Russian Defense Ministry’s Tu-154 Aircraft Crashed En Route To Syria

Yeap..Olympics is followed by a recession in the majority of the hosting countries, this is statistically verified. Instead of spending the 50+bil$ for useless and now empty stadiums and resorts, these would be money well spent in military and high tech R&D. As for me considering “anything Russia does as wrong” you could not be further from the truth. A brief look at my commentary in Disqus is enough proof. To be precise, Russia is fighting the good fight both in Syria and Ukraine, but it does so half-heartedly, with its leaders more focused in PR than achieving tangible goals,-that is, winning the wars. Russian economy is a different but not so dissimilar case. Steps have been taken to diversify it, but still the dogmatic belief in a globalized system is hindering any meaningfully results.

Drinas – I agree with you. I live in what many here believe is the United States which is a Washington based government service organization, a corporation. The United States of America is another such fraudulent group. The fraud is in the lack of disclosure and true transparency. The only PR that is valid is in full disclosure with the members of the society, the men and women that compose it.

I have regularly observed through middle east and Russian media the process acting out in Syria and in Ukraine – everything moves in the realm of ineffective peace processes, like the forever Israeli peace process in Palestine with the continuation of settlements all along. It is clear that, like Russia’s western counterparts here in America (not the US or USA) the working men/women are the controlled elements and corporations (fictitious legal identities) actually control with hidden directorships. This may be ongoing processes that cannot be averted.

A government Ceasing to acknowledge all corporations and only defend companies and contractual agreements that are public and without secrets is one possible way; another is for the state to totally own all banks and coinage. These are unlikely.

You have right about the Putins Economic policy ,this is a disaster and the weak point of Russia .Many here they have NOT idea about Russians daily life

I fear you misunderstood me. Russian’s daily life is by and large pretty good, incomparably better than in the Yeltsin years. But that is part of the problem. An urban, middle-class population is complacent and prone to preoccupy itself mainly with economics. Economics are important insofar as they allow a country to be powerful in military and tech sectors. When economics is put to serve consumerism and so-called”high-standards” of living, the nation is doomed. Take the Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantium for example. Much richer than its enemies even to the end, but decadent with a population averse of fighting. To sum up, Russia needs a strong economy not so that Russians will live like decadent westerners, but so that they can live free from aggression.

most people who got no idea is actually outside of Russia, people that of course includes you.

so, spending for sports and an event that is basically a good thing for the whole world is much worse than spending in weapons and wars. Belief in a globalized world? lols. Meaningful results? And what would be the meaningful results in your book of economies? having 3 trillions of national debt? Or follow the example of nazi germany (that had beefed up its economy by building tanks and waging wars), which in the end is the solution you’re suggesting, since money is “better spent on military R&D and weapons than in olympics? Russian military is doing just fine in defending the country’s interests, even without the additional spending in weapons. Incidentially they also hosted the olympics, and they were just as fine as all the other olympics, although all the haters wished they’d fail, due to terrorism or whatever.

They did fail. They failed big time since when the FSB was too busy protecting the events from terrorists, the CIA &co organised a coup in Ukraine, effectively snatching the country from Russia. That was a major geopolitical defeat, a defeat made possible by the naivete of the Kremlin and its western-loving, “why can’t we all be friends” mentality.. Also, Nazi Germany? Seriously? Do you emulate the Putin=Hitler argument on the reverse? ts,ts,ts..

I’m not the one that said that spending in weapons is better for a country’s economy.

Actually, that is the opposite of what the Third Reich did, and they paid for it in WWII. Hitler tried to maintain a high production of consumer goods until 1943, despite trying to fight the most massive war in history, so as to keep his electorate happy.

it’s not the point, the point is that Hitler put Germany’s destroyed economy back on its feet by producing arms. It’s very likely that the production of goods was the secondary effect of the country becoming productive again: simplistically, as people start to work again and gets paid, they are able to afford buying more goods, so the economy adjust to the increased demand. But it’s an effect – the cause is, as said, the revival of military industry, in particular the “heavy” one.

No, the Germany economy was revived by getting off the gold standard (which is the main thing that started FDR planning a war with Germany) and by exporting high quality German industrial and technical goods, exactly like Germany does today. Because high quality German products were in demand, as they have very few competitors for technical quality, and all of those countries had much less output potential, people were forced to accept a reasonable exchange rate for the Reichsmark, priced off German export value, not their gold reserves. Hermann Goering had written his first dissertation on economics as an 18 year old cadet at Lichterfelde, the premier officer cadet school, to get his arbitur, and got the highest marks any cadet passing through the school ever received, leading them to name a whole corner of the quandrangle after him. They had a very sound understanding of economics.

I find it hard to believe that Germany revived its economy with the exports, in particular because the USA had turned to absolute protectionism, hence barring german goods from its market, the richest at the time. Also, it’s true that Goring had graduated at Lichterfelde (Yet this moment is before WW1, when he served as fighter pilot and wing commander, and got its popularity), but he was totally avulse from economic subjects, he was picked by Hitler to direct the four year plan (which is the plan to, that is, revive the economy), only because he was a very popular figure and in that sense it would be easier to make the population and the political power to accept him overruling the ministry of economics (of which he had been given the power to do). Also, the four year plan was based on gaining autarky and economical independence for Germany: the fact that the economy was dismantled by an external event (The great depression), of which Germany had no fault, surely made the people well poised to support such a plan. So it was fullfilled basically by heavy deficit-spending, in order to finance and build the military industry. Of course, at that point, they already knew that they would use that military potential to start war and basically take all the economic and population resources to enforce Germany’s autarky from the invaded countries. The nazis did not get opposed by the western democracies for a single reason – the fear of communism. UK, France and the US had allowed Hitler to do whatever, and prepare the biggest tragedy of contemporary history, because they knew for sure that had he failed, German would had fall to communist revolutionaries, and they were afraid as hell that both France and UK (Even US perhaps) working classes would had followed suite.

I’m afraid, sir, that you’ve been misled by popular stereotype and propaganda and the Third Reich, Goering and the relationship between Goering and the Four Year Plan, Schacht, etc. Goering was not at all averse to economics. On the contrary, my point about Lichterfelde was that he chose to write his arbitur dissertation on economics. Nobody made him, and it was actually a rather odd choice at that school. In Wilhelmine Germany, the military encouraged an acute disinterest in ‘civilian’ subjects, most particularly anything that smelled remotely like politics, which the military regarded as a particularly foul topic. Consequently, those few cadets who chose to stay the extra 2-3 years fro an arbitur, rather than move straight on to their regiment tended to write dissertations on subjects that were closer to their chosen profession. Economics, which was both intertwined with politics (Gott in Himmel!) and also about, of all things something as grubby and low-class as….money (der Graeuel!) was almost controversial as a topic for an army cadet. But his instructors were even more astonished because his dissertation was actually very good.

Goering was also familiar with business from personal experience. From the period between his discharge from the army and joining up with Hitler in the 20s, he travelled Europe as a parachute salesman. (He met his first wife Carin doing this, and his experience with, and enthusiasm for parachuting is why the Luftwaffe had paratroopers. Germany’s first paratroop unit was actually a GSG9-type police commando unit, the Police-Parachute Battalion Hermann Goering, which he formed while Police President of Prussia, and personally trained in the dangerous skill of parachuting onto the rooftops of urban buildings to conduct very modern type assaults, hostage rescues, etc. They later became the elite Luftwaffe Parachute-Regiment Hermann Goering.)

Yes, what you describe about Goering just being there to lend prestige and authority to the economic plan was what most people expected, Schacht most of all. But Goering was quite bright, and considered himself a sort of Renaissance Man (modesty was not amongst his virtues) and Hitler, who was an auto-didact himself, was aware of Goering’s broad interests. It was Goering who, in 1933 started I. G. Farben producing synthetic oil, and in 1935, still a year before he was put in charge of the Four Year Plan, he was in control of all Germany’s oil and rubber synthesising projects. In the saem year, he was asked by Hitler to arbitrate between Darre and Schacht regarding the competing interests of agriculture and industry in the German economic plan. His handling of the matter pleased Schacht enough that he asked Goering to take control of Germany’s foreign currency reserves. Schacht thought Goering would simply be his high-power rubber stamp. But oh no, to the dismay of all the professional bureaucrats, Goering immediately jumped into the project with enthusiasm, and took his secret authorisation, published it, and formed Prime Minister General Goering’s Raw Materials and Foreign Currency Department. (He had been handling the raw materials situation since 1933, which is how he came to make the I. G. Farben contract.) Goering’s refusal to simply submit to Schacht’s expertise, and his, as Schacht saw it, impertinence in actually suggesting economic theories himself, is what soured their relationship, and eventually led to Schacht leaving his post. To quote Irving’s “Goering” regarding their first economics meetings in 1936: “But Schacht had to listen impassively as his rival (Goering) preached his new economic gospel – putting EXPORTS FIRST TO EARN FOREIGN CURRENCY, then projects designed to meet the Reich’s raw-materials needs from it’s own native resources.” (Emphasis mine, and sorry for the caps, I can’t figure out how to do bold or italics on here.) He handpicked his own staff of economists from I’G. Farben, the Air Ministry and his Prussian ministry, as well as Himmler, to help execute this economic vision. Schacht was a Western-style liberal economist of the very type Putin is trying to carefully, slowly push out of Russia’s financial structure, who wanted to privatise everything.

Or, “As in the 1930s, Germany has put all its economic might into producing exports that will enhance its power and cement it as the economic engine that drives Europe.” From https://www.thetrumpet.com/article/5243.2.0.0/economy/germany-reverts-to-1930s-economics

Germany’s % of world exports, and % of world export manufactured goods exported climbed steadily from 1934 to 1938. Export share was 8.8% in 1934, 8.9% in 1935, 9.1% in 1936, 9.2% in 1937 and 9.3% in 1938, while share of manufactured goods was 16.6% in 1934, 16.7% in 1935, 18.4% in 1936, 18.1% in 1937 and 17.5% in 1938. Modern Germany hasn’t had that big a share of the export market since the 1990s. They are down to @7.5% today, and they are still an export giant, being 2nd or 3rd in world share over the last decade. And the ONLY reason Germany fell from an even larger share in 1933 was because Hitler rightly insisted on introducing a huge package of worker protection laws (in fact, almost all of Germany’s modern labour laws, that are the envy of the world are his creations), that established a high minimum wage, maximum working hours, paid vacations and vacation packages whose costs were shared between the employer and the government, and youth laws that mandated that any employer employing minors was responsible for seeing that they completed, at company expense in time and money, a full German Realschule education, and that German workers were provided with reasonable promotion opportunities during their careers. These laws drove out a number of more predatory foreign investors and companies, and dropped Germany’s export share. Also, what you say about protectionism didn’t substantially hinder them. First, then as now they had a largely captive market in Europe’s poorer countries, especially southern Europe and the Balkans. Second, in many key areas they had no real competition. For just a single example, if you wanted the best lenses in the 1930s, for anything from microscopes to telescopes, you had to buy German. The Swiss could compete in quality, but not quantity. So trade tariffs mostly just got passed on to the consumer, rather than biting into German profits. There was usually no serious domestic competitor to drive them out of the market. That was true for a lot of technical products.

Regarding Germany’s military expenditure (and thus share of industry devoted to such), prewar Germany’s military expenditure was comparable to that of the USA in the 1950s, running from 8% in 1935, to 10% in 1936, 13% in 1937, and 17% in 1938, when tensions were rising. However, while in 1939 it was 23%, and 1940 38%, 47% in 1941, and only topped the halfway mark in 1942, when full scale war production got underway, when it it 55%. By contrast, the UK was 22% in 1939, jumping to 53% in 1940, 60% in 1941 and 64% in 1942. As a percentage of the German budget, German spending was similar to US spending in the 50s and 60s. As I said, and as the numbers show, Hitler made a conscious effort to maintain high standards of living and volume of consumer goods until full war production began in 1942.

The history books contain a lot of propaganda about the Third Reich’s economics, but the numbers don’t bear them out, just like the statistics for most other areas.