You are sooooo busted - pt1

"Would you like a polonium spritzer with that?"

A friend of mine called me up this morning (cheers John) to tell me that I really should turn on BBC News 24 to watch its headline story

It was, of course, Andrei Lugovoi, the man charged with poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, giving his frankly remarkable press conference.

My chum was thoughtful enough to appreciate that there’s nothing quite like watching a live feed before the editors get a chance to step in and the specialist correspondents have an opportunity to present the edited material in its ‘correct’ context

My chum is also aware that I maintain a particular interest in what goes on in Russia as the result a series of frankly remarkable business trips I made there a few years ago.

And what I saw was the tail end of the purest expression of kleptocracy I have ever seen in the Northern Hemisphere

Without rehashing the story of the oligarchs here, the country had been robbed blind and ownership of anything of any value had been transferred to a small band of crooks. All thanks to Boris Yeltsin’s quite staggeringly corrupt government and the assistance of hordes of Western economic advisers who maintained that the only way to save Russia was to destroy Russia.

Once the assets had been stolen, a fairly crude accounting trick that involved selling their output to offshore holding companies at knock down prices meant that the state’s share of the revenue from those assets approximated to something like fuck all.

Low-income earners couldn’t afford to pay any tax. Higher incomes earners didn’t have to. Middle income earners ended up footing all the bills. That was, at least, until there were hardly any middle income earners left.

Russia was broke

In spite of Western portrayals of the recently deceased Boris Yeltsin as being some kind of flawed hero of the Russia people, most of the people, aside from tourists, visiting his body weren’t paying their respects they were just checking to make sure the fucker was really dead

Yup, he's definitely not breathing...

Anyone wishing to study a highly compressed, edited highlight version of how globalisation works when totally unrestrained could do worse than study what happened to Russia in the 1990s

And it is worth studying. It's the Future

(as an aside, I didn't develop my views about untrammelled globalisation and klepto-capitalism sitting at a keyboard - I've seen the results first hand and they lick donkey nuts, big time)

Policemen weren’t being paid. Teachers weren’t being paid. You could sense that for a time there was a real, and very dangerous, prospect of the entire, very large, very heavily-armed, country breaking down completely

And then Putin came along

Without holding up Putin as any kind of paragon of virtue and to cut a long story short, Putin was given power by the people who were looting Russia and then, for reasons known only to Putin, he turned around and fucked them.

Which goes a long way to account for Putin's continuing popularity in the Russia, in spite of what the Western media, rather feebly, try to imply

Putin is clearly far from stupid and realised that there was no way he could take back the assets stolen by the Oligarchs without having to face some serious global repercussions.

On top of that, some of the smarter oligarchs realising which way the wind was blowing started selling large chunks of their stolen Russian holdings and exchanging them for Western assets. In money laundering parlance this is known as the ‘layering’ stage. A process which the British establishment has a long and distinguished record of bending over backwards to facilitate, Russian mobsters being no exception.

So, at first sight, Putin was stuck. Russia had been robbed of its most productive resources and unless Putin was prepared to expand the role of the Russian government to include British football club ownership he had a problem.

Only he didn’t have a problem. The thing about oil fields and aluminium mines is that you can’t physically move them out of the country. All Putin had to do was tax the shit out of their land value.

Problem solved

And he is starting to (this link is well worth a read)

So, as long as Putin or someone like Putin is in charge of the Russian government the net profitability of those resources for their thieving, scumbag owners (now Western as well as indigenous oligarchs) is severely reduced.

Basically, Putin has to go...

.