I love our neighbors to the north:
Excellent!
by John Cole| 63 Comments
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Gay Rights are Human Rights, Sports
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Sports
9.7! MT "@jodiapplekay: !!!"@sochireport: Judging panel seating is complete! In Sochi the competition never stops. pic.twitter.com/59KIgPRxe8””
— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) February 7, 2014
Everybody’s a critic:
… The Games are a crowning moment for Mr. Putin, a chance to demonstrate anew his mastery of the global levers of power, but perhaps not for the country he governs. With Russia’s natural-resource dependent economy slowing as commodities prices fall, and with foreign investments drying up, the Kremlin has already signaled that it would have to cut spending. The $50 billion or so lavished on Sochi is becoming a political liability…
The sheer cost of the Games has suddenly become a liability even in a political system that allows little room for public debate about the wisdom of government spending.
“It is about a lost chance,” said Aleksei A. Navalny, whose Foundation for the Fight Against Corruption recently published an interactive website charting what critics have called excessive waste and corruption in the construction of the Olympic facilities. “It is about what Russia could have done with this money. We could have had a new industrialization along the same lines as the industrialization under Stalin.”
Instead, he added, “it’s just one crazy little czar who chose to throw money right and left in some kind of madness.”…
***********
Speaking of crazy little czars and non-stop complaining, what’s on the agenda for the start of the weekend?
Friday Evening Open Thread: Bitch, Bitch, BitchPost + Comments (95)
This post is in: Grifters Gonna Grift, Military, Decline and Fall, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?, Nobody could have predicted, Our Failed Political Establishment, Security Theatre
Via exceptionally sharp young journalist Taylor Dobbs, this story of the efficiency and national security value of military procurement:*
The Dayton Daily News reports that the Air Force has spent some $567 million to acquire 21 new Spartans since 2007, but has found that the Air Force does not have missions for many of the aircraft.
The planes had originally been acquired because of their ability to operate from unimproved runways. But sequestration forced the Air Force to re-think the airplane’s mission, and it determined that they were not a necessity, according to an analyst with the Project for Government Oversight.
…An Air Force spokesman said the program was “too near completion” to be able to terminate the program in a way that does not cost the taxpayers more than building the airplanes and sending them immediately to the boneyard.
An alternate headline would — should, in fact — go something like this: “Legislators Find Alternatives To Food Stamp Cuts”
Yeah…I’m dreaming.
One more thought: the fetishization of (genuinely brave and self-sacrificing) members of the military is cover for sh*t like this.
Image: Jan van Kessel, Birds on a Riverbank, 1655.
*Proper link added after initial brain bubbles led to blogger-failure, and then real life prevented repair for some time. Apologies.
Annals Of The Military Industrial ComplexPost + Comments (81)
This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs
Also Pussy Riot, kleptocrats, and ‘the Paris Hilton of Russia”. Fascinating, very readable reporting by Julia Ioffe, in TNR:
… After the economic collapse and chaos of the 1990s, Putin and the Russians had entered a tacit social compact: The government would provide stability and wealth, and the people would stay out of the government’s business. And, for the most part, well into the 2000s, everyone abided by it. Polls steadily indicated that some 80 percent of Russians thought they could not influence the political process, nor did they seem to care to. The state meticulously cleared the underbrush of civil society, leaving Russians atomized and isolated from one another. Putin’s popularity, meanwhile, was stratospheric, and it was real. The television was his television, and everyone who didn’t like it congregated in the Internet ghetto and cracked jokes.
But in 2008, Putin’s two terms as president ran out and his handpicked successor, Dmitry Medvedev, replaced him. Medvedev talked about modernizing the economy, fighting corruption, and easing up on the government’s routine harassment of small businesses. By 2009, when I’d moved back to Moscow (my family had emigrated to the United States in 1990), there was even a kind of renaissance in the liberal media ghetto. Russian journalists I met and became friends with were less afraid. New media outlets were popping up, both online and off, including Dozhd TV. Dark things were still happening: The horrific death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in prison after he uncovered a massive government corruption scheme, the savage beating of journalist Oleg Kashin, the continued imprisonment of Khodorkovsky and many of his former colleagues. It was Russia, after all. But it felt like it was—slowly, gingerly—becoming a gentler, more modern country.
And then on September 24, 2011, at a convention of Putin’s ruling United Russia Party, Medvedev—looking very much like a man who’d spent the night crying—mounted the podium and nominated Vladimir Putin to run for president. I was in the press section up by the rafters, and I remember being almost as stunned as Andrei Kolesnikov, who traveled around with Putin for one of Russia’s biggest dailies. As I wrote at the time, Kolesnikov had not seen it coming and, despite his job—he was virtually Putin’s hagiographer—it was clearly not welcome news. “This,” he said faintly, “is for keeps.”
The Russian constitution had already been changed to lengthen the presidential term from four to six years, and people grasped immediately what Medvedev’s announcement meant. Looking down at the Twitter feed on my phone as the speechifying went on, I saw despair and bitterness beyond Internet snark, beyond jokes. Instead, everyone was doing the math: How old would they be in 2024 when Putin would, theoretically, leave office? People my age had already spent their twenties with the man, and another twelve would put them well into middle age. Others realized they’d be pensioners. It was a strange way to measure mortality.
But more than anything, it was insulting. “It said very clearly to everyone that the question of government in Russia is, at most, a question to be resolved between two people,” and, more likely, one, explained Gleb Pavlovsky, a political consultant who had helped Putin win his first presidential election, in 2000. “I didn’t think it would be done so stupidly and so provocatively. They spit in people’s faces.”
The protests came soon after that…
Long Read: Internet Hamsters & “The Loneliness of Vladimir Putin”Post + Comments (32)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 67 Comments
This post is in: War
James Fallows has been writing all week about the reception given Sgt. Cory Remsburg, who was terribly wounded during his 10th deployment in Afghanistan, during the State of the Union speech. Here’s his first reaction:
But while that moment reflected limitless credit on Sgt. Remsburg, his family, and others similarly situated; and while I believe it was genuinely respectful on the president’s part, I don’t think the sustained ovation reflected well on the America of 2014. It was a good and honorable moment for him and his family. But I think the spectacle should make most Americans uneasy.
The vast majority of us play no part whatsoever in these prolonged overseas campaigns; people like Sgt. Remsburg go out on 10 deployments; we rousingly cheer their courage and will; and then we move on. Last month I mentioned that the most memorable book I read in 2013 was Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain. It’s about a group of U.S. soldiers who barely survive a terrible encounter in Iraq, and then are paraded around in a halftime tribute at a big Dallas Cowboys game. The crowd at Cowboys Stadium cheers in very much the way the Capitol audience did last night—then they get back to watching the game.
All of his follow ups (here, here and here) are worth reading.
The only thing I can add is that it the insane number of tours these soldiers are serving hurt soldiers in ways other than wounds. The daughter of one of our neighbors was married to a soldier who did a huge number of tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I’m sure that’s a big part of the reason they’re now divorced, even though he’s avoided injury so far (knock wood).
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Sports
Steven Lee Myers, “acting bureau chief of The Times’s Moscow bureau…at work on a biography of Vladimir Putin”, takes a gentle ramble through Putin’s Potemkin village:
… “This is one of the biggest frauds of the Olympics,” Boris Nemtsov said about the new road and railway, and the whole Sochi project, he says, is the biggest fraud in Russia’s history, “maybe even the biggest in human history.” Now 54, Nemtsov was once one of the brightest stars of the democracy movement that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union. A mathematician and a physicist with a Ph.D. that he defended when he was only 25, he became involved in politics by protesting plans to build a nuclear reactor after the Chernobyl disaster. In 1991, he was appointed governor of Nizhny Novgorod, the formerly closed city of Gorky, and served until 1997, when Boris Yeltsin drafted him to join his government. He was so popular — young, handsome, intelligent — that he was widely discussed as a potential successor for the ailing Yeltsin. Those prospects crashed with the Russian economy in 1998 and, a year later, with the unexpected ascension of Putin. The two occasionally worked together in the beginning, but Nemtsov turned fierce critic after the arrest of the oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003. He has since vehemently attacked Putin’s authoritarian instincts and the heavy hand of the security organs and has been arrested three times for taking part in anti-Putin protests.
“What is really interesting is that Putin believes nobody knows about the corruption,” Nemtsov said over dinner in Moscow. It’s not for Nemtsov’s lack of trying. In a report he co-wrote and distributes at political protests, he noted that Russian Railways contracted the bulk of the road and railway project to two companies, including one that is now partly owned by a businessman named Gennady Timchenko, who has longstanding connections to Putin. Nemtsov also claims that 15 percent of the entire Olympic budget went to companies owned by the brothers Rotenberg, Arkady and Boris, who were Putin’s friends and judo partners when they were coming of age in the 1960s. After Putin’s rise to power, they advanced in the ranks of Russia’s oligarchs. In an interview with The Financial Times in 2012, Arkady Rotenberg defended his friendship and said he had not used it for personal gain. “I have great respect for this person,” he said of Putin, “and I consider that this is a person sent to our country from God.”
Every Olympics costs more than the initial projections, but Russia’s costs have increased more than fourfold since Putin’s initial estimate of $12 billion. As Nemtsov figures, because most games typically double in cost, the difference in Russia — $25 billion to $30 billion — can be attributed to outright thievery. “This is a festival of corruption,” he said. And he argued that everything — from the choice of Sochi, to the design of the buildings, to the contracts parceled out — was effectively controlled by Putin. “There was no public discussion about the place. Zero. Not even one discussion in Parliament. Zero. No discussion on Putin TV, the zombie box. It was completely closed.”.
In December, a scientist and environmentalist named Yulia Naberezhnaya agreed to meet in Sochi, but only after certain precautions were taken to protect the now-secret location of her organization, the Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus, which has been chronicling the abuses done to a fragile biosphere by the preparations for the Olympics. The alliance’s office in a nearby town was raided by security services in March, as was the home of one of its members, Vladimir Kimayev. Its leader, Andrei Rudomakha, was detained in October along with Naberezhnaya, as they were on their way to the office in Sochi… “We are not a powerful-enough organization to fight the state,” Naberezhnaya told me. “The only thing we can do is raise hell, and then see what happens. And even that is being taken away from us.”
Naberezhnaya asked that a colleague and I meet her at a bus stop in Bytkha, a working-class neighborhood that climbs into the hills along the coast and is likely to be trod by few, if any, of the visitors who come for the Olympics. It was already dark when we arrived, and she appeared at the bus stop a few minutes later. She took us on a rambling walk through darkened streets and alleys before we arrived at the back of a Soviet-era apartment building, with an expansive view of Sochi’s center and the mountains cast in silvery moonlight. An old shed had been converted into a crude apartment, sparsely furnished and occupied most of the time by a lone cat. Stacked around were boxes of campaign literature for Yabloko, one of the oldest democratic parties in Russia, to which many of the environmentalists also belong. It is here that Naberezhnaya is finishing work, in virtual collaboration with the alliance’s now-scattered members, on a final report on the environmental impact wrought not only by the Olympics but also by the rapacious development underway in the region’s protected parks, including a supposed research center above Sochi that is widely believed to be a personal mountain resort, replete with helipads and several Swiss-style chalets, for Putin.
She cited a new law that was proposed by the Kremlin and dutifully adopted by both houses of Parliament in November 2007, effectively superseding all other relevant laws regarding the use of environmentally sensitive areas. “The territory planning documentation for the location of Olympic facilities shall be approved without holding public hearings,” the law declared….
Human Rights Watch and other groups like the Environmental Watch on the North Caucasus have chronicled a range of abuses, including the gross exploitation of migrant laborers, many of them shuttled in from abroad. While Russian officials dispute the accusations of corruption, the evidence has mounted to the point that even a member of the International Olympic Committee, Gian-Franco Kasper, told Switzerland’s SRF radio this month that roughly a third of the spending on the games had been lost to embezzlement…
The pictures at the link are really impressive, too.
Long Read: “Putin’s Olympic Fever Dream”Post + Comments (46)
This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Sports
(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)
You know things are looking dicey for the Games when NBC mixes its uplifting celebration of feisty, spirited, advertiser-friendly (American) athletes with discussion of ‘delicate challenges’:
A catastrophic terrorist strike at the Sochi Winter Olympics would present the United States with a logistically mind-boggling and diplomatically delicate challenge: How to get more than 200 American athletes safely out of Russia.
U.S. military officials have described plans to use two warships in the Black Sea and planes already on standby in Europe to evacuate Americans if the worst fears of security experts come true…
But at least part of the American contingent for Sochi, the skiing and snowboard teams, is paying a private company, Global Rescue, for additional security.
The company promises communications help, “rally points” for athletes to shelter in place and ways to get them around, or out of, Sochi. Dan Richards, the CEO, said in an interview that Global Rescue has six aircraft that it could “utilize for rapid response.”…
Richards would not say what the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association is paying for the additional protection. The skiers and snowboarders are among the richer American teams…
A large-scale attack would trigger almost unimaginable complications, said Weiss, the Russia expert.
For example: At least 85 countries and 2,500 athletes are taking part in the games. Sochi has a fairly small airport, so who gets to fly out first? And why should the Americans be given priority?
“Something that looks like the U.S. cavalry riding to rescue Russia or Vladimir Putin from an attack seems — well, it’s just hard to imagine that happening,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s all on Russia.”
Russia, of course, is doing its best, per the Washington Post:
… Putin has deployed up to 60,000 police personnel, troops and special forces to Sochi — double the number Britain enlisted in London for the 2012 Summer Games. The security services have the technology in place to monitor phone calls, e-mails and Internet activity in Sochi, among Russians and foreigners alike. In November, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev gave an order permitting the collection of telephone and e-mail metadata from foreign journalists, Olympic officials and athletes, according to journalists here. The Pentagon has offered air and sea support, including two Navy ships in the Black Sea, if needed….
“It’s a really tough gig,” said Mark Galeotti, a scholar of Russian crime and security at New York University who is in Moscow. “It’s not a particularly easy place to police and control. They are hoping quantity will substitute for quality. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”…
“They are sending the boys out to kick down doors of everyone who has ever been a friend of a terrorist,” Galeotti said, “on the theory that if people are afraid of being shot or arrested, they might not be talking about perpetrating dark deeds in Sochi.”…
Which hasn’t stopped some Highly Placed Sources from bitching in public, per the Guardian:
… But some US politicians complained on Sunday that the Russians were not telling US intelligence enough about threats from militant groups operating in the region. “We don’t seem to be getting all of the information we need to protect our athletes in the games,” Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the US House of Representatives intelligence committee, told CNN.
“They’re not giving us the full story about what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups – the terrorist groups who have had some success – are they still plotting?” Rogers said…
Of course, Mike Rogers had some other very strong opinions on those same Sunday shows:
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Sunday condemned former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden as a “thief” and said he may have had help from Russia.
“I believe there’s a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB agent in Moscow,” said Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former head of the Russian security service. “I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”…
The Norwegian men’s curling team are poised to show off a new round of “crazy, funky pants… more outrageous than ever”, but there is no way our homegrown Republicans are going to let those Vikings steal the title of Biggest Clowns of the 2014 Games.