Russia: Zimbabwe, with Permafrost
The Financial Times reports that supposedly "stable, resurgent" Russia needs to ban inflation by edict just like that wacko failed regime of Robert Mugabe (pictured) in Zimbabwe. As we've previously reported, Russia is facing double-digit overall consumer price inflation this year (half that would be viewed as apocalypse in the U.S.) and prices on the basket of basic food and staples that the common man can afford stands to rise at twice that rate, or more. Welcome back to the USSR! Russia: Zimbabwe, with permafrost! Oh, how wise the people of Russia for choosing such a wonderful regime that has elevated them to new heights of bliss!
Russia is introducing Soviet-style price controls on some basic foods in an effort to prevent spiralling prices from denting the Putin administration’s popularity ahead of parliamentary polls in December. The country’s biggest food retailers and producers have reached an agreement, expected to be signed with the Russian government òn Wednesday, to freeze prices at October 15 levels on selected types of bread, cheese, milk, eggs and vegetable oil until the end of the year. Russia’s move is the latest sign of surging agricultural prices becoming an international political issue. Big retailers will limit their mark-up on those goods to 10 per cent. China has also agreed to food price controls; Egypt, Jordan, Bangladesh and Morocco are increasing subsidies or cutting import tariffs to lower domestic prices. Rich countries are not immune: Italian consumer groups organised a pasta boycott last month in a protest over prices.
The Russian economy ministry is also examining whether to increase a 10 per cent export tariff on wheat planned for November to 30 per cent to keep its domestic market well supplied. That prospect has pushed wheat prices up 6 per cent in Chicago in the past week, giving Moscow’s fight against rising food prices an effect beyond its borders. Russia’s agriculture ministry said the food pricing arrangement was voluntary. But industry insiders said they had come under heavy pressure. “We were told in no uncertain terms that we have to freeze prices on certain products,” said one Russian food industry executive, who asked not to be named. “Everybody understands what the government is doing. It is part of their election campaign.” Russian food prices rose steeply in September, with vegetable oil up 13.5 per cent, butter up 9.4 per cent and milk 7.2 per cent, thanks to global agricultural price increases. Given a big low-income population and meagre pensions, the price rises are among the few factors capable of deflating President Vladimir Putin’s 80 per cent-plus approval ratings.
Mr Putin’s decision to head the ticket for the dominant United Russia party has transformed parliamentary elections on December 2 into a referendum on his personal popularity. Russia has fought off inflation in recent years but rising food prices mean it has already exceeded this year’s 8 per cent inflation target, with the final figure likely to top 10 per cent.Food prices have risen globally thanks to increasing demand and changing diets in developing countries, more frequent floods and droughts damaging harvests, and the biotech industry’s growing appetite for grains.
Russia, like many countries, faces the additional challenge of fighting food inflation while pumping money into the financial system to combat the global credit squeeze. But, as Izvestia newspaper commented, Moscow has “found its solution in the past”, with price freezes harking back to Soviet times. “The reaction of the Russian authorities to the recent inflation spike has been even more predictable than the price surge that triggered it,” Dresdner Kleinwort said in a note to investors. Industry insiders said price freezes might restrain headline inflation but would not reduce the overall rate.
2 comments:
The Socialist process is as follows:
1) lie cheat and do anything necessary to manipulate things to get into power. MERIT is to be avoided, since others may be better than you. (besides merit is a false booghwazee concept)
2) in the process to get power, you create the impression that change is progress. this helps disconnect MERIT as well. the downside is that even if the system finds a "best" solution for something (like long division in math as a heuristic), this concept will eradicate it since nothing can stay static, and call it progress (except for state members)
3) once the people give you control, start making sweeping changes. remember, marxists fail on economics!!! which is why MERIT has to go. these changes however are contemplated conceptually as if changes dont spread out, and the target remains the same
this is a fundemental flaw. you can see this in feminist things where they propose a change of sorts and the only way it would work is if the world remained static (make it too onerous for men and women to marry (vawa, child court, etc). ha! the men are punished, but then they go overseas... so then make a law against that (imbra), etc).
each change creates a response of adaptation, and that changes the settings and so on.
this process of constant change is opposite that of conservative change.
how does it work? well the people that do this think merit is a lie, and they think they are smarter than othrs... yet you cant track where they got their knowing from. they believe in defunct economics system that has to be imposed by totalitarian force, and eschew one that happens naturally if you leave things alone.
however, their methods are akin to trying to adjust the tv by turning many dials at once. they never learn as the changes come too fast and are sold on social cache and false beliefs... (pc makes that skew even farther too).
once the social ones are in office there is no more merit, but everyone flipping dials and knobs, and claiming to know how it all works and that they will improve it. note as stated before, they have no measure (relativism) and so they cant determine improvement (merit), and they keep flipping dials.
3) at some point, they can no longer flip the easier dials as the problems start getting out of hand. they have to start being more punitive.
4) at another point, they realize that the problem is not them!!! the problem is that the people are the problem. they are not trying hard enough.
this is when the real problems start.
they are headig there... these controls will only have one effect. to change the forces involved and so skew things more..
they are at the point where they have decided that their previous policies were not sweeping enough, that by making little changes here and there, they were not able to set the system up... and so more sweeping changes will be needed..
and things will get worse.. eventually they will run out of changes to state things, and will look to the people. and those who dont deleiver what they imagine they should deliver will have to be punished.
this is how the gulag and camps start... they start because these are the only methods that the state has!!! and if the state is power based, not purpose based, it becomes paranoid knowing that a little bit of freedom is a crack in the wall to losing power.
and so they cant use thigns like freedom, and the peoples power of inventiveness and individual adaptiveness.. all those things to them are like giving out machine guns to their enemies.
Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't allow our enemies to have guns, why should we allow them to have ideas?
Joseph Stalin
understanding taht this process is systemic... is the key.. that no matter who runs it or how its reformed it will never work.. eventually they find fault with those at the bottom and start punisheing them for not cooperating.
so if you do something, punish a lot of people.. not a few..
A single death is a tragedy, are million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin
if people are the problem, then get rid of the problem.
A single death is a tragedy, are million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin
Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach.
Joseph Stalin
[totalitarian armies reach everywhere in total within the state]
The only real power comes out of a long rifle.
Joseph Stalin
and lastly..
You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves.
Joseph Stalin
the actions will stem from the ideology, since the ideology is one of power not wisdom, it will do what it knows best.
communism can reform itself at will, even contradict itself... however, the one constant is power...
while the other state ideas and ideologies try to be a whole concept, and fade if they are not the best, and succeed if they are better, communism has no such form.
it takes whatever form that is needed to get power.
in russia in 1917, that was revolution (revolutionary marxism).
in the west, that was war of the sexes as revolution (gender marxism)
once it has power, it takes whatever form to force the end that it wants... howeer its paranoid and so cant use any other methods for long as they are too slow, dont ahve noticable visceral effect...
The only real power comes out of a long rifle.
Joseph Stalin
AND lastly, does not pump them up and make them feel powerful as they do horrible things and no one can stop them.
they are not sadists in the traditional sense.. they are sadists because they are numb nihilists.. their lives have no meaning except this false ideology and so they are vacant.
in this weird reality the mind loses its limits.. and people become full despots.. in a way the child inside them is screaming to find a limit.. a wall.. a boundary.. without it, our personalities are lost, and we seek to exist through what we do to others.
its then that perversions come out as they are or seem to be the only way to push the limits (do you see a parallel in western art, film and such? that the limits are not the limits of merit, but the limits of perversion)
so when Elizabeth Bathory was countess... she gets some weird thing in her head.. and so she tries it.. its perverse, and she gets a kick, and feels powerful because she knows that the perversion is hated, and would be reviled, but no one has the power to stop her.. (for a while at least).
we live today with myths of no female serial killers.. but thats not true... history has a lot of them.. and Elizabeth Bathory was one of them.. her thing was to stay young, and so she sought to take the life force of other young women.
she came from what today would be considered a very progressive family, but then was a perverse one (note that!!)
Born in 1560, “Erzebet” (Elizabeth) Bathory was a child of wealth and privilege whose closest relatives became cardinals, prime ministers, and kings. Unfortunately, other members of her large family tree also dabbled in the black arts, diabolism, lesbianism, and habitual promiscuity. Supposedly, none of these “pastimes” were kept secret from the impressionable Elizabeth while growing up.
basically a modern progressive education, backed by the modern concept of freedom...
note that this is the same concept that the socialists have been building.
well after husband is gone.. and she divests herself of the kids.. she goes on follwoing what in large strokes looks like the feminist/communist/progressives/socuialist plan.
more than 600 women were tortured and killed to make her baths.. though she went on unhindered till she started to think the blood of elites was better.
if you dig, the stories are similar...
today russia is at the turning point.. they can accept the pain, and get well, or they can hide the symptoms and let the gangrene run its course.
they have the same progressive life of the countess, and they have the same hubris... they have no way to know other than they believe, zealously, and with no reason.
so they will do this.
and its akin to the little boy running all over trying to put his fingers in all the holes of the dam.
the system is about to get exponentially worse!!! if small changes by small force got them to this point, do you really think that large changes by force, will get them back?
maybe if they knew what they are doing, but they are marxists, and economics is not their strong point.
power is.
The familiar process of
1) counterfeiting (money)
2) fixing prices
3) exproriating food (often grain)
4) enslaving the population
goes back to the War Socialism of Chancellor Erich Ludendorff of Imperial Germany (practiced during WWI). Lenin copied it, and called it "War Communism."
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