Translated material
Message 2%
The current government is a follower of the revisionist Eduard Bernstein with his thesis "The ultimate goal is nothing, the movement is everything."
The stock market reacted to the Message and rose by 2%. And how else could he react to the idea of creating an association of student sports clubs (as a social lift - in addition to the Agency for Strategic Initiatives)? Only with restrained optimism...
"We are moving forward, far ahead of our ass"
Alexander Zinoviev, Yawning Heights, 1976
The stock market reacted to the Message and rose by 2%. And how else could he react to the idea of creating an association of student sports clubs (as a social lift - in addition to the Agency for Strategic Initiatives)? Only with restrained optimism and a barely hidden sarcastic smile…
For the first time since the Soviet era, the birth rate began to exceed the death rate, Vladimir Putin reported. Only those who were born, as well as their parents, will have a hard time with pensions: according to Standard & Poor's forecast, spending on the pension system in Russia will have to increase by force by 9.5% of GDP (of course, in the system that is imposed on us by power that actually nationalizes the funded element). By the way, here is another economic news not mentioned in the Address: in the outgoing year - and also for the first time! - the growth of the labor force has stopped. From next year and for decades to come, as the head of the Economic Expert Group Yevsey Gurvich notes, a long-term process of its reduction will begin.
In the conditions of global uneven development and intensified competition for resources and people, for our “state-civilization”, as Putin formulated after some ideologists of the Russian idea (before him there was only Leonid Ilyich, to whom his speechwriter Vadim Zagladin wrote in the report the phrase that that the Soviet state is a special civilization), there is only one way left - to increase spirituality at a faster pace. To begin with, however, every woman is downright obliged to give birth to three children - this should become the norm for Russia. (This is now the norm in a number of underdeveloped countries and in limited clusters of wealthy people in developed countries.)
It is necessary, Putin said, to create 25 million quality jobs. They will pull salaries with them. True, they are growing anyway - by 9% this year. And labor productivity - by 3%. That is, the growth of wages is three times higher than the growth of labor productivity. It's about the quality of jobs...
Well, once again about spirituality: “Today, Russian society is experiencing a clear shortage of spiritual bonds - mercy, sympathy, compassion for each other, support and mutual assistance - a shortage of what has always, at all historical times made us stronger, stronger than we have always been. were proud." One can hardly agree with this. Never in the history of Russia - the Soviet and post-Soviet period - did ordinary citizens so actively help each other, put out fires on their own, did not save people during natural disasters, did not help sick children and the elderly. None of this happened under Soviet rule. Even under Comrade Stalin, widely known for his morality and mercy. And none of this happened under the post-Soviet government: just the complete impotence and indifference of the state forced people to take on the functions of authorities at different levels. And the state is only able to pump up demand with money and take on social obligations, which it is able to fulfill only if a favorable commodity situation persists.
And then - an unexpected “toast to the Russian people”: “For the planet, we, regardless of our ethnicity, have been and remain a single people. I remember one of my meetings with veterans. There were people of different nationalities: Tatars, Ukrainians, Georgians, and Russians, of course. One of the veterans, a non-Russian by nationality, said: "For the whole world we are one people, we are Russians." So it was during the war, so it has always been. (Applause.) It's good that the Soviet Union collapsed. And then after such statements, he would have collapsed again ...
Well, about sports news and the weather. That is, about democracy: “Direct or indirect external interference in our internal political processes is unacceptable. A figure who receives money from abroad for his political activity and thereby serves, for sure, foreign national interests, cannot be a politician in the Russian Federation.
An improvisation joke: “I ask you to support legislative proposals to limit the rights of officials and politicians to foreign accounts, securities and shares. (Applause.) Wait for applause. You may not like everything yet. (Laughter in the hall.)"
At the moment when Vladimir Putin announced the “deoffshorization” of the economy, I was talking to a number of Russian economists. Yevgeny Gontmakher, who was nearby, immediately deciphered the message: the authorities needed a new source of money. Although, as Alexander Auzan noted, at present, business, faced with a deteriorating environment, does not take money into the shadows, but re-registers enterprises - only in another country. For example, in Kazakhstan...
During the period of nationalization and the use of Rosneftegaz for these schemes, the phrase that privatization should not resemble the loans-for-shares auctions of the 1990s somehow sounded strange. Still, the 90s could not do without ...
In short, "we have a lot of work to do, we always need it if we strive to move forward." It has always been so (see the epigraph).
The question of where to go after all, hung in the air. Probably, the current government is a follower of Eduard Bernstein, who was criticized in Marxist times, with his thesis “The ultimate goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” The theme of the development strategy has not been disclosed ...