Trevor
0
- Joined
- Jul 17, 2009
- Messages
- 4,386
- Points
- 113
More info on your tent city, actually kind of interesting: Saudi Arabia Denies Syrian Refugees? : snopes.com
Trevor
Trevor
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I saw snopes and didn't even read it, snopes is biased and very often wrong.
I watched the clip you posted, and it was why I said what I did. Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer, was the director of the FSB in 1999. He was installed as Prime Minister later that year and was promoted to president after Yeltsin was forced to resign that same year. Everything Putin has done since then was to establish a new history of the Soviet Union and to build a system of capital cronyism filled with former Soviet Union officials. From June 1999 when he restored the memorial plaque to Yuri Andropov on the KGB building, he submitted that the Soviet anthem be made the Russian national anthem, then in 2003 he was quoted as saying the USSR had been heroic and constructive. In 2004, Putin said, "It is my deep conviction that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a national tragedy on a massive scale." Further, in 2005, in an address to Russia's Parliament, Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the century. What Putin has done is to consolidate much of the wealth in Russia into a type of criminal hierarchy, while allowing just enough to be used to build schools and increase the number of the middle class to placate many of the Russian people.Today's Russia is unique among nations where all the businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats are all the same people. He privatized and took control of the country's wealth where 35% of that wealth belongs to 110 of Putin's cronies. And, in today's Russia, a crony can be a businessman, organized crime leader, and intelligence officer all at the same time. That is why we see state actors hacking companies, people, and government agencies in the U.S. Putinism is very much akin to Stalinism of the Soviet Union. Every part of Putin's Russia is corrupt, from government officials, the judiciary and businesses, with organized crime running through all of it.
If you don't want any source of any information, that's also cool with me, because this is America.
Trevor
Hey, it's just human nature for people to not want to accept facts that conflict with their desired beliefs. :shhh:
Ed
As for Russia not getting crazy rich from it's fossil fuel reserves: population size. The wealth has to be spread across 150 million russians or so, whereas something like qatar has a population of 2 million. Russia has a total GDP 10 times that of Qatar, but it spreads 10 times thinner as well.