If you''re Russian, then that's okay. If you're an American, then you're an embarrassment. But, we've always had a certain number of Americans who hate this country.
Here's a chart for Russian GDP:
Putin is an incompetent loser.
There is absolutely no evidence that Russia shot down a commercial airliner and US intelligence admitted that within days of the MH 17 incident, but the US DID shoot down commercial airliner Iran Air 655 in 1988.
As to Putin, the Russian GDP has grown two and a half times since he took office. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Russia#/media/File:Russian_economy_since_fall_of_Soviet_Union.PNG
In addition:
Putin has (1) restricted abortion to 12 weeks, banned abortion advertising and instituted a robust maternity program; (2) denounced multiculturalism and all its works; (3) prohibited the distribution of homosexual propaganda to minors; jailed the vile “Pussy Riot” for desecrating the Moscow Cathedral; (4) rebuilt churches throughout Russia and placed the Russian Orthodox Church at the center of the nation’s cultural life; (5) tightened immigration laws and opposed the West’s open borders philosophy; (6) stood up for state sovereignty against globalism; (7) denounced excessive welfare spending in the West for drawing in immigrants and as dangerous to the “moral foundation of society” and generating “a dependency mentality,”; (8) required religious or moral education in the public schools; (9) instituted a flat income tax of 13%; (12) abolished the estate tax; (13) cut the corporate tax to 20%, half of what it is in the US; (14) paid the Russian state debt down so it is only 18% of GDP (v. 101% in the US): (15) accumulated a foreign exchange reserves of half a trillion dollars; (16) condemned Western money printing as “hooliganism”; (17) denounced excessive state intervention in the economy; (18) cut the Russian state budget by 10% each of the last two years.
Nor, if you study the individual cases, will you find any convincing evidence Putin has had anyone killed. And I have studied them.
As to “kleptocracy,” the former Forbes bureau chief in Moscow, Paul Klebnikov, later probably murdered by Berezonvsky, said:
“What happened is that most of the so-called oligarchs were very bad managers. As soon as President Putin came in, and after the bankruptcy of the Russian state, the devaluation of the ruble and the debt default of 1998, there was a change of tone in the Russian government and a groundswell of outrage in the Russian population. There was an understanding among the oligarchs that they would have to change their tactics. They couldn’t just simply strip the assets and strip the wealth from these companies. They had done their looting, and now if they wanted to hang onto their companies, they had to suddenly act like real managers and build the companies up.
This is something that Putin made very clear when he came to power. This was unexpected. People like Berezovsky expected him to be a wishy-washy character.
But an informal deal was struck. Putin said he wouldn’t look into the past and the criminal way in which the oligarchs acquired the companies, but from now on, they were going to pay taxes and stop sucking all the money out of these companies and parking it in their personal bank accounts abroad. They were going to have to take the profits from the companies and reinvest them, or at least reinvest them into the Russian economy. And those financiers that agreed to this deal started acting differently and are now acting in a more civilized manner. There were a few that did not want to make the transition and took whatever wealth they could carry and are now living abroad.”
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02jan-feb/jan-feb02interviewklebniko.html
And here is what Christopher Caldwell, senior editor of the neocon Weekly Standard, no friend of Putin, has written.
“These “state-appointed billionaires,” as Putin came to call them, were a conduit for looting Russia, and they were too entrenched to root out. But Putin was able to avoid an outright oligarchic takeover of the state, of the sort that happened in neighboring Ukraine. It was for reasons good and bad that Yukos oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who served ten years in prison before being released on the eve of Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics, became the center of Putin’s crackdown. Khodorkovsky’s was among the most obscene of the privatizations: Myers calculates that Khodorkovsky and fellow investors paid $150 million in the 1990s for the company’s main production unit, which was valued at about $20 billion by 2004.
Khodorkovsky began leveling accusations of corruption at the very Russian state from which he had appropriated one of the world’s great fortunes. Putin saw his own task as restoring to the country what had been stolen from it. In his view, here was Khodorkovsky preening before his powerful American friends, hoping they might help him consolidate his theft.” http://www.claremont.org/crb/article/the-prince/
Thank you for that very informative post.
I also like that that Putin respects Patriarch Kirill and defends Christians (at least that’s what he says in public) unlike Obama who hates Christians.
If you''re Russian, then that's okay. If you're an American, then you're an embarrassment. But, we've always had a certain number of Americans who hate this country.
Here's a chart for Russian GDP:
Putin is an incompetent loser.
Well said.