Category Archives: transnational crime

FTAC: A Bid for the Lost and Missing of America

13 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Canada, Extreme Brown vs Red-Green, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, North America, Political Psychology, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, United States of America

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Inspiration for the post: a tirade against the specter of Democratic Socialist America in the fashion of the Soviet Communist sphere of influence and the detritus of the irresponsible authoritarian mafia states left behind for western conscience and vision to address.

” . . . who despite enjoying the benefits and protections of a free society . . . ” (would vote the Democratic ticket).

What happened to these, especially our approximately 490,000 missing Americans under age 21?

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2019/10/04/an-american-report-card/ — the page provides a glance at the numbers associated with America’s most troublesome social pathologies–cocaine use, homelessness, missing persons, opioid addiction, prostitution.

Life has its hooks, ladders, and chutes, of course, and will never be perfect for everyone, but the numbers represent some systematic decimation of a modern — not 1950s white bread — culture. Are those of the middle class and of the privileged supposed to completely turn away from the social epidemiology swirling around the apparently Lost of America?

We should know who is in the mix — and why — and get that unholy street stew separated and channeled in some helpful way.

If Americans hadn’t “social conscience”, there would be no laws involving environment, health, labor, housing, or much else that has brought and held the nation together as a unified polity. Politicians on the Left / Far Left have walked down their own streets and asked about the same questions for the same reasons. Now it would seem up to radically responsible moderates to steal that flame to produce an overall healthier state, not an environment fit to elite, rapacious, and ruthless personalities.

Some Red-Green elements that have flowed down from the Soviet Era machinery have infected America’s Democratic Party with the familiar Far Left cocktail of anti-capitalist, radical, and anti-Semitic (anti-Zionist) cant that in effect poisons their own projects before they can progress. The social conscience of the Democratic Party as stamped by Presidents Roosevelt in the 1930s and Johnson in the 1960s appears well under attack by the vanguard of a bullying old White Right political culture that really doesn’t care to address the misery it has learned to overlook.

Far be it, however, for BackChannels to overlook Hollywood’s role in the glamorizing and promoting of the very scourges that have both enriched the world’s mafia and — with dollars cleaned and spiffy — spilled back into working communities — here: read about Vancouver’s pleasant (not really) influx of wealth — as to make economic retreat and the decoupling from evil virtually impossible.

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Venezuela: Background for the Liberal Perspective

03 Friday May 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, International Development, South America, transnational crime, Venezuela

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Dickey, Christopher. “How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela a Mafia State.” Daily Beast, June 2, 2019.

InSight Crime. “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” Seven-part series, May 16, 2018 to May 25, 2018. Full report: InSight Crime. “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” Report (PDF): 1) “7 Reasons for Describing Venezuela as a ‘Mafia State’”, Mary 16, 2018; 2) “Drug Trafficking Within the Venezuelan Regime: The ‘Cartel of the Suns’”, May 17, 2018; 3) “The Devolution of State Power: The ‘Colectivos’”, May 18, 2018; 4) “The Devolution of State Power: ‘The Pranes’,” May 20, 2018; 5) “Colombia and Venezuela: Criminal Siamese Twins,” May 21, 2018; 6) “Honduras and Venezuela: Coup and Cocaine Air Bridge,” May 23, 2018; 7) “Dominican Republic and Venezuela: Cocaine Across the Caribbean,” May 24, 2018; 8) “Venezuela and El Salvador: Exporting Aid and Corruption,” May 25, 2018.

Instead of abetting or encouraging the survival of President Nicolas Maduro’s now brutal regime in Venezuela, Representative Ilhan Omar may do better to review how starvation came to visit the South American state — wondrously rich with resources — in the first place.

Johnson, Keith. “How Venezuela Struck it Poor.” Foreign Policy, July 16, 2018.

Venezuela as petrostate had a fine run on high and rising oil prices, but as crude pricing fell, the state discovered discovered itself as yet . . . undeveloped — and foremost in its oil sector. From the above cited Foreign Policy piece:

The problem for Chávez was that many of the PDVSA’s then-managers wanted to increaseproduction, by continuing the development of Venezuela’s technically challenging heavy oil fields. To do so, they needed to reinvest more of the company’s earnings rather than hand them all over to the government. So the managers had to go.

It was only the beginning of the mismanagement of Venezuela’s oil reserves.

What about other sectors of the economy?

On agriculture, here’s an excerpt from The Washington Post (Mariana Zunig and Nick Miroff, “Venezuela’s paradox: People are hungry, but farmers can’t feed them”, May 22, 2017):

“Last year I had 200,000 hens,” said Saulo Escobar, who runs a poultry and hog farm here in the state of Aragua, an hour outside Caracas. “Now I have 70,000.”

Several of his cavernous hen houses sit empty because, Escobar said, he can’t afford to buy more chicks or feed. Government price controls have made his business unprofitable, and armed gangs have been squeezing him for extortion payments and stealing his eggs.

As well known to other communist and socialist bureaucracies, the government owns all, but to play the role of an enlightened hub for all that the state needs and needs to share equally, it has to have something to distribute. As the oil economy collapsed, much around it appears to have caved as well.

Add desperation to insolvency: what the government hasn’t discouraged, ordinary thieves — not to blame them too much for their response to starvation — have apparently stepped in to pick up the slack.

Alas, also, Venezuela’s program had some items it distributes all too well for cash:

The network used a string of heavily guarded nightclubs to generate profits from the forced prostitution, which where then laundered through at least eight companies the group owned.

Thirteen victims were rescued and more than 2 million euros (almost $2.4 million) worth of properties, cash, jewelry and vehicles, as well as weapons, were seized as part of the operation.

Albaladejo, Angelika. “Transnational Sex Trafficking Rings Cash In on Venezuela Crisis.” InSight Crime, June 28, 2018.

Basically, Maduro’s dictatorship and its military (and the state’s mafia) have had between narcotics — noted at the top of this blog — and sundry other criminal undertakings — some nefarious ways of raising cash for themselves.

In the global politics, the regime has also the support of other feudal and absolute powers: Beijing and Moscow have both made arrangements with the hard-struck “socialist” state, and Turkey, famously, has been buying up Venezuelan gold now scraped off the earth by others scrambling for useful cash.

The state of war has become a constant between Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, but the issues are worked either “by other means”i.e., “diplomacy” or through punitive measures that would be violent swipes — and they are that — without the gun play. What works and how far it goes may be indicated by Venezuela’s continuing decline into chaos, darkness, and despair.

The western-supported alternative President Juan Guaido has been able to inspire defections — and that is saying something about the state of the Venezuelan state — but not yet raise the army to compete with Maduro’s heavily leveraged forces.

Related on the Web

O’Connor, Tom. “Russia, China and Iran Defend Support for Venezuela, warn U.S. Cannot Tell Them or Latin America What to Do.” Newsweek, April 15, 2019.

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Venezuela: Bella Dodd’s Arch 1954 Observation and Maduro’s “Mafia State”

04 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, International Development, Politics, South America, Syndicate Red Brown Green, transnational crime, Venezuela

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In the Party I was beginning to see many people of a different stripe. During the war period I saw how opportunism and selfishness engulfed many comrades. They wore expensive clothes, lived in fine apartments, took long vacations at places provided by men of wealth. There was, for one, William Wiener, former treasurer of the Party, manipulator for a score of business enterprises, who wore Brooks Brothers suits, smoked expensive cigars, and lunched only at the best places. There were the trade union Communists who rubbed elbows with underworld characters at communist-financed night clubs, and labor lawyers who were given patronage by the Party by assignment to communist-led trade unions and now were well established and comfortable.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Dodd

Communist Party USA leader Bell Dodd’s 1954 remark as relayed by Wikipedia may have special resonance today in the socialist’s disaster continuing to unfold — or perhaps preparing to fold — in Venezuela.

While it had been one thing to share Venezuela’s good fortune and wealth with the public, perhaps especially with massive revenues pumped out of the ground, it has been another for the socialist government to suppress the private ownership of productive ideas and resources while utterly failing to diversify a national economy with the intent to forestall a one-market boom-or-bust (it busted) disaster.

For BackChannels, the cite-quote-cite-quote method has grown tiresome, so the reader may take this post as a reference page but with the suggestion that Maduro’s now patently criminal junta — access the OCCRP and InSight Crime reports cited in reference — may choose to loot and flee the country having proven themselves unable to judiciously and responsibly govern the same — or, in the manner demonstrated by Assad in Syria, they may enjoy being carved up by similarly predatory trade partners.

BackChannels’ humanism in relation to economic development would counsel the damping of dogma in the search for a good mix of private incentives for economic diversification x public policies and programs fit to constituent needs for “basics” plus psychological enthusiasm, fitness, and growth. From the same stance, the messianic self-aggrandizement associated with dictatorships would be viewed as damaging and limiting the greater public experience and potential for good things, starting with community-wide and personal security.

(For related exploration or some meditation on dictatorship, this blog offers portals for “Malignant Narcissism” and its own proposed concept, “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy“. Neither would differentiate between Far Left and Far Right authoritarianism or kleptocracy — and it would place both as more appropriate in the operating environments of the feudal world and fit to related medieval worldviews associated with “political absolutism” and sovereignty. Wherever placed x space x time, the absence of conscience looms large with dictatorships and the related criminality associated with power becomes glaring and, eventually, beyond bearing).

Bella Dodd, by the way, would renounce Communism toward the end of her journey and again embrace the Catholicism with which she had been born.

Reference

Aslund, Anders. “Venezuela is Heading for a Soviet-Style Collapse.” Foreign Policy, May 2, 2017.

Ayres, Sabra. “Russia and China, heavily invested in Venezuela, warily watch the political turmoil.” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2019.

Doyle Liam. “Venezuela gold: 20 tons of GOLD BARS ‘shipped out’ of Venezuela on Boeing 777.” Express, January 30, 2019.

Faiola, Anthony and Karen DeYoung. “In Venezuela, Russia pockets key energy assets in exchange for cash bailouts.” The Washington Post, December 24, 2018.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. “Oil-Producing Countries and Debt”. Podcast with the bank’s public affairs content coordinator Kristie Engemann and Fed economist Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria detailing results of her research on the subject of interest. May 4, 2018.

Fox Business. “Venezuela is worse than the Soviet Union was: Lt. Col. Peters.” June 28, 2017.

Johnson, Keith. “How Venezuela Struck It Poor.” Foreign Policy, July 16, 2018.

Kew, Ben. “OAS: 10 Million Venezuelans Could Flee Country Within Next Four Years.” Breitbart, December 27, 2018.

Martin, Jorge. “US Tightens the Noose on Venezuela: Will the Coup Succeed?” Venezuela Analysis, February 4, 2019. On Venezuela’s travail (and America’s Far Right Imperialist Aggression) from the Marxist perspective.

McLaughlin, Eliott C. “Maduro says a US-led ‘coup’ is behind the political upheaval in Venezuela.” CNN, January 27, 2019.

OCCRP. “2016 Man of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption”.

Trevithick, Joseph. “Venezuela Agreed to Let Russia Set Up a Bomber Outpost On This Caribbean Island: Reports.” The War Zone, The Drive, December 18, 2018.

Venezuela Investigative Unit. “7 Reasons for Describing Venezuela as a ‘Mafia State’.” InSight Crime, May 16, 2018. Related off this article: “Venezuela: A Mafia State?” — A three-year project producing an eight-part series and full 84-page report. Herewith an excerpt from “7 Reasons . . . .”:

What is clear from our investigations is that the following institutions are staffed at the higher echelons by individuals we believe are, or have been, engaged in criminal activity:
The Vice Presidency, the Ministries of Interior (Ministerio del Poder Popular del Despacho de la Presidencia y Seguimiento de la Gestión de Gobierno), Defense (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Defensa), Agriculture (Ministerio del Poder Popular de Agricultura Urbana), Education (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Educación), Prison Service (Ministerio del Poder Popular para el Servicio Penitenciario), Foreign Trade and Investment (Ministerio de Estado para el Comercio Exterior e Inversión Internacional), Electricity (Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Energía Eléctrica), the National Guard (Guardia Nacional Bolivariana), the Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Bolivarianas), the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Servicio Bolivariano de Inteligencia Nacional – SEBIN) and PdVSA.

The penetration of so many key institutions, and the fact that they constitute the state’s main organs in the fight against organized crime, means that Venezuela cannot even contain organized crime, let alone effectively fight it. With so many state actors with interests in criminal activity, be it fuel smuggling, the black market sale of food and medicines or the trafficking of cocaine, this factor alone suggests that Venezuela qualifies as a mafia state.

https://www.insightcrime.org/investigations/seven-reasons-venezuela-mafia-state/

Wikipedia. “Bella Dodd”.

Wikipedia. “Corruption in Venezuela”.


Posted to YouTube February 3, 2019.
Posted to YouTube February 2, 2019
Posted to YouTube February 4, 2019.

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FTAC: Brief Comment: Optics on Frenemies Moscow and Washington

16 Monday Apr 2018

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Russia, transnational crime

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” . . . they are making a show to other countries . . . “

True. The action taken to forestall additional Chemical Weapons (CW) attacks was conducted as a deliberate and open demonstration of capability (imho) and not as one blow among others launched without warning in the chaos and fury of combat.

Russo-American cooperation in “optics” has been a theme in the Syrian Tragedy from the beginning and in current form dates back at least to the end of the Cold War in which Moscow and Washington in a presumptive peace were to work on terrorism and transnational crime together.

It is uncertain that that is not taking place!

🙂

How would one know?

In that Moscow sustains numerous “frozen conflicts”, operates its war machinery against noncombatants in Syria and Ukraine, and that it has long cherished (by not reforming itself much) the title, “Mafia State”, I may suggest the west had been snookered by old political criminals or a mentality in Moscow befitting the same.

Related Reference

In the too-fast press associated with blogging, there may be a little bit of post-first-read-later taking place here.  Even if so, the main point is to look into what happened between Moscow and Washington in their respective thematic characters — paternal authoritarian for one; liberal democratic for the other — in the nearest shadows of the Cold War.

PDFs cited go straight to the BackChannels Kindle and may be read on that platform soon afterward.

Elliott, Dorinda.  “Lifestyles of Russia’s Filthy New Rich.”  Newsweek,  December 18, 1994:

Where did all the money come from? Most of the new robber barons — an estimated 61 percent of Russia’s richest people, according to one study — simply turned the socialist empires they managed into their own private companies. Others built their fortunes on the roots of criminal trading they were doing secretly during Soviet times. The result is a pervasive sense of unfairness — particularly since Russia still has no real middle class. But Russian society for centuries has been driven by envy.

Finckenauer, James O. and Yuri A. Voronin.  “The Threat of Russian Organized Crime.”  PDF.  Issues in International Crime, National Institute of Justice, June 2001.

Hockstader, Lee.  “Russia’s Criminal Condition.”  The Washington Post, February 26, 1995.

“In Western Europe and the United States . . . organized crime controls only criminal activities such as prostitution, drug trafficking and gambling,” wrote Pyotr Filippov, a former adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, in a report to the president last year. “In our country, it controls all types of activities.”

In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, an alleged criminal leader with a long prison record and a private militia loyal to him is the right-hand man to the country’s leader, former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze. In Russia’s Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, an ex-convict named Vladimir “The Poodle” Podiatev, who spent 17 years in prison, is said by police to be the city’s foremost power broker, allegedly controlling his own television station and much commerce in the city.

Mirsky, Wendy L.  “The Link Between Russian Organized Crime and Nuclear-Weapons Proliferation: Fighting Crime and Ensuring International Security.”  Comment.  University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Business and Law, 16:4, 749-781.

Orttung, Robert and Christopher Walker.  “Putin’s Frozen Conflicts: Each of Russia’s reform-minded neighbors is plagued by separatism.  It’s no coincidence.”  Foreign Policy, February 13, 2015:

Russia’s attempt to subvert Ukraine cannot, however, be seen in isolation.Russia’s attempt to subvert Ukraine cannot, however, be seen in isolation. Its tactics are part of a wider pattern in which the Kremlin uses separatist conflicts as engines for corruption and criminality, and as Trojan horses to block progress in reform-minded countries on Russia’s periphery.

Shelley, Louise I.  “Post-Soviet Organized Crime: Implications for the Development of the Soviet Successor States and Foreign Countries.”  The National Council for Soviet and East European Research.”  Title VIII Program, The National Council for Soviet and East European Research.  February 8, 1994:

Organized crime has penetrated most of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union at all governmental levels, and is assuming an important role in the political , economic and social evolution of these states, with consequences already being felt in Europe , the United States and parts of Asia . The collapse of communism may not lead to democratization and the transition to a competitive capitalist economy.  Instead, the pervasiveness of organized crime may lead to an alternative form of development — political clientelism and controlled markets. Domination by the Communist Party may be replaced b y the controls of organized crime.

U.S. Department of State Archive.  “United States Relations with Russia: After the Cold War: 1990-1991.

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FTAC: 9/11 – Sixteen Years of Accelerating, Expanding Conflict Between Archaic Worlds and the Modern One

11 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion, transnational crime

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The medieval worldview and its marriage to financial and political power may be archaic in the modern world.  Faith in God and religion may be good things, but as demonstrated by the Islamists, by the Saudi Royals and their spreading of Wahhabi madrasas, and by related clerical wealth dependent on subscription plus political repression, too much of that kind of “religion” suffocates creativity, freedom, and economic exchange.

I believe the modern world wishes not to be dragged back into the “medieval mode” — or your nation should have a new King with his legitimacy validated by Bishops and the Pope.

Yours has also a different kind of contest going with archaic systems: the tribal systems (with chiefs) are absolute and often worlds unto themselves, and they may well be discomfited by seeing their children yanked into mines and (perhaps) abused.

The Third World War seems to me quite healthy and under way as regards barbarism and the most cynical and evil worship of money by those encouraging horrific acts worldwide.  

Thank Putin who has been most visible in relation to the barbaric horrors of Syria, the creeping warfare ongoing in Ukraine, numerous “frozen conflicts”, which become transfer points for smuggling, potentially on a nearly unimaginable scale, and today the support of al-Qaeda-like Taliban in Afghanistan.

When, and since we woke up sixteen years ago this day, has the modern world — the civilization of open democracies — not been at war with barbarism?

My South American correspondent counseled the various forms of “sword” against the evils wrought by bankers who sought deregulation that invited the 2007/8 financial meltdown, by the godless forces of still nominal and virulent communist and socialist politics, and by indigenous either living in older worlds or lost in this one.

Since 9/11, a curtain in time has come up on the world that surrounds all of us as we have come to casually and commonly access cultural activities and political news around the world via Internet.  Perhaps the community of foreign affairs and international relations enthusiasts as well as professionals has been grown as a consequence of access to . . . the online universe of media, political institutions, and, of course, fellow travelers — and, perhaps, we have become or started on the path toward greater cognizance and sophistication about the world’s myriad conflicts and their true underlying drivers.

For brevity, BackChannels will leave this post “airy” — short on specifics — but note that we — “the west”, “EU / NATO”, “the open democracies of the world” — may be more at war today with feudal despots and medieval illusion and “The Terrorists” — the global network of clerical power bound to media production and incitement and transnational crime (arms, diamonds, drugs, for a start) and related and active cells than was the case before this day sixteen years ago.

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FTAC – On the Persistence of the Feudal Mode in Statecraft

05 Friday May 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, transnational crime

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The Kingdom is not a NATO member, much less one applying for European Union accession. It’s alliance with the west may be based on its defense of its own power and prestige in Sunni Islam (vs the Shiite anchorage in Iran) and on related defense, development, and trade needs.

Turkey no longer teeters on the “brink of Islamization”.

Over the course of many years, President Erdogan has managed to eviscerate the pillars of the westward-leaning government developed by Kemal Ataturk, starting with the neutralization of the generals and ending just about with the throttling of Turkey once free press. When President Putin leveraged Erdogan into an apology over the shooting down of a trespassing Russian jet, that signaled the end of common western interest within Ankara as regards the NATO agreement.

This one video clip foreshadows more recent events and serves as illustration of Moscow’s deal making realpolitik:

So Moscow has won, eh?

Not necessarily.

The anachronistic feudal systems that Putin (and Khamenei) wish to sustain in services to their own politically absolute power (dictatorship / kleptocracy) have ways of losing money and pissing off modern constituents. Moscow has been running down its state cash reserves for some time by way of criminal behavior that has spurred capital flight for years, induced the west into the application of sanctions, and promoted alternative energy sourcing that has driven down the oil revenues on which Moscow had counted for growth. Here’s the kicker: the less immediately fluid wealth of the Russian Federation has been parked in WESTERN banking institutions and valuable assets protected by rule of law!

Russia cannot expect to move to conventional war. It hasn’t the money to support related industry and troops. Instead, if offers its nuclear threat, which is a potent headache for everyone, and the more criminal and insidious permutations of combined “hybrid warfare”, which really combines the most underhanded methods in the subversion of target states while also totally managing the image of conflict and enjoy the benefits of transnational crime.

🙂

I smile because I — and you — should cry.

As I tire of making the same assertions over and over again as regards the “end of the end of the Cold War” (but we would like to avoid a “hot war”, right?), I may only suggest here a visit to my blog — https://conflict-backchannels.com/ — and perhaps spending some time with Agnia Grigas’s book on Crimea — http://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300214505.

The world on display in the Moscow Grand Mosque video is the one held together by President Putin and arrangements he’s made that serve the interests of a now privileged social set using hyper modern tools of political repression. They have gone back to secret police, centralized power, and both a nervous and reactionary class of immensely patronized wealthy.

The People?

Who cares?

In the feudal states, The People will have their patriotism and religion, just like in the olden days . . . .

Reference: The Power of Money

Several of the following news reports appear to feed from the same source but with each their own flavor.  No matter.  The point made here is that Russia’s easiest money has been hit hard by time: capital flight; reduced oil revenues; sanctions –> depleted ready cash.  Other wealth rides in banks, luxury assets, and markets, but for both western conflict analysts and Russian citizens outside of the “systema”, the money appears to be running out and domestic hardship appears already in the numbers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/12/19/how-to-win-the-new-cold-war-without-firing-a-shot/#c8037fd7967e | http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/16/news/economy/russia-cash-reserves-depleted/ | http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-money-reserve-fund-2017-assets-oil-prices-recession-sanctions-a7313236.html | http://www.pravdareport.com/russia/economics/28-12-2016/136533-russia_reserve_fund-0/ | https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/russia-could-run-out-of-cash-reserves-in-2017/ar-BBwhUe9

Here’s an excerpt from observations published over the winter:

According to the Russian Finance Ministry, only 10 of Russia’s 85 official regions — most of them commodity producers and metropolitan areas with substantial tax bases — are economically or financially stable, down by half since 2015. Of the country’s remaining regions, 30 manage to scrape by because direct federal subsidies make up at least 33% of their revenues. Half of the $3.5 billion in subsidies that the Kremlin disburses each year goes to just 10 of those regions: Dagestan, Chechnya, Yakutia, Kamchatka, Crimea, Altai, Tuva, Buryatia, Stavropol and Bashkortostan. That leaves more than half of Russia’s regions struggling to fulfill their social obligations and meet the federal government’s demands for funding.

Seventy of Russia’s regions send 63% of the income they generate to the federal budget, keeping only the remaining 37%. The federal government, meanwhile, returns at most 20% of the money by way of subsidies and intergovernmental transfers.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/russia-is-a-mess-the-poverty-rate-is-soaring-and-only-10-of-85-regions-are-financially-stable-2017-01-31

Related World Bank data, albeit covering Russia’s expanded impoverishment only through 2015: http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/RUS

Reference: The Russian “Mafia State”

As the fabulously wealthy – such as Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich – buy ever bigger yachts and build ever bigger mansions, the average Russian is becoming ever poorer.

Many ordinary men and women live in desperate conditions and last year a staggering 19.2 million people – or 13.4% of the population – were officially living in poverty .

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/inside-vladimir-putins-new-russia-9976578 – 3/6/2017

Belarus, Chechnya and Russia are virtual “mafia states” and Ukraine is going to be one. For each of those countries, one cannot differentiate between the activities of the government and organized crime groups. Economic influence, sooner or later always reaches political power. a key factor in a government’s ability to combat OC depends on the extent to which the country’s best attorneys and law firms represent the mafia.

The vory v zakone do not engage in racketeering and murder, preferring to distance themselves from this activity and focus on crimes that are further up in the hierarchy, such as corruption of high-level ministers. The level of power that vory v zakone operate at is indicated by their level of interaction with these public servants, because cabinet-level officials do not spend time with unimportant people and cannot be tempted by those who do not have something important to offer.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/para/russian-organized-crime.htm – 2/18/2017 by David Cay Johnston

Also:

http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_security_concerns_russian_mafia_back_on_agenda7083 – 7/25/2016 Republished in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/putin-welcomes-return-russian-mafia-484083 

–33–

Lunev’s 1998 Statement – Moscow and the Mob

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, American Domestic Affairs, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Russia, transnational crime

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I have no fear of death now whether it comes from cancer or from a paid Russian assassin.  but I do feel I have an obligation to use my experience to warn America of the dirty tricks that can be played against her.  And if I have one message for my adopted country, it is this: the Cold War is not over; the new cold war is between the Russian mafia and the United States; and in this new cold war, the Russian mafia has every tool, every weapon, every intelligence asset at its disposal that the old Soviet Union had.  America is facing a nation led by gangsters — gangsters who have nuclear weapons . . . .

Lunev, Stanislav and Ira Winkler.  Through the Eyes of the Enemy:  Russia’s highest ranking military defector reveals why Russia is more dangerous than ever.  Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998.

” . . . and some of those weapons are actually on American soil, as I will explain” finished the ellipses left in the quotation block.

One hesitates when typing such a sentence.

At minimum, the import calls for digression.

Was Lunev’s 1999 book disinforming as regards the “suitcase bomb” question?

Or has the matter been suppressed?

Or has the asserton been just too large and scary a possibility to hang on for long without donning the tinfoil hat?

That too is a possibility as searches for a related 60 Minutes report — “The Perfect Terrorist Weapon” — produces reference online, but to get at the episode appears to involve hitting one of dozens of iffy “torrent” type (illicit share site) web addresses.

BackChannels will plead with both the legal and faint of heart on that potentially disastrous next step — and not take it.

So one may toss Lunev’s page-turning statement into the “don’t know /won’t know” bin, at least, so BackChannels and its readers may hope, for a good long time.

Less questionable: the Russian state as a “mafia state” and international mafia enterprise:

Investigators in Spain have been at the vanguard of the fight against Russian organized crime, warning fellow NATO members for years of the dangers posed by what they call state-sanctioned syndicates, an issue that’s become more acute since the conflict in Ukraine rekindled Cold War distrust.

After a briefing by Grinda, one of the prosecutors, in Madrid in 2010, U.S. officials concluded that Putin runs a “virtual mafia” state where the activities of criminal networks are indistinguishable from those of the government, according to a classified cable from the U.S. embassy in the Spanish capital that was published by WikiLeaks.

Russian security services control criminal groups and use them to do things the government “cannot acceptably do,” Grinda was cited as telling U.S. officials at the time.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-29/putin-allies-aided-russian-mafia-in-spain-prosecutors-say – 6/29/2016.

At the base of this post is a 14-minute trailer for a 91-minute documentary (subtitled) about Russian mafia — “Thieves by Law (Ganavim Ba Hok).”

Additional Reference

CNN.  “Former Russian spy Col. Stanislav Lunev’s reaction to FBI agent’s arrest for spying.”  February 20, 2001.

Committee on National Security, Military Research and Development Subcommittee, House of Representatives.  “OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CURT WELDON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM PENNSYLVANIA, CHAIRMAN, MILITARY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT SUBCOMMITTEE”.  Inquiry into Moscow’s potential deployment of “man-portable nuclear weapons”.  August 4, 1998.

Drudge Report Archives.  “Lebed: 100 Nukes Missing in Russia.”  Norris Carden’s e-mail collection of Drudge’s Special Reports. September 5, 1997.

Meyer, Josh.  “Ex-Soviet Spy Testifies on Hidden Weapons.”  Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2000.

National Terror Alert.  “Suitcase Nukes”.

Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).  “The Perfect Terrorist Weapon.”  Comment on 60 Minutes program aired September 7, 1997.

Yablokov, Alexei.  “Comments on Russia’s Atomic Suitcase Bombs.”  Frontline, PBS, n.d.

PDF Format

Finckenauer, James O. and Yuri A. Voronin.  “The Threat of Russian Organized Crime.”  Issues in International Crime, NCJ, 2001.

Russia as Mafia State – Fast Links

In time, Louie and Z left the shores of the Atlantic for Zurich, Switzerland – and a far more menacing situation: A meeting with a high-ranking Russian General offering his government’s arsenal for sale.

“We’re talking long-range missiles, tanks, submarines, everything,” Z said.

The danger was driven home last week with the New York indictment of notorious Russian arms dealer Victor Boot, captured in Thailand in March. He was charged with selling weapons to a terrorist group to be used to kill Americans.

That’s hardly a scene from “The Sopranos.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/undercover-look-inside-the-russian-mob/ – 5/13/2008.

http://www.rferl.org/a/putins-mafia-statecraft/27329898.html – 10/27/2015.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/23/crimean-gangland-putin-s-seaside-mafia-state.html – 6/23/2015.

http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_security_concerns_russian_mafia_back_on_agenda7083 – 7/25/2016:

In the 1990s, the so-called “Russian Mafia” was Europe’s new nightmare, an overblown threat surging west into Europe instead of Soviet tanks. In the 2000s, it had become a cliché, the thriller-writer’s staple. Now it is back on the agenda, with serious concerns that organised crime has become a ‘fifth column’ of the Kremlin’s effort to undermine European security.

 

http://uatoday.tv/crime/mafia-friends-of-president-putin-wanted-in-spain-642267.html – 5/3/2016.

http://uatoday.tv/crime/seven-members-of-russian-mafia-arrested-in-spain-681260.html – 6/28/2016.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-29/putin-allies-aided-russian-mafia-in-spain-prosecutors-say – 6/29/2016.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/armine-sahakyan/the-export-other-countrie_b_11009200.html – 7/15/2016.

Wikipedia Entries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Lunev

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