The Economist: "INSIDE THE BEAR"

... the country’s leading independent pollster, shows that half the overall population and as many as 90% of young Russians know nothing about the drama that began in the small hours of August 19th 1991.

That morning the world woke up to news of a coup. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was detained in Crimea, “unable, for health reasons, to perform his duties”. Power had been seized by a group of hard-line Communists, the chief of the KGB and senior army generals, who declared a state of emergency. Tanks were rumbling through the centre of Moscow. The television, overrun by the KGB’s special forces, was playing Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” on a loop. It was a last, desperate attempt to save the disintegrating empire.But on the day of the coup not a soul came out to support the Soviet regime.

The two main pillars of the Soviet state, propaganda and the threat of repression, have been restored. The KGB, which was humiliated and broken up in the aftermath of the coup, has been rebuilt as the main vehicle for political and economic power. The secret police is once again jailing protesters and harassing civil activists. In September the Kremlin designated the Levada Centre a “foreign agent”, which could be the end of it. Television has been made into a venomous propaganda machine that encourages people to fight “national traitors” and “fifth-columnists”. Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician who once represented Russia’s hopes of becoming a “normal” country, was murdered outside the Kremlin last year.

After nearly a decade of economic growth spurred by the market reforms of the 1990s and by rising oil prices, the Russian economy has descended into Soviet-era stagnation. Competition has been stifled and the state’s share in the economy has doubled. The military-industrial complex—the core of the Soviet economy—is once again seen as the engine of growth. Alternative power centres have been eliminated. Post-Soviet federalism has been emasculated, turning Russia into a unitary state.

During the first eight years of Mr Putin’s reign the economy grew by an impressive average of 7%, kickstarted by a 70% rouble devaluation in 1998. As state finances and economic rules became more stable, the market reforms of the 1990s began to have an impact. From the mid-2000s soaring oil prices stimulated further growth, mainly in the services and construction sectors, but also fuelled imports, and the economy started to overheat. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the Russian economy crashed, contracting by 10% from the peak of 2008 to the trough of 2009.

The subsequent recovery was driven by higher government spending that propped up consumption. Between 2010 and 2014 the economy grew by only 3% a year, even though revenues from oil exports were 70% higher than during the oil boom of 2004-08. Russia used its abundance of natural resources to create a corporatist state that suppressed competition. Between 2005 and 2015 the share of the state in the economy doubled, from 35% to 70%.

Now the economy is in recession. Last year GDP shrank by 3.7% and real disposable income fell by 10%. Investment in fixed assets declined by 37% over the past four years, with the steepest fall coming after Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014.

In 1995 they struck an audacious deal, offering to lend money to the cash-strapped government and put their resources, including the media they controlled, behind an ailing Yeltsin. In return, they asked to manage the government’s shares in natural-resource firms. When Yeltsin was re-elected in 1996, they were allowed to auction off those shares to themselves. This “loans for shares” privatisation undermined the legitimacy of Russian capitalism and compromised the idea of property rights.

To protect their assets, the oligarchs had to ensure the continuity of the regime. In 1999, as Yeltsin prepared to step down, Boris Berezovsky, the ultimate oligarch, who had worked himself into the president’s family, proposed Mr Putin as Yeltsin’s successor. According to Berezovsky, Mr Putin had originally wanted to be chairman of Gazprom, Russia’s natural-gas behemoth, but instead he was offered the job of running Russia Inc.

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Lafayette said:

Excerpts from "Inside the Bear" and well worth the read:

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Lafayette said:

Excerpts from "Inside the Bear" and well worth the read:

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danielpalos said:

All the Youth of the Nation really need to know, is that some (junior) Elders are taking their "job" as seriously as they can, and advocating for competing for the Best form of Socialism in the Entire World.

Only the fantastical right wing endorses the "Hellish conditions of warfare on Earth", on a potentially, for-profit basis.

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joG said:

No. They must understand that a democracy was able to withstand 50 years of effort and relative loss of income to win.

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danielpalos said:

All the Youth of the Nation really need to know, is that some (junior) Elders are taking their "job" as seriously as they can, and advocating for competing for the Best form of Socialism in the Entire World.

Only the fantastical right wing endorses the "Hellish conditions of warfare on Earth", on a potentially, for-profit basis.

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countryboy said:

Do you realize most of the major wars the United States has fought, were entered into by Democrats?

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danielpalos said:

just lousy management. the fantastical right wing has nothing but repeal instead of better Capital solutions at lower capital cost.

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countryboy said:

Nonsensical gibberish and partisan hackery. History records Democrats starting most of the wars in this country. That is a fact.

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joG said:

He was a wonderful thief, it is said.

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danielpalos said:

Past results is no guarantee of future results.

Why do we have wars on crime, drugs, poverty, and terror?

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countryboy said:

Greedy politicians, that's why. If you think you can pin those wars on one party, that's delusional in the extreme. Why haven't the dims done anything about them? Which major US Democrat politicians support drug legalization? Please list them for me.

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joG said:

They must understand that a democracy was able to withstand 50 years of effort and relative loss of income to win.

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MANY people complain that conventional measures of GDP fail to capture a country's true standard of living. But their attempts to improve on these conventional metrics are ad hoc. In a new paper* Charles Jones and Peter Klenow of Stanford University propose a new measure of standards of living based on a simple thought experiment: if you were reborn as a random member of another country, how much could you expect to consume, in goods and leisure, over the course of your life?

America, for example, has a higher GDP per person than France. But Americans also tend to work longer hours and live shorter lives. They also belong to a less equal society. If you assume that people do not know what position in society they will occupy, and that they dislike being poor more than they like being rich, they should prefer more egalitarian societies, everything else equal. For these reasons, the authors calculate that France and America have about the same standard of living.

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joG said:

He was a wonderful thief, it is said.

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Lafayette said:

He claims to have "nothing". But, his daughter, married to the son of one of Putin's cohorts in crime is richissime. That means his daughter is rich, but not necessarily himself.

No doubt, Putin has his fortune stashed away somewhere - and not likely on Wall Street. I doubt he is the richest man in the world, but he is not poor either. See here: Putin's Billions: Mystery Solved - They Don't Exist.

In fact, it is entirely possible that Putin IS NOT THAT RICH - just modestly rich enough for himself. In fact, I wonder if he is not thinking, given all the sickeningly rich Russian plutocrats, what if it all came to naught by means of yet another peoples' revolution.

What would become of him? Leave Mother Russia? Unthinkable. He'd be like a fish out of water. He'd be prosecuted, but to prove illegal possession of Wealth the prosecutor would have to find that wealth ...

PS: And guess who was seen vacationing with who recently - see here: Ivanka Trump Vacationing With Vladimir Putin's Girlfriend Get the connexion? Understand why The Dork will say nothing evil about Putin?

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joG said:

No. They must understand that a democracy was able to withstand 50 years of effort and relative loss of income to win.

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Andalublue said:

If that was a win, how do you explain Putin's ability to act without reference to US wishes or interests? What current state of affairs would you point to to demonstrate that Cold War victory?

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joG said:

I often wonder, what people think winning means. Life is a process and you win and then the world changes and you have another up hill bolder to push. It was a European that remarked on that. I guess a nice simile is the doctor healing you only for you to fall ill again and again till you die.

Even had the US done, what you seem to think they should have and expanded to become a traditional empire, there would have been new problems and in the end all empires have fallen. So Putin is no surprise. In the early 1990s this was all discussed in an open debate and, though, Putin was not identified as the next largish criminal, it was clear to anyone that thought about it or just followed the literature that a Putin would come.

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Andalublue said:

I don't disagree. I certainly wouldn't have been any kind of advocate of a US Empire regardless of what happened in Russia. I think that we can see from more recent events that the Cold War needs to be re-evaluated. It clearly was much less to do with a conflict of ideologies, Cap v. Com, than it was a continuation of nationalist rivalries; the Great Game Part 3or 4. We're now embarking on Part 5 or 6, and it has still got little or nothing to do with democracy, liberty or ideology. It's corporatist power politics dressed up as as something that HAS an ethical, rather than a purely economic, dimension.

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