ianefc
Player Valuation: £70m
No need for the little reverse, once the subject was apprehended.
Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Russia
- Thread starter summerisle
- Start date
- Status
No need for the little reverse, once the subject was apprehended.
chrismpw
Player Valuation: £70m
Fear mongering helps justify war. War is big, big, business for the UK and especially the US who will happily sell arms, technology and fuel to both sides of any conflict.
Settle it with a footie match I say.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
There's something nasty in the woodshed, but Putin seems untouchable. A bit like Hitler during WW2 when people complained that if only the Fuhrer knew he would sort out their concerns.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/world/europe/russia-economy-putin.html?_r=0
Putin Took Credit for the Boom. Now There’s a Bust.
The main entrance of a factory that produces alumina, a chemical compound used in aluminum smelting, in Pikalevo, Russia, in March. The country’s economic downturn has crippled the town’s industrial base. James Hill for The New York Times
PIKALEVO, Russia — The factory meeting room where the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin browbeat one of Russia’s richest tycoons in front of cameras from state television has become a shrine, hallowed ground where Mr. Putin showed a path out of economic pain for ordinary people and calmed a spasm of worker unrest.
Pikalevo, about three hours east of St. Petersburg, and the rest of Russia are now mired in the country’s longest recession since Mr. Putin came to power at the end of 1999, with the World Bank warning last month that the nation’s poverty rate would increase this year to 14.2 percent of the population, “undoing nearly a decade’s worth of gains.”
Russia’s current crisis, though largely caused by market forces beyond the Kremlin’s control, notablya slump in the prices of oil and gas, has pushed Mr. Putin into a corner. After years of taking credit for a booming economy, which also had little to do with his actions, and casting himself as a can-do leader capable of untying the toughest economic and political knots, he faces a crisis that has exposed the stark limits of his power and prowess.
While praising Mr. Putin as a “tough and efficient” leader who ended the drift and decay that characterized the rule of President Boris N. Yeltsin in the 1990s, Mr. Volkov said the concentration of power in the Kremlin had left the president “responsible for all the idiots who work under him” and for solving all the county’s quarrels and problems, no matter how small.
On a nationally televised call-in show last month, Mr. Putin displayed omnivorous interest in the concerns of ordinary people. At the same time, he dropped his customary swagger in response to a flood of questions about the economy, acknowledging that this year there would be yet more contraction, instead of growth as he predicted on the same show last year.
Svetlana Antropova, a trade union leader in Pikalevo, cursed the “torture” the economy has inflicted on workers in her town and quit President Vladimir V. Putin’s political party, United Russia.James Hill for The New York Times
Photo
Mr. Putin, then prime minister, touring a factory in Pikalevo on June 4, 2009. Back then, he browbeat factory owners into resolving a dispute that was crippling the town. But now, as president, he is finding the nation’s economic woes much more difficult to solve. Alexey Nikolsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ms. Suslova, the disenchanted worker, said she had always voted for Mr. Putin, had cheered his 2009 visit to Pikalevo as offering salvation and had believed his rule would steadily make her life better. But she said she now realized that “one man can’t do everything.”
For 16 years, however, the Kremlin, aided by hagiographic reports on television, has been telling and, to a large degree, convincing Russians that, in the case of their leader, one man could do just about anything and everything.
His visit to Pikalevo in 2009 helped construct this image. But the problem he solved then was relatively simple: The three separate private owners of a once-unified industrial combine could not agree on the price of the products they supplied to one another and which each needed to keep going. Starved of vital supplies, they halted production, leaving workers without work and Pikalevo’s 22,000 residents without heat and hot water. Angry residents blocked a nearby federal highway in protest.
In just a few minutes, during a televised meeting in June 2009 with the owners, including Oleg V. Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate who owns the biggest of the three factories, Mr. Putin put everything right. Describing the owners as “cockroaches,” he accused them of making “thousands of people hostages to your own ambitions, your nonprofessionalism and maybe simply your trivial greed; it is absolutely unacceptable.”
The owners, fearful of losing their assets, swiftly ended their quarrel. Behind the scenes, the Kremlin leaned on Gazprom, the state-controlled gas giant, to cut the price of energy to the Pikalevo plants and on state-owned banks to provide cheap credit.
The factory at the center of those troubles, Mr. Deripaska’s alumina plant, is now pumping out its primary product, a chemical compound used in aluminum smelting, as well as hot water for the whole town and a tide of slurry for the adjacent cement factory that no longer wants it.
On a recent day, only one of six kilns at the cement plant was operating. Managers at the plant, owned by a Russian building materials group called Eurocement, declined to be interviewed. Mr. Volkov, who runs the alumina plant, said the cement factory’s antiquated equipment and plummeting demand for its products left it no hope of recovery.
“There is no solution,” he said. “Even if they get their materials for free, they still could not compete.”
And this, in a nutshell, is the Kremlin’s current nightmare: With low global energy prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict crimping Russia’s prospects of recovery, the economy has hit a wall. It simply cannot compete with China, the United States or even the European nations that Russian state media constantly portray as fading has-beens. The easy and popular fixes the Kremlin used in the past to resuscitate the economy — or at least placate the public — have all been exhausted.
There are few signs, however, that Russians will take to the streets in protest or flock to the banner of a divided and feeble opposition. Svetlana Antropova, a local trade union leader who helped organize the highway blockade in 2009, cursed what she called the “torture” inflicted on Pikalevo workers, but she said she saw no point in street protests and has instead filed a raft of lawsuits over alleged violations of the labor code. She also quit Mr. Putin’s political party, United Russia.
She said she had received a call recently from a trade union colleague in Moscow who asked about setting up a Pikalevo branch of Yabloko, a pro-Western liberal party critical of the Kremlin. She said she told him not to bother even trying.
Asked who is at fault for Russia’s economic troubles, she shrugged and said: “The world market? The Chinese? The Europeans? Frankly, I don’t know.” All she knows for sure, she said, is that ordinary people are suffering.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/world/europe/russia-economy-putin.html?_r=0
Putin Took Credit for the Boom. Now There’s a Bust.
The main entrance of a factory that produces alumina, a chemical compound used in aluminum smelting, in Pikalevo, Russia, in March. The country’s economic downturn has crippled the town’s industrial base. James Hill for The New York Times
PIKALEVO, Russia — The factory meeting room where the Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin browbeat one of Russia’s richest tycoons in front of cameras from state television has become a shrine, hallowed ground where Mr. Putin showed a path out of economic pain for ordinary people and calmed a spasm of worker unrest.
Pikalevo, about three hours east of St. Petersburg, and the rest of Russia are now mired in the country’s longest recession since Mr. Putin came to power at the end of 1999, with the World Bank warning last month that the nation’s poverty rate would increase this year to 14.2 percent of the population, “undoing nearly a decade’s worth of gains.”
Russia’s current crisis, though largely caused by market forces beyond the Kremlin’s control, notablya slump in the prices of oil and gas, has pushed Mr. Putin into a corner. After years of taking credit for a booming economy, which also had little to do with his actions, and casting himself as a can-do leader capable of untying the toughest economic and political knots, he faces a crisis that has exposed the stark limits of his power and prowess.
While praising Mr. Putin as a “tough and efficient” leader who ended the drift and decay that characterized the rule of President Boris N. Yeltsin in the 1990s, Mr. Volkov said the concentration of power in the Kremlin had left the president “responsible for all the idiots who work under him” and for solving all the county’s quarrels and problems, no matter how small.
On a nationally televised call-in show last month, Mr. Putin displayed omnivorous interest in the concerns of ordinary people. At the same time, he dropped his customary swagger in response to a flood of questions about the economy, acknowledging that this year there would be yet more contraction, instead of growth as he predicted on the same show last year.
Svetlana Antropova, a trade union leader in Pikalevo, cursed the “torture” the economy has inflicted on workers in her town and quit President Vladimir V. Putin’s political party, United Russia.James Hill for The New York Times
Photo
Mr. Putin, then prime minister, touring a factory in Pikalevo on June 4, 2009. Back then, he browbeat factory owners into resolving a dispute that was crippling the town. But now, as president, he is finding the nation’s economic woes much more difficult to solve. Alexey Nikolsky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ms. Suslova, the disenchanted worker, said she had always voted for Mr. Putin, had cheered his 2009 visit to Pikalevo as offering salvation and had believed his rule would steadily make her life better. But she said she now realized that “one man can’t do everything.”
For 16 years, however, the Kremlin, aided by hagiographic reports on television, has been telling and, to a large degree, convincing Russians that, in the case of their leader, one man could do just about anything and everything.
His visit to Pikalevo in 2009 helped construct this image. But the problem he solved then was relatively simple: The three separate private owners of a once-unified industrial combine could not agree on the price of the products they supplied to one another and which each needed to keep going. Starved of vital supplies, they halted production, leaving workers without work and Pikalevo’s 22,000 residents without heat and hot water. Angry residents blocked a nearby federal highway in protest.
In just a few minutes, during a televised meeting in June 2009 with the owners, including Oleg V. Deripaska, a billionaire aluminum magnate who owns the biggest of the three factories, Mr. Putin put everything right. Describing the owners as “cockroaches,” he accused them of making “thousands of people hostages to your own ambitions, your nonprofessionalism and maybe simply your trivial greed; it is absolutely unacceptable.”
The owners, fearful of losing their assets, swiftly ended their quarrel. Behind the scenes, the Kremlin leaned on Gazprom, the state-controlled gas giant, to cut the price of energy to the Pikalevo plants and on state-owned banks to provide cheap credit.
The factory at the center of those troubles, Mr. Deripaska’s alumina plant, is now pumping out its primary product, a chemical compound used in aluminum smelting, as well as hot water for the whole town and a tide of slurry for the adjacent cement factory that no longer wants it.
On a recent day, only one of six kilns at the cement plant was operating. Managers at the plant, owned by a Russian building materials group called Eurocement, declined to be interviewed. Mr. Volkov, who runs the alumina plant, said the cement factory’s antiquated equipment and plummeting demand for its products left it no hope of recovery.
“There is no solution,” he said. “Even if they get their materials for free, they still could not compete.”
And this, in a nutshell, is the Kremlin’s current nightmare: With low global energy prices and Western sanctions over the Ukraine conflict crimping Russia’s prospects of recovery, the economy has hit a wall. It simply cannot compete with China, the United States or even the European nations that Russian state media constantly portray as fading has-beens. The easy and popular fixes the Kremlin used in the past to resuscitate the economy — or at least placate the public — have all been exhausted.
There are few signs, however, that Russians will take to the streets in protest or flock to the banner of a divided and feeble opposition. Svetlana Antropova, a local trade union leader who helped organize the highway blockade in 2009, cursed what she called the “torture” inflicted on Pikalevo workers, but she said she saw no point in street protests and has instead filed a raft of lawsuits over alleged violations of the labor code. She also quit Mr. Putin’s political party, United Russia.
She said she had received a call recently from a trade union colleague in Moscow who asked about setting up a Pikalevo branch of Yabloko, a pro-Western liberal party critical of the Kremlin. She said she told him not to bother even trying.
Asked who is at fault for Russia’s economic troubles, she shrugged and said: “The world market? The Chinese? The Europeans? Frankly, I don’t know.” All she knows for sure, she said, is that ordinary people are suffering.
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
D
Deleted member 28206
Guest
My specialist subject. The wonderful sovereign state of .ru
bluebrotha77
Player Valuation: £20m
Anyone recommend a good book on the russian mafia?
Russian Evertonian
Player Valuation: £6m
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
God bless the Russkies lol
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
At last, a reason to own a dog.
- Status