unemployment has fallen sharply." It's amazing that a professor at a major American university could publish a statement that is so misleading.
First, Treisman is speaking about data manufactured by the Kremlin itself, an institution plagued both by gross incompetence and utter dishonesty. A responsible scholar would be aware that the Kremlin's data is not to be taken at face value, and would write "the Kremlin claims real wages have tripled."
Second, one must wonder whether he's even quoting the Kremlin correctly. In its "person of the year" feature a few months ago, for instance, Time magazine said real wages had "more than doubled." So which is it, tripled or doubled? What kind of scholar gives information like this without citing a source?
Third, Treisman doesn't see fit to mention that there is no rational reason to credit Putin with such increases in wages as have occurred. He seems to be suggesting that, since it's "no surprise" the Russian people love Putin, they are either a nation of morons or simply insane, unable to grasp reality. Of course, he may have something there, but he gives no indication of being aware of his own point. He continues this them when he totally ignores the wider insignificance of the data. As Michael Weiss has observed in Pajamas Media: "Real wages have doubled, all right -- from about $200 per month to less than $400 per month. This may be ranked an accomplishment given the utter chaos and endemic poverty that persisted through the capitalist "shock therapy" of the 1990's, yet the increase is still modest, particularly against the gilded flamboyance of the post-oligarchic new class of billionaires. Russia's gross national income is lower than that of Mexico." Is he concluding that Russians are so stupid, or Putin's dictatorship so successful at misinformation, that they are unaware of these basic realities? It's impossible to say from the text he's published, as if he himself didn't actually read it.
Treisman may also be unaware of the basic mathematical realities involved. If you have a population of ten people and one has real wages of $1 million and the others each have $1,333 then the real wage total for the group is $1,010,000 and the average real wage for the group is over $100,000. But nine out of ten members are still living in total poverty, off $3.65 per day. Russia's vast wealth disparity, with a large number of billionaires offset by a vast population that is starving and perishing, makes discussion of concepts like average real wages virtually meaningless.
Finally, Treisman seems not to be aware of the horrifying manner in which inflation, due in part to rising wages, is currently ravaging the Russian economy -- to the extent that Putin has needed to impose price controls on basic foodstuffs.
Treisman then writes something truly bizarre. He claims that the Kremlin should actually favor democracy because "in the long run, it can be the most effective way to protect the interests of insiders." Is he trying to get Putin to accept democracy because it's the best way of consolidating his dictatorship?
So much stupidity makes it hard to take comfort from Treisman's conclusion:
If politics is forced out of public institutions, it spills out onto the streets. The administration is right to fear mass demonstrations, not because Kasparov's supporters are likely to storm the Kremlin, but because there comes a point, as demonstrations grow, at which individuals all along the "power vertical" start to reevaluate their positions. During the August 1991 coup attempt, Generals Pavel Grachev and Yevgeny Shaposhnikov chose not to follow the orders of the organization that tried to implement the putsch, the State Committee for a State of Emergency, as did various second and third-level officers. Such sudden changes of perspective among their mid-level subordinates are what should keep the Kremlin's strategists awake at night.
Yet, he's clearly right. The Kremlin clearly knows that it is illegitimate, just as every other Russian regime has always been, and hence that it can be toppled in the first strong breeze. Putin struts and preens about in the Kremlin talking about courage and manliness, but in fact he's obviously quaking in his boots, to the extent that he is willing to go to the most outrageous and even ridiculous extremes to rig elections. Why not welcome all candidates to the race and defeat them on the level battlefield before the voters, if he is so devastatingly popular? Once victory is in hand, then arrest them if you must.
But Putin knows he can't risk that. And in that sense, if no other, he knows exactly what he is doing.
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Comments
Artfldgr says:
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Poor treisman. He is in the same place that all those other useful idiots and fellow travelers end up in. I will say that he has responded as many of them do. note that the majority find religion more and emerse themselves more so that no threat to their world view appears again. others are like treisman, they feel compelled to say something, but not enough to draw attention to their new status as the guy they made a fool of. However there have been famous anarchists and feminists, and socialists, and ad nauseum that have come forward and even said they were dupes.
"Once they have dirtied their hands manipulating local elections, the governors are also less likely to metamorphose into anti-Kremlin campaigners for openness and liberal democracy."
Insight as that is signs that he could see the facts, but was also clever enough to rationalize them away. and never putting them all down on the table at once together was his way of avoiding the sum total.
Now there isn’t any more room to wiggle as their actions are canceling out even that. to fix the election after the fix, and everything else is to insure an outcome, and that means that they are controlling the outcomes. If there are no riots come election, then they have totalitarian control.
He then can truck out all the ideas that he thought of, but discounted by other means.
Not for one single second does he pause to attempt to offer us any advice about how we can resist this malignant regime as Cold War II begins in earnest (indeed, he doesn't even go so far as to acknowledge its existence), much less does he admit the hideous nature of his past errors in misleading us.
No, of course not.
Imagine Catherine McKinnon coming in tomorrow, addressing NOW, and telling them that the whole thing was a lie and a farce etc.
She would lose her whole constituency. Not only does this act require her confession, but it also would result in their removal from leftist communist Eden where they were ‘love bombed’.
It's amazing that a professor at a major American university could publish a statement that is so misleading.
Not really that amazing. Since the whole of academia is almost all leftist, this would mean a man that actually stood on absolute principals. In effect, the guys world is collapsing, and either he will have to develop the two faced sociopathic communist mind in which there is a mentality for private and a mentality for public party, the dissoancnce will either have him retreat into the safety, or stand alone and realize that what was up was really down, and what was dark was light, etc.
Cognitive dissonance can be painful to a person who has let the avoidance of such dictate their direction in life.
What kind of scholar gives information like this without citing a source?
Leftist, socialist, feminist, etc. they all do this. (care to check out the source of the 70 cents on the dollar figure? The lady who created it admitted it to be a lie. Same with the rape assertion, same with lots of other things. including father absence).
Leftists, socialists, communists, feminists, etc, all HAVE to lie. Their ideologies are all claiming to know things before we actually research them and find out. which is why the longer they exist the worse they are and the more likely they will fade, and the more punitive the members have to be to insure that people deny reality to preserve ideology (unchanging religion).
he concluding that Russians are so stupid, or Putin's dictatorship so successful at misinformation, that they are unaware of these basic realities?
When one lives in a hall of mirrors one learns not to make projections that go very far.
They know by their lack of ability to plan ahead and then meet that plan. That’s the crack in the secret polices system that they cant ever plug up no matter how they try. You cant fake prosperity and prosperity isn’t just about material things, its also about stability. Prosperity without stability is a bribe they can steal tomorrow. Not a Russian saying, but one would believe it was if I didn’t just make it up.
They have learned not to care. Which is why we don’t get discussions from old soviets and mostly the young. the elders have learned that in russia, caring is dangerous. The young don’t remember the warnings past to each person in the gulags.
Don’t want, don’t care, don’t plan
The old remember what Doghadgha means.
If you survived, if you survived, I survived because I was very young and strong enough. People who were in their 40s, 50s, they were dying very, very fast. - BARDACH
even though the Gulag was not an automatic death sentence, its reality was misery enough. Applebaum distills the essence of the camp experience through memoirs, documents and interviews. What kinds of fabricated charges might lead to an arrest? How long might one expect to languish in a Soviet prison? What kinds of assaults and outrages might occur on the journey from prison to work camp? And how did inmates survive the camps' starvation-level rations, the casual brutality of the camp guards, the special hell reserved for women and children?
Official plans rarely conformed to lived reality. Though prison inmates regularly wallowed in their own filth, Soviet regulations specified that latrine buckets should be 55-60 centimetres high for men, 30-35 centimetres for women, with a capacity of .75 litres per person.
Exactingly detailed formulas governed the feeding of prisoners, but, as Applebaum notes, these rations were "not a reliable guide to what prisoners actually ate." One 1940 camp inspection determined that the entire lunch for a labouring convict consisted of water, 130 grams of grain and 100 grams of black bread. The camp cook reported that there had been no deliveries of fish, meat or vegetables.
For many recent historians, the worst depravities of Stalinism were a result of such institutional "chaos," rather than any so-called "master plan." Applebaum neatly dismisses such nonsense. "One can have no doubt that the Gulag bosses in Moscow knew -- really and truly knew -- what life was like in the camps: it is all there [in official reports], in language no less frank than that used by Solzhenitsyn." Camp guards were traditionally the dregs of society, often former convicts themselves, carefully indoctrinated in the Soviet ideology of class hatred. The results were not only foreseeable; they were inevitable. "In the end," Applebaum writes, "nobody forced guards to rescue the young and murder the old. Nobody forced camp commanders to kill off the sick. Nobody forced the Gulag bosses in Moscow to ignore the implications of inspectors' reports. Yet such decisions were made openly, every day, by guards and administrators apparently convinced they had the right to make them."...
It's better to forget that you have a family, a home, a car, Guilty or innocent. You're nothing. Just cattle." Pasko
Maybe the older people remember things from less than 20 years ago. Maybe the older people have noticed that in the dark corners, things ahvent changed, and so they are just waiting, killing time till time kills them, hoping that they will escape.
He claims that the Kremlin should actually favor democracy because "in the long run, it can be the most effective way to protect the interests of insiders." Is he trying to get Putin to accept democracy because it's the best way of consolidating his dictatorship?
No. he is actually quite clever. He is all over the place. the kinds of people that look to him for information will get confused as you are showing that he is being confusing. In that confusion he can mish mosh and claim what he wants. It’s a recovery tactic akin to projecting to your enemy the exact thing your doing to deflect attention.
In this case, his readers get twisted around so much they think that the situation is really complex, then they get happy that there is someone like him to make sense of it for them. kind of like that times commercial in which the lady says “I like the times, they tell me what to think”.
He COULD make it simple, but then he would be plain old intelligent, not intelligentsia. Who are powerful because they are willing to take advantage of their fellow man and sell them out pretending they are oh so smart.
Why not welcome all candidates to the race and defeat them on the level battlefield before the voters, if he is so devastatingly popular? Once victory is in hand, then arrest them if you must.
The reason is that such a thing could only be possible if Putin and a FEW of them are sociopathic. But the whole top of the layer cake is sociopathic.
You are talking about a group of people that have ONLY loyalty to power, since power is the only thing that will FORCE them to bend.
Do not project from your place to their place, then what they do will not make any sense since what they do has total disregard for things like fealty, loyalty, etc. sociopaths do not believe in such things. heck that belief often kept them from being successful in some spy actions because they CANT understand those alternative drives.
They cant understand how a population will work and be happy with enough. In their world, you hold still, and one of your own eats you up.
They eat their own.
Their system breaks down the normal collusions between people and society. this is the FUNDEMENTAL reason that they deny capitalism, as they cant see what keeps people from acting like them. to them it has to be a trick, evidence of a great power that they cant peirce that confounds them. What kind of fear can drive people to such actions? They can’t understand that its not fear, and why its successful over their systems as they cant see that they are parasites.
Feminists do the same thing. except their monster is patriarchy… while socialists monster is the social contract of mutual benefit in capitalism… neither can understand these things and the power they have since neither can understand the emotional ties and loyalties and family fealties that drive the majority of us (and that they think is a source of weakness).
Putin struts and preens about in the Kremlin talking about courage and manliness, but in fact he's obviously quaking in his boots, to the extent that he is willing to go to the most outrageous and even ridiculous extremes to rig elections.
No, you have it backwards. He is NOT quaking in his boots because he has taken actions. He does not see what you see since he cant feel what you feel. he has no guilt, no remorse, no desire to work thru merit. His manipulations are precisely those designed to sew up a situation beyond all doubt, and this frees him up to work other things.
If he didn’t do this, then the other sociopaths would converge on him. he spends as much if not more time defending his position from the other sociopaths and schemers as he does actually doing something modically productive.
Most of his time, like the French court, is wasted on intrigues, manipulations, double crosses, etc…
As far as the author… he is stuck between a rock and a hard place. he has to tell enough truth so he can continue to right, but not enough truth that his core audience from which his power comes doesn’t leav him.
So if he cant dazzle them with brilliance, he baffles them with bullshit.
You can buy that on a t-shirt : )
Artfldgr says:
The Evolution of Personal Wealth
in the Former Soviet Union and
Central and Eastern Europe*
Sergei Guriev † and Andrei Rachinsky ‡
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTDECINEQ/Resources/Evolution_of_personal_wealth.pdf
While the data
availability is still a problem, the available indirect evidence suggests privatization has
resulted in an increase in personal wealth but also in personal wealth inequality –
especially in the countries that lagged behind in building effective institutions. Another
source of wealth inequality is the high income inequality due to wage decompression
coupled with the low saving rates among the poor. We pay a special attention to one of
the most noticeable implications of this rise in personal wealth and wealth inequality –
the emergence of so called “oligarchs”. Using the comprehensive dataset of Muscovites’
incomes we show that surveys that do not take into account the first- and second-tier rich
(billionaires and millionaires) may drastically underestimate inequality.
Newman (1993) show that in the absence of an effective court system and wellfunctioning
financial markets wealth inequality breeds wealth inequality and may lock
the economy in an underdevelopment trap.
sounds right... underdevelopment trap. a fancy way of saying that the top develop and everyone else rots. and since the top isnt making their money in capitalism internally, they CAN let them all rot (and feel superior and as the elite by doing so)
and as to the data:
The research on wealth inequality is plagued by an array of data problems (Davies and
Shorrocks, 2005). First, there are no consistent microeconomic data on personal wealth
for transition countries. Whatever data are available are not comparable neither crosscountry
nor over time. The wealth data for the pre-transition period are problematic for a
number of reasons (see the next section). Also, transition has been accompanied by a
substantial growth of informal sector (Shleifer and Treisman, 2005); what is more
important, the growth of informal sector may have been very different in different
countries (Alexeyev and Pyle, 2003) and cannot be accurately measured (Hanousek and
Palda, 2005).
however despite this you cAN work things out if you want to.
and here is the key point that Kim is trying to get a concrete block to understand.
Second, there is a substantial research on one of the most intriguing phenomena in
transition: the emergence of a handful of superrich tycoons in Russia – so called
“oligarchs”. Out of 691 billionaires in the Forbes list of 2005, 27 are from Russia – by far
many more than from the other transition countries combined (including China).4 It is
interesting to compare Russia’s standing in the Forbes Billionaire List and in the World
Wealth Report that cover the “second tier rich” – individuals with at least $1M in
financial assets. While Russia has 4% of the World’s billionaires both in terms of wealth
and number of individuals, there are only 103,000 Russian millionaires (only 1.2% of the world’s total) who have about $670 billion wealth (2% of the world’s total).5 The
comparison of the Forbes List and the World Wealth Report suggests that there is a huge
inequality at the very the top end of Russia’s wealth distribution: 25 Russian oligarchs
have about 12% of the combined wealth of 103 thousand Russian millionaires
so us peoples in the west, you knwo the ones that have a few centuries experience with finances, and production... we find it hard to be tricked this way.
why?
because on top of the premise that capiatlists have to make others happy to earh money, there is also a maxim of responsiblity that goes with it. CAVEAT EMPTOR, let the buyer beware. so unlike those who cant do economics of which socialists are the de facto worst, those who are economically savvy, understand what the data actually presents.
Actually, in 2005 Forbes list, the total wealth of all non-Russian billionaires from transition countries
(including China but excluding Hong Kong) was below the wealth of the single richest Russian. In 2004,
the wealth of 26 Russian billionaires was about 19% of Russian GDP; the total wealth of all 262 US
billionaires was just 7% American GDP. The role of oligarchs increased even further in 2006 when their
wealth doubled to $174 billion (23% Russian GDP).
what was it that you said?
if all of the economic benefits have gone to the russian elite, i would be quite distressed.
bet that you figure out a way not to be distressed!!!!!
read that paragraph as to the distribution.
the wealth of 26 billionaires in russia represnts 20% of the GDP.
the wealth of 262 billionaris in the US represent 7% of the GDP
as wealthy as they are they are not as wealthy in proportion as the russian billionairs are!
Why did they emerge in Russia but not in
other transition countries? What is the impact of their wealth on the economic
development of Russia?
so the study goes even farther than kim ever would (though i could be wrong i dont want to speak for kim).
One of the most commonly held beliefs about transition is that the rise of inequality is
due to the reform and to privatization in particular. This argument is especially popular
among the scholars of Russian transition (Stiglitz, 2003)
scholars, revisionists, same thing in russia.
in Russia the major increase in inequality occurred prior to
privatization
whoops, so they gave out the assets, and then the privatization covers this gift giving, then the scholars cover it up with reasonable scholarship. nice.
In Russia, they chose to launch a rapid mass privatization to
transfer tens of thousands of industrial enterprises to private hands (usually to
incumbents) within the course of a couple of years Initially, the assets were owned by tens of millions of Russians, but the ownership
quickly consolidated. As the market institutions were underdeveloped, there were huge “institutional economies of scale” – large owners have been able to influence the rules of
the game through capturing regulators, courts and legislatures (Glaeser et al., 2003,
Sonin, 2003, Hellman et al., 2002, Slinko et al., 2005). Hence the shares changed hands
from workers and retired workers to managers or outside majority owners. The next wave of privatization was the so-called loans-for-shares program. This program
was designed to overcome the parliament-imposed ban on privatization of mining
industries. The government did not sell the assets; rather, government borrowed cash
from private banks using the assets as collateral; as the government never intended to pay
back, the assets were actually transferred to the bankers. As the auctions were run by the
banks themselves, they were rigged and the assets were privatized at a small fraction of
their market value (Freeland, 2000).
is this enough detail for you guys?
Both loans-for-shares privatization and post-voucher-privatization consolidation of
ownership resulted in an emergence of a few large business groups each owned by
handful of entrepreneurs known as oligarchs.
so they were made by manipualting the system,. and the ONLY people that had power in transition that could manuipulate this way and have outside bank connections and such were KGB and GRU, etc.
which is why, everything went downhill to that group. they wanted it to, and they had already planned how to do it.
so even when the proletariat had the cahnge to have a peive of everythign, the communists figured out how to take the ownership of all property away from them as they traded their futures for food and other necessities, that these state people didnt need as they had already stocked up at their daschas, and other places.
basically their habit is to put their own people across the desk, rape them, and then convince the victim that it was the best sex they ever had
the victims never understand why everyone else doesnt want to be bent over a desk and made love to the kgb way.
the reason things are the way they are is simple, they let the leadership remain, and the leadership is incompetent. from lenin on russian leadership has been totally incompetent, and so have needed organs like the cheka to maintain power... have posioned each other... purged... binged.. the list goes on.
transition has created oligarchs in Russia but not in other
postcommunist countries.
thats right... once again, russians are unique in having serious problems because they have decided that they know more about things they dont know about. how can peoples with no experience with free market, make a better free market? how do they stop and get self control. how does a sociopath get self control? they dont, they only avoid consequences, so their only limited by what they can get away with. sound famliar?
but dont worry. the major difference is that instead of oligarchs, the leaders are the ones that get the cash. now in russia the oligarchs and kgb, are making a marraige in hell, and again, the leaders will get it.
the conventional wisdom is that the Russian oligarchs were
created by the loans-for-shares scheme, this is only a part of the picture.
Indeed, among the 22 business groups, only 3 (led by Potanin,Abramovitch and Khodorkovsky) owe their fortunes to this particular event as they – the
young bankers – have used the loans-for-shares auctions to acquire the crown jewels of the mining industry. Two more oligarchs – then industry incumbents Bogdanov and
Alekperov – have used loans-for-shares to reinforce their control over their own
enterprises. Others have risen through voucher privatization or through purchasing
privatized firms from incumbents
the first list of omnipotent tycoons of Russia – so called “Berezovsky’s Group of Seven” (FT 1996) included four businessmen
who actually lost all loans-for-shares tenders they took part in.
In their
sample covering about 75% of Russian industry, the 22 oligarchs control about 40% of sales and employment. It is therefore not surprising to see astonishing estimates of their personal wealth in the Forbes list.
still think that this represnts russian prosperity for its people?
22 people control 40% of everythign for a country of how many millions?
What do we know about Russian oligarchs?
they do control enterprises in natural
resource industries and in protected industries such as automotive (Guriev and
Rachinsky, 2005).
as i said, they are selling off russian peoples stock reserves for quick cash and cash out and run. when the mines are empty they will leave the russian peoples holes in the ground and unlike the west, the currency they gained was spent in the west, not within their countries.
Their market shares in the industries that they control are very large.
Even though the oligarchs are small in the global economy, they have a
huge weight within Russia.
this explains the politics. you have 100 or 200 people against a few hundred million or more. they dont like those odds in open competition.
Most of the oligarchs in Table 3 are relatively young. An average/median Russian
billionaire is about 45 years old – 20 years younger than an average/median billionaire in
the US.
this means that they didnt EARN their place, and so are totally in the thrall of the leadership. outside of the closed world and these games, they would fail, so they HAVE to make sure that the conditions for continued success continue. and thats the stagnation of the russian peoples, and the inflation of the raw materials prices through cold war games, till they gut the country. (historically its been done by leaders like this before who then go on and live very cmfortably in the west)
unlike robber barons in the USA, Russian oligarchs are a part of a globalized economy
hence their commitment to building long-term security of property rights in Russia is rather limited The oligarchs’ incentives are also weakened by the insecurity of their property rights. A
median Russian voter deems oligarchs’ property rights illegitimate and supports their
expropriation (see a discussion of poll data in Guriev and Rachinsky, 2005, and
Vedomosti, 2003b). This is well understood by all Russian politicians who use the threat
of expropriation to obtain political or pecuniary contributions from the oligarchs. In
particular, President Putin has used the anti-oligarch sentiment in his campaign in 2000;
once he came to power in, he offered the oligarchs the following pact. As long as the
oligarchs paid taxes and did not use their political power (at least not against Putin), Putin
would respect their property rights and refrain from revisiting privatization. This pact
defined the ground rules of oligarchs’ interaction with central and regional government
for Putin’s first term (2000-2004). Although the pact could have never been written
down, even general public was well aware of its existence. A poll by FOM (an
independent nonprofit Russian polling organization) a week after the meeting of Putin
and the oligarchs showed that 57 percent Russians knew about it.
so i guess we are lucky... we get the other ignorant ones here arguing.
go read and study... then argue.
otherwise your coming to a gun fight with a toothpick for a weapon.
Artfldgr says:
what a winner:
so your claiming that capitaalisms maxim that in a rising tide all boats rise?
funny.
howecver in my last post i showed a VERY serious difference.
the problem is that one would have to actually understand past a 5th grade level to not think that everything is relative to the point where no point can be made.
thats not debating.
one thing you didnt 'get' was that none of the otehr countries, including china which has a lot more growth, have oligarchs. like the monopolists of the west, it took the protection of the state to arrange that kind of concentration (which means that thats not capitalism! thas planned economy, and even in a MOSTLY capitalist state, there are some that would want the state to fight for them unequally as the state in russia does constantly)
the wealth of 26 billionaires in russia represnts 20% of the GDP.
the wealth of 262 billionaris in the US represent 7% of the GDP
30 people control the most critical 1/5th of the russian economy. the rest of the economy cant run without what they have, so they also control the rest of the economy as well.
the next tier is the milloinaires, and there is much much smaller number in proportion, so there isnt even that mitigating number as in the west.
in the US there are nearly 300 people that control less than 1/3 of what the oligarchs do.
you cant see that that is a critical difference? no, of course not, since you CHOOSE the reality you pick and select from, and so choose that tahts not real.
25 Russian oligarchs
have about 12% of the combined wealth of 103 thousand Russian millionaires
so in a power pyramid the western wealthy are not in control of much. while these 30 people control ALL of russia, and are also controlling the economies of the satellites and parts of europe through resource blackmail.
even jesus remarked that the cannonites can get crumbs that fall from the lords table, but thats not the same as in the west where people are not gettig crumbs
what your tiny little mind isnt computing is that the all the wealth ended up concentrated among 30 people, and as you can see, by the millionair ratio, they didnt let much of ANY crumbs fall.
its not the same thing as a rising tide. not at all. and your equicvalencies are quite moronic.
so again, not that you have such data, but could you please provide some evidence that real wages in russia are stagnating for most of the population (as they've done for the past 30 years in the us)
http://www.cepr.org/meets/wkcn/7/745/papers/
but if you cant understand the simple stuff i put up, i dont think your going to understand the stuff above.
of course you are mathematically illiterate, so you may think that a 50% increase in wages each year is GREAT.
but when you start at 1200 a year not 35k a year... the outcomes are a lot different, and percentages are an awful measure since your not really comparing correctly.
in 5 years that person would have gone from 1200 a year to 9000 a year...
but the other guys your competing could beat that productivity with only 5% increases.
when your really low then big percentages seem to mean alot.
duh
personally most people wouldnt mind being stagnated at 80k a year US. in fact most would prefer 80k a year stagnated, rather than 50% increases a year for 10 years from 2k
thouhg the funniest thing is that if it was really really good as it seems, the data would be VERY easy to find, and russia wouldnt ahve to hide anything.
however, if the data is not that great, or lies of ommission andsuch, it greatly affects their ability to get investment and deal.
ah.. but the true russian mind does not see improvement and merit as a way to fix this, they see hide the bad, and lie... cheat is their way, and so the game is and has always been play, hide, cheat, obfuscate, omit, etc.
you can easily show me lots of financial analysis as to wages in the US, and other places... but cant do that for russia. dont you think that that isolates russia from investments, busineses, growth, etc?
of course it does, given the choice between workgin with someone in which i can tell wahts going on, and someone in which i cant, and who has over 100 year history of NEVER dealign honestly...
which would you deal with?
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