Friday, September 9, 2016

Paul Craig Roberts: Putin Politely Expresses His Amazement At Western Stupidity

PCR put this out on his site recently. I've reprinted it in full below in italics.

I like Putin and I don't see him at all how the West like to portray him. Putin combines some unique attributes: he is quietly spoken and aggressiveness, and yet the Russians see him as a strong leader because took on the Russian, swindling oligarchs.

The Russian neoliberal gangsters asset stripped the country along with the help of Western neoliberals and bankers. That Putin brought their game to an end was a massive crime according to the Western neoliberals. Putin was tough with the Russian criminals and so they say he is an authoritarian, a very tough person, but who couldn't ask for a nicer guy. We need politicians like Putin who will stand up to our own oligarchs, swindlers, and gangsters.

In the West the neoliberals continue to asset strip our economies hollowing them out, but a country's strength comes from its technology and its industries. The engineer and scientist, James Dyson, really wanted to produce his products in the UK but he was forced to go to China because of the competition. He said the West was just about fiance, not engineering. Chinese scientists help to produce James Dyson's ideas and then they move onto other Chinese companies and take the expertise that they learned with them - and so Chinese companies get our technology. That's no problem if we were building up our own industries and technologies, but there is more money to be made out of banking and pushing house prices up here instead. The free market isn't working for us, so it's time for something else. The government should step in if our 'entrepreneurs', another name for robber barons, won't invest in new technology and industries.

The Chinese are now the market leaders in solar energy and they are going to make a packet out of it. The Western ruling elite pumped millions into climate change denial to protect their old fashioned, dead end, fossil fuel industries. But whether climate change is real or not, we should have been putting our money instead into developing green energy alternatives because they will produce far cheaper fuel. That's the future.

The Western system is on its knees, requiring imperialism and its exploitation of the third world for cheap, below the market rate raw materials and the exploitation of third world labor to keep itself afloat. Russia and China are ready to leave the West far behind, but the West has its war machine ready to steal everyone else's hard work.

 Putin Politely Expresses His Amazement At Western Stupidity 


Reprinted in full. 

In an interview with John Micklethwait of BloombergBusinessweek, Putin was asked about Russia’s desire to expand its influence geographically. Putin answered as follows:
“I think all sober-minded people who really are involved in politics understand that the idea of a Russian threat to, for example, the Baltics is complete madness. Are we really about to fight NATO? How many people live in NATO? About 600 million, correct? There are 146 million in Russia. Yes, we’re the biggest nuclear power. But do you really think that we’re about to conquer the Baltics using nuclear weapons? What is this madness? That’s the first point, but by no means the main point.
“The main point is something completely different. We have a very rich political experience, which consists of our being deeply convinced that you cannot do anything against the will of the people. Nothing against the will of the people can be done. And some of our partners don’t appear to understand this. When they remember Crimea, they try not to notice that the will of the people living in Crimea—where 70 percent of them are ethnic Russians and the rest speak Russian as if it’s their native language—was to join Russia. Those in the West simply try not to see this.
“In one place, Kosovo, the West invoked the will of the people, but not in Crimea. This is all a political game. So, to give reassurances, I can say that Russia has pursued and plans to pursue an absolutely peaceful foreign policy directed toward cooperation.
“As far as expanding our zone of influence is concerned, it took me nine hours to fly to Vladivostok from Moscow. This is about the same from Moscow to New York, through all of Eastern and Western Europe and the Atlantic Ocean. Do you think we need to expand something?”

3 comments:

Peter Pan said...

Nothing Putin says will reassure Eastern European governments. Their people may be willing to consider common sense but their leaders need the Russian menace to distract from their own incompetence. This situation enables Washington to engage in saber-rattling.

Salsabob said...

What a joke. Putin dealt with the oligarchs by becoming the penultimate oligarch.

This is just another form of Trump Putin-suckin - destroyed in a single tweet from Krugman today that compares what has happened to US GDP compared to Russia's since 2008. Gee, not only an intolerant Czar-for-life but one that comes with economic contraction. Yee-haw!

Tom Hickey said...

Funny that Putin has consistently had an exceptionally high approval rate as polled by independent Levada, which was just sanctioned in Russia for being foreign financed. I guess the Russian people must be taken in the crude state sponsored propaganda because they have no access to Western media owing to the Iron Curtain.

Krugman today that compares what has happened to US GDP compared to Russia's since 2008

And the gains all went to the top because just deserts.