Bill Browder and the Magnitsky Act. Humanitarian Act or Big Scam?
dave23 said:
nan said:I looked on open secrets and couldn't find any Browder data. I'll take the Politifact article at face value.
dave23 said:What murder are you talking about? Magnitsky was not murdered. He died of neglect in prison. People in the us die of neglect all the time. No one calls it murder.
nan said: But, what has Putin really said about Browder, other than he is a crook who does not pay taxes, which he is. The author's profile of him indicates that as well. Supposedly, Putin also accused him of donating 400 million to Hllary Clinton, which he did not, but perhaps Putin thinks that will make Trump more likely to let him get Browder? And Browder did give a much smaller amount to Clinton and the DNC. Still makes him seem like a real villain, which he is. The phase should go more like this:You keep eating around what you want to avoid, which Putin's role in what you call the new Cold War (a gross exaggeration, imo). We probably disagree, but I don't think avoiding taxes is a reason for murder. Just as I don't think political opposition is a valid reason for murder. Putin's role is decidedly un-cartoonish.
Putin is obviously nothing like the cartoon villain that Browder portrays him to be, and yet that image allows him to play into American hysteria about Russia and saves Browder's tax-avoiding butt"
Browder's re-ignition of the Cold War does have global reverberations. That's why it is important to out him as a fraud. He clearly has a lot of power on his side, cause this story is falling apart and in this article, things like lies about lawyers just hired versus long term employees, and critiques of people listed in the Panama Papers, which not not admitting self-inclusion are just treated as quirky personality flaws, not indications that this guy is full of BS on a deep level.
How much and when did Browder donate to Hillary?
As for donating to Hillary, I found this on Politifact: (https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2018/jul/16/vladimir-putin/putins-pants-fire-claim-about-400-million-donation/)
Did Browder's associates send $400 million to Hillary Clinton's campaign?No. We found $17,700 donated to Clinton and another $297,000 to the Democratic National Committee.In the New Yorker article, Browder says he did not give any money to Clinton. So that's not true.
Putin later said he misspoke about the $400 million (https://theintercept.com/2018/07/18/putin-says-misspoke-withdrawing-claim-clinton-got-millions-stolen-russia/).
Browder lies but Putin misspeaks. Noted. Just like the US kills civilians and Syria doesn't. And Crimeans are content with having been invaded.
I doubt Browder is listed on Open Secrets, or at least not as Browder. Maybe as some shell company owned by another shell company. Putin admitted what he said was false. When has Browder ever done that? He mostly says "I don't remember and I'm not an expert." Not related to Syria or Crimea.
No. Because if Browder "remembered" a source's name, Putin could poison or kill that source in vengence. This is what you f'ing don't get. Browder is the firewall between more Putin victims.
dave said:
No. Because if Browder "remembered" a source's name, Putin could poison or kill that source in vengence. This is what you f'ing don't get. Browder is the firewall between more Putin victims.
They are asking him about people he has accused of stealing money. If you accuse someone of stealing millions of dollars, you should be able to supply evidence. In a court of law, "I just know they did it, I don't have any proof" does not carry much weight.
nan said:
dave said:They are asking him about people he has accused of stealing money. If you accuse someone of stealing millions of dollars, you should be able to supply evidence. In a court of law, "I just know they did it, I don't have any proof" does not carry much weight. He smeared people and hurt their careers without evidence.
No. Because if Browder "remembered" a source's name, Putin could poison or kill that source in vengence. This is what you f'ing don't get. Browder is the firewall between more Putin victims.
Aww, the poor Russian thieves got their careers hurt? The ones with $38k salaries and $6 million homes in Dubai? No, I think they got promotions. Get your facts straight.
You can't just say they are the thieves without evidence, just because you hate Russians. That's not how justice works. Browder is as much a suspect as they are, and he is living better too.
The $230 million tax fraud: whodunit?
“Browder and his agents engaged in a series of
misrepresentations to execute the fraud, to distance
themselves from it, and to pin it on the Russian officials
investigating Browder for a separate tax fraud his
companies committed.”
---Prevezon court filing, Southern District Court of New
York
With a more complete perspective on Bill Browder and his employer in Russia, we can now revisit the mystery of the Russian $230 million tax fraud. As we have seen, someone stole three of Hermitage’s Russian investment firms and used them to fraudulently claim $230 million in tax rebates from the Federal Tax Service. According to Browder, this was done using the original corporate documents and seals, all of which were in possession of the Interior Ministry where Lieutenant Colonel Artem Kuznetsov was conducting an investigation against Browder and Hermitage. But as it turned out, the operation was done using forgeries of the documents and seals, which opens the possibility that Kuznetsov and the Interior Ministry officials aren’t the only suspects in the case. Whoever carried out this fraud had access to the original corporate documents and seals of the stolen companies, was able to manipulate court proceedings, had strong connections high in the tax office hierarchy, was capable of performing sophisticated banking operations including money laundering and even setting up and liquidating entire banks. A network of corrupt state officials connected with the Interior Ministry might have had these capabilities.
But so did people connected with Bill Browder and his goodfellas. Before the key documents and seals were confiscated by the Interior Ministry they were kept at Firestone Duncan offices in Moscow. Both Hermitage and Firestone Duncan had detailed understanding of the structure and functioning of the Russian administrative, judicial and tax bureaucracies. During their ten odd years of operation Hermitage and its lawyers have litigated some 40 court cases gaining valuable experience and connections in Russian judiciary. As Browder used to boast in his speeches, Hermitage invested a great deal of time and effort in cultivating relationships through the state bureaucracy including the tax service. Finally, through their association with Edmond Safra and later with HSBC bank who both ran extensive money laundering operations, Browder and his goodfellas were easily capable of laundering the stolen money and disappearing it from Russia. Even if Bill Browder did not himself mastermind the fraud, it is possible that some of his business associates in Russia did and that Browder took part in it. He could certainly not be dismissed as a suspect without a thorough investigation.
More information on the connections between McCaine/Obama/Biden and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian oligarch involved with money laundering. They introduced a bill to support him. Relates to what's going on today and the Magnitsky Act.
I did not know that. What kind of an error do you get? Can you see the titles?
Does this work?
nan said:
More information on the connections between McCaine/Obama/Biden and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian oligarch involved with money laundering. They introduced a bill to support him. Relates to what's going on today and the Magnitsky Act.
Nice - another 20 minute video - can you just sum up what you gathered from it in a sentence and point to the minute where the absolute facts are laid out? And link to the supporting documents.
Just thought this may be relevant since we what-abouted to Khodorkovsky:
A trio of Russian journalists who were murdered in the Central African Republic were investigating a gang of mercenaries linked to a Vladimir Putin ally who the feds said meddled in the 2016 US election, according to an exiled tycoon who bankrolled their trip.
Prigozhin and three of his companies were named in a February indictment by special counsel Robert Mueller, which said he was one of 13 Russian citizens involved in a years-long, multimillion-dollar conspiracy aimed at undermining Hillary Clinton while supporting Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump via social media, fake rallies and other methods.
Thanks, ridski. (Quote function failing, as are my search skills, apparently.)
Ok, I'm still figuring all this out myself. Even if you think this is hogwash, you should pay attention, because it will probably come out in a confusing way with one of Trump's 3am tweets or in the next election. Get it on MOL first and you will be one of the few in the country to have a clue.
Basically, Lee Stranahan, an investigative reporter (Trump supporter, BTW, but his partner on the radio show is a Progressive--it's a great show and very unique--and remember the Browder stuff crosses party lines), has been trying to figure out how Browder gets away with his obviously BS story and who is behind it. He has been saying for awhile that he thinks the Russian oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky is involved. He did research and found a bill from 2003 (I think) 322 which was put forth by McCain/Obmaa/Biden supporting Khordorkovsky. This is strange because why would they do that? It's like the Russian government saying our prosecution of Manifort is politically motivated. It's none of their business. Anyway, Browder used to hate Khordorkovsky and said he was happy when Khororkovsky went to jail, but that was when Browder was Putin's biggest cheerleader. When Putin turned on him (cause he did not want to pay taxes), Browder changed his tune. Now he and Khordokovsky (who has mob connections also), are some kind of partners or friendly associates. Khordokovsky went to jail for 10 years and during that time he was lobbying to US politicians to support him. He and Browder were both part of the group that looted the Russians during the 90's, so it seems they want to overthrow Putin so they can go back to looting Russia. So, Stanahan, was able to link that bill (322) to donations made by a company owned by Khordokovsky and he has been donating to the people who help him. Stranahan uses Open Secrets to prove his case. In the end, Khordorkovsky's money goes to funding the Magnitsky Act. There is more, but that is enough to swallow for now.
They would do that because McCain was speaking out against Putin. Such symbolic bills are not at all rare in the Senate. FWIW, it seems that Amnesty International had a similar perspective of Lebedev and Khordokovsky.
I'm having issues with quoting, too. It kicks me to the homepage when I quote somebody. I thought it was just the crappy machine I'm working with today.
MOL was down this morning and now we can't use the quote function.
dave23 - Why are they speaking out to support a known criminal? And he later gives them money through his company. No one should support this guy, not even Amnesty International. Everything can't be "because Putin is so bad." Putin was not responsible for looting Russia in the 1990's and causing many people to starve. Khordorkovsky was and he seems to get support from lots of US politicians. Perhaps Putin does not deserve everything he is charged with maybe?
I am having trouble with "quote" function. I wanted to copy first sentence of second paragraph from Nan's post and state that it is quite impossible to be a Progressive and a partner of a Trump supporter.
If you really want to know why Amnesty held that position, I'm sure you can find out. You can learn the outline of how Putin shut down Yukos and gave the assets to Gazprom.
Perhaps you've noticed the pattern of Putin suddenly charging his opponents with tax evasion as a means to shut them up and imprison them. In the case of Yukos he did so, then promptly froze their assets, making it impossible to pay any real or imagined back taxes.
LOST - It's the premise of the show--they don't agree. They are both populists--but one is from the left and one is from the right. Sometimes they start yelling at each other. Other times they surprisingly agree. It's interesting and a good way to hear other points of view. I started listening because I liked Garland Nixon before he did this show so I was curious about it. They also bring on other people with libertarian and other points of view and general non-political stories on health and diets, etc. Not usually a fan of the non-political topics. Nixon used to be a Democrat, but recently changed to Independent. Stranahan seems over Trump, also.
nan said:
South_Mountaineer said:The US should not be doing sanctions based on a scam.
Invading the territory of a sovereign country is less "new cold war" than sanctions on some oligarchs?
Okay, I will humor you. Let's say that the sanctions have no basis. You're saying that they're more of a cause of a "new cold war" than the invasion of a sovereign country by Russia is. How can you justify making that claim?
Russia is responsible, because they're having a very "hot war" in the Ukraine. Every source you've posted is helping them to try to distract from that fact.
Post edited to add - By the way, the Sputnik news, video and radio is owned by the Russian government. So anybody who works there, works for Putin.
nan said:
Putin was not responsible for looting Russia in the 1990's and causing many people to starve.
In the early days of the new Russia, Putin headed a committee to woo overseas companies to St. Petersburg. But the city primarily needed humanitarian aid. "There was no food in the city at all," recalled Marina Salye, who was then a member of the legislature's food committee. "There was no money. Barter was the only way – say, metals for potatoes and meat."
St. Petersburg was a port and military city, and the state-owned shipbuilding and defense factories were stocked with precious metals. Salye said contracts were signed to trade metals for food, but she discovered the metals had been sold at discount prices, the food prices were inflated, and the food never arrived. Then it turned out that front companies had taken the profits and disappeared. Salye said she thinks Putin "was manipulating these contracts and was directly involved. But it hasn't been proved."
Salye confronted Putin, she recalled, but he brushed off her inquiries. "Everything is correct," she said he told her. "You are just making up things." Salye demanded an investigation, which was referred to a Moscow auditing commission and then dropped without explanation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/russiagov/putin.htm?noredirect=on
dave23 said:
If you really want to know why Amnesty held that position, I'm sure you can find out. You can learn the outline of how Putin shut down Yukos and gave the assets to Gazprom.
Perhaps you've noticed the pattern of Putin suddenly charging his opponents with tax evasion as a means to shut them up and imprison them. In the case of Yukos he did so, then promptly froze their assets, making it impossible to pay any real or imagined back taxes.
I have not researched Khodorkovsky, as I have Browder, but I do not believe he is an innocent man and has strong ties to the Russian Mafia. I have always respected Amnesty International, but they are not always right and sometimes base judgement on false or incomplete information. They are not a court of law. According to Wikipedia:
There was widespread concern internationally that the trials and sentencing were politically motivated. The trial was criticized abroad for the lack of due process. Khodorkovsky lodged several applications with the European Court of Human Rights, seeking redress for alleged violations by Russia of his human rights. In response to his first application, which concerned events from 2003 to 2005, the court found that several violations were committed by the Russian authorities in their treatment of Khodorkovsky. Despite these findings, the court ultimately ruled that the trial was not politically motivated, but rather "that the charges against him were grounded in 'reasonable suspicion'".
Putin is always demonized in the west, without context. Khodorkovsky, an oligarch, was the richest man in Russia and his acquisitions caused great suffering and starvation. I don't think we can just assume that he was jailed on trumped up charges. Here is some information, from the Krainer book, about the Loans for shares scheme that allowed men like Khodorkovsky to loot Russian assets. Also remember, it was the US that installed Boris Yeltsen and allowed all this to happen. Putin is not to blame for this:
Loans for shares scheme
While voucher privatization transferred company shares to private investors, the government became the controlling shareholder in all of them, creating a legal and political risk for the oligarchs’ long-term interests. To remedy this situation, they cooked up the so-called loans-for-shares scheme. Supposedly a brainchild of Anatoly Chubais, this scheme was organized in 1995 and sold to the public as government’s solution to short-term financing pressures. In reality, it was a massive transfer of ownership in Russia’s most valuable resources to a small group of oligarchs known in Russia as “semibankirschina,” or the group of seven bankers. These resources included giant deposits of oil and natural gas, gold, silver, platinum and diamond mines, world’s largest paper, steel, automobile and aerospace factories and electric and telecom monopolies.
Under the scheme, banks like Vladimir Potanin’s Oneximbank, Vladimir Gusinsky’s Most Bank and Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep loaned money to the government and received shares in government-owned companies as collateral. The government was supposed to repay the loans
after about three years, but if it failed to do so, the banks could auction off the company shares in their custody and split any profits with the government. However, because the very banks that held company shares in their custody also organized the auctions and controlled the bidding process, they were able to win the auctions in almost every case, buying up companies at prices
that were barely higher than the minimum initial bids. In this way, Khodorkovsky took 78% ownership in the oil giant Yukos. With oil reserves the size of Kuwait, Yukos was worth at least $5 billion, but Khodorkovsky bought it for only $310 million. Boris Berezovsky walked away with Sibneft, another oil giant worth about $3 billion, for only $100 million. For $171 million, Vladimir Potanin became majority owner of Norilsk Nickel which controlled about a third of the world’s Nickel reserves.
Not long after these auctions, Norilsk Nickel’s annual profits reached $1.5 billion. Potanin also took ownership of the oil giant Sidanco for $130 million. Only two years later, the firm was valued at $2.8 billion in international capital markets. Besides the seven bankers, Harvard Management Company (HMC) and George Soros were the only other investors allowed to participate in the loans-for-shares auctions.
To add insult to injury, it turned out that the bankers did not even use their own money to buy the companies – they bought them with public funds. Namely, before the auctions, several ministers in Boris Yeltsin’s cabinet diverted large sums of government money from the state banks into the
private banks owned by the oligarchs who used it as collateral to issue themselves credit to buy firms through auctions they rigged for their own benefit. As an example, Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep obtained the money earmarked to fund the Russian Academy of Science. When Menatep was buying Yukos, Academy of Science employees stopped receiving their salaries.
While Khodorkovsky’s Menatep bank handled the public money meant for funding of the Russian
academy of sciences, scientists went unpaid. Protest signs read: “A hungry physicist is a SHAME for
Russia” and “Give scientists the salaries that they are OWED.” (Kouprianova 2015) Representatives of Western powers and financial institutions were well aware of the larceny perpetrated by the oligarchs and Yeltsin government, but they raised no objection. During his final trip to Moscow in the early 1995, Jeffrey Sachs himself warned Western officials about this blatantly corrupt scheme, but it appeared that none were moved by his warnings. He later wrote: “I was stunned by the obtuseness of the response, from the IMF, and OECD visiting mission, and later from very senior U.S. officials, including Larry Summers.”
Nobody was inclined to interfere with this brazen theft of Russia’s wealth, raising the suspicion that the process was intended to play out as it did. Through the whole privatization process from 1992 through 1996, the seven oligarchs gained control of 60% of the Russian economy. At the same time, Russian government’s proceeds from privatization amounted to about 0.15% of state revenues while the vast majority of ordinary Russians found themselves left out with their hopes for a better life after communism forever shattered.
edited to add: If you want to see what Browder did with Gazprom, read here:
https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2018/05/what-paul-manaforts-trump-tower-notes-mean
South_Mountaineer said:
nan said:Okay, I will humor you. Let's say that the sanctions have no basis. You're saying that they're more of a cause of a "new cold war" than the invasion of a sovereign country by Russia is. How can you justify making that claim?
South_Mountaineer said:The US should not be doing sanctions based on a scam.
Invading the territory of a sovereign country is less "new cold war" than sanctions on some oligarchs?
Russia is responsible, because they're having a very "hot war" in the Ukraine. Every source you've posted is helping them to try to distract from that fact.
Post edited to add - By the way, the Sputnik news, video and radio is owned by the Russian government. So anybody who works there, works for Putin.
Conflicts in the Ukraine are also about US once again sticking their nose in where they don't belong:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/10/us-imperialism-and-the-ukraine-coup/
If you want to say that Americans, Lee Stranahan and Garland Nixon are somehow compromised by working at Sputnik than you need to show some proof. They don't think of Putin as their boss. They do get comments about that all the time and they state that they have complete freedom to report as they want and welcome anyone to come in and visit and investigate. The late Ed Schultz, also worked for RT and said he had more freedom there than at MSNBC, where he was fired for ideological differences.
ridski said:
nan said:In the early days of the new Russia, Putin headed a committee to woo overseas companies to St. Petersburg. But the city primarily needed humanitarian aid. "There was no food in the city at all," recalled Marina Salye, who was then a member of the legislature's food committee. "There was no money. Barter was the only way – say, metals for potatoes and meat."
Putin was not responsible for looting Russia in the 1990's and causing many people to starve.
St. Petersburg was a port and military city, and the state-owned shipbuilding and defense factories were stocked with precious metals. Salye said contracts were signed to trade metals for food, but she discovered the metals had been sold at discount prices, the food prices were inflated, and the food never arrived. Then it turned out that front companies had taken the profits and disappeared. Salye said she thinks Putin "was manipulating these contracts and was directly involved. But it hasn't been proved."
Salye confronted Putin, she recalled, but he brushed off her inquiries. "Everything is correct," she said he told her. "You are just making up things." Salye demanded an investigation, which was referred to a Moscow auditing commission and then dropped without explanation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/russiagov/putin.htm?noredirect=on
The article also says that none of these accusations are proven. Putin is almost always vilified in MSM, and US interference in Russia gets scant attention. The Krainer book provides another view (the original has charts but they did not cut and paste with the text):
Vladimir Putin’s disastrous contribution to Russia’s history
On 26th July 2014 British magazine “The Economist” published an article titled “A web of lies,” opening with the following two sentences: “In 1991, when Soviet Communism collapsed, it seemed as if the Russian people might at last have the chance to become citizens of a normal Western democracy. Vladimir Putin’s disastrous contribution to Russia’s history has been to set this country on a different path.” Well, we have already seen how Russia fared in the 1990s after Soviet communism collapsed. For some reason, the bright minds at The Economist thought this path was so promising, it was a real shame – a disaster, no less – that Vladimir Putin took Russia on a different one. Let’s take a closer look, shall we, at Mr. Putin’s “disastrous contribution.”
To start with, Putin played the pivotal role in keeping the country from disintegrating. When he came to power, Russia’s regional governors were writing their own laws, disregarded presidential instructions and were not even returning their republics’ tax receipts to the Federation’s purse. Mikhail Gorbachev stated that Putin “saved Russia from the beginning of a collapse. A lot of the regions did not recognize our constitution.”
But this historical feat was only the starting point of the subsequent renaissance of the
nation. Its economy returned to growth and became more vibrant and diverse than it had been perhaps since the reforms of Pyotr Stolypin of the early 1900s.
Economic reforms
In 2000, Russia was one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Without instituting draconian purges Putin took on the oligarchs and steadily curtailed their power, gradually returning Russia to the rule of law. By 2016 his government reduced corruption to about the same level as that of the United States. That was the empirical result of the annual study on corruption published in 2016 by Ernst & Young.The global auditing consultancy asked respondents around the world whether in their experience, corruption is widespread in the business sector. Their survey, which was conducted in 2014, indicated that only 34% of their Russian respondents thought so, the same proportion as in the United States, and below the world average of 39%. Things have probably improved further since then as Vladimir Putin stepped up a high-profile anti-corruption campaign that led to investigations and prosecution of a number of high level politicians around Russia. Even highly ranked members of Putin’s own political party were not spared. The unmistakable message of such campaigns was that corruption would not be tolerated and that it would be aggressively investigated and prosecuted. Some of the best evidence that Putin’s various anti-corruption measures have had effect can be found in World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys which ask businessmen the question, “was a gift or informal payment expected or requested during a meeting with tax officials?” In 2005, nearly 60% of respondents answered affirmatively. By 2009 this number was 17.4% and by 2012 it had dropped to only 7.3%.
Putin’s government also made impressive advances in making it easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses to set up shop, raise capital and operate in Russia. World Bank’s annual “Doing Business” report ranks 190 world economies on a set of attributes such as the ease of starting a business, obtaining construction permits, obtaining electricity, raising credit, and enforcing contracts. On all the metrics combined, Russia managed to climb from 124th place in the world in 2012 to 40th in 2017. Thus, within only five years, Russia had vaulted an impressive 84 positions in World Bank’s ranking. This was not a random achievement but the result of President Putin’s explicit 2012 directive that by 2018 Russia should be among the top 20 nations in the world for ease of doing business.
One of the strategically important sectors where Russia has made striking progress is its agricultural industry. After the disastrous 1990s when she found herself dependent on food imports, Russia again became self-sufficient in food production and a net food exporter. By 2014, Russian exports of agricultural products reached nearly $20 billion, almost a full third of her revenues from oil and gas exports. Not only is Russia now producing abundant food for its own needs, the government is explicitly favoring production of healthy foods, a strategy which includes a ban on the cultivation of genetically modified (GMO) crops, introduced by the State Duma in February of 2014. According to official Russian statistics, the share of GMO foods sold in Russia declined from 12% in 2004 to just 0.1% by 2014.
These and many other constructive reforms have had a very substantial impact on Russia’s economic aggregates as the following examples show:
--Between 1999 and 2013, Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP) leapednearly 12-fold from $1,330 per capita to more than $15,560 in 2013, outpacing even China’s remarkable economic growth.
--Russia reduced its debt as a percentage of GDP by over 90%, from 144% in 1998 to less than 14% in 2015!
--Gross national income per capita rose from $1,710 in 2000 to $14,810 in 2013.
--Unemployment fell from 13% in 1999 to below 5% in 2014. Among the working population (those aged 15-64), 69% have a paid job (74% of men).
--Only 0.2% of Russians work very long hours, compared to 13% OECD
average
--Poverty rate fell from 40% in the 1990s to 12.5% in 2013 – better than U.S. or German poverty rates (15.6% and 15.7%, respectively)
--Average monthly income rose from around 1,500 rubles in 1999 to nearly 30,000 rubles in 2013.
--Average monthly pensions rose from less than 500 rubles to 10,000
rubles.
Social and demographic improvements
Putin’s economic reforms included also a more equitable distribution of wealth. As hopelessness faded and standard of living improved, Russian society started to heal: suicides, homicides, and alcohol poisonings declined dramatically. Over the twenty-year period between 1994 and 2014, suicides declined by 56%, homicide rate by 73%, and alcohol poisonings by 83%!
The chart below shows the evolution of these improvements over time (don't know how to paste)
As we can see, these misery statistics rapidly deteriorated with the introduction of shock therapy in 1992, but the trend reversed soon after Putin took charge. By 2014, these figures reached their lowest values since even before 1992. Along with these improvements, the nation’s demographic trends also experienced a dramatic turnaround. Russian life expectancy, which sunk to an average of barely 64 years (57 for men), rose steadily from the early 2000s to reach almost 72 in 2016, the highest it has ever been in Russia’s history.
Looking at the way life expectancy in Russia changed over time, we see again that it had collapsed in the early 1990s but the trend turned around sharply under Vladimir Putin’s leadership of the country. Similarly fertility rate, which dropped to 1.16 babies per woman in 1999, increased by almost 50% to 1.7 babies by 2012, comparing favorably to European Union’s average of 1.55 babies per woman of childbearing age. Abortions declined 88% from a harrowing 250% of live births in 1993 to 31% in 2013.
Not only are Russians living longer than ever before and enjoying much better quality of life, they also feel freer and happier. In 2014, Gallup Analytics reported that 65% of Russians, more than ever before, answered “Yes” when asked, “are you satisfied ... with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?” Meanwhile, Russia’s happiness index rose more than tenfold, from 6 in 1992 to 70 in 2015. Happiness index, compiled by VCIOM adds the proportion of the respondents reporting that they feel decidedly happy or generally happy and deducts those that report feeling
generally unhappy or decidedly unhappy.
The next chart further corroborates the idea that under Putin’s leadership, Russia has been developing as a sane and prosperous society, not only for the benefit of a narrow ruling class and at everyone else’s expense, but for the majority of ordinary Russians.
By 2014, the great majority of Russians felt satisfied with their lives and believed that things in Russia were moving in the right direction. These figures only tapered off after the 2014 Western-sponsored coup in Ukraine and the subsequent economic sanctions imposed on Russia. At the same time, the price of oil – still one of Russia’s largest export – collapsed from over $100 per barrel to under $40. Economic sanctions and the oil price collapse triggered a significant crisis in Russia’s economy. However, in spite of the continuing sanctions regime imposed on the country, its economy started improving again in 2016, thanks to its diverse industrial base that includes a developed commercial and consumer automotive industry, advanced aircraft and helicopter construction based largely on domestic technologies, world’s leading aerospace industry building satellites and top class rocket engines, and advanced industries in pharmaceutical, food processing, optical device, machine tools, tractors, software and numerous other branches. Indeed, Russia is far from being just the “Nigeria with missiles,” or a “gas station with an army,” as many Western leaders like to characterize it.
Insofar as a population’s sentiment is a valid measure of its leadership’s performance, Russia’s development under Vladimir Putin stands in sharp contrast with the weak performance of most other developed nations, including those that most vehemently criticize Russia and its president.
According to polls conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs in 25 different countries
in November 2016 and published by the World Economic Forum, almost two
thirds of the people in the world believed that their countries were moving in
the wrong direction. The leading western nations scored just as badly, while
some of them did just dismally.
Nearly 60% of Russians believe that their country is moving in the right direction! Evidently, they feel much better about the way their nation is shaping up than do constituents of many western nations whose sanctimonious leaders like to lecture their Russian counterparts about prosperity, freedom, democracy and other exalted values they purport to cherish.
It may thus only surprise the most credulous consumers of Western propaganda that a high proportion of Russian people trust Vladimir Putin and approve his job performance. In the early 2017, Putin’s job approval stood between 80% and 90% and has averaged 74% over the eleven years from 2006. During this period, no western leader has come even close to measuring up with Vladimir Putin.
Over the years, I’ve heard depressingly many intellectuals attempt to dismiss Putin’s achievements and Russian people’s contentment as the product of Russian government propaganda. Putin the autocrat, you see, keeps such tight control over the media that he can deceive his people into
believing that things in the country are much better than they really are. But the idea that government propaganda can influence public opinion in this way is just silly. If the majority of people thought their lives were miserable, state propaganda could not persuade them that everything is great. On the contrary, most people would conclude that the media is deceiving them and might feel even less positive about things as a result.
It is sillier still to think that Western intellectuals should have a better appreciation of what it is like to live in Russia than the Russian people themselves. Rather than buying the truth from their media, such intellectuals would do well to take a trip and visit Russia, speak to ordinary people there, and reach their own conclusions. My own travels in Russia, as well as reports from other visitors largely agree with the positive picture that emerges from the statistics we’ve just examined.
STOP PASTING SO MUCH! I'll have to start adding a character count thanks to you.
Post links and whatever facts you're trying to say in your words.
And if you're cutting and pasting from a PDF book - that puts us at risk.
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I looked on open secrets and couldn't find any Browder data. I'll take the Politifact article at face value.
Browder lies but Putin misspeaks. Noted. Just like the US kills civilians and Syria doesn't. And Crimeans are content with having been invaded.