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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia | |
| Russia 'humiliated' by primitive economy | |
| 2009-11-14 | |
| Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has criticized the country's raw-material based economy and urged a speedy modernization of the 'whole' system. Medvedev scolded the Soviet era economic and governance policies and pledged to overhaul the country's political and financial institutions which, he stated, have been built on a primitive infrastructure. The Russian leader who was delivering his annual state of the union address before the country's economic and political elite at the presidential palace at the Kremlin on Thursday, pledged to fight corruption, deal with "unprincipled" officers in law enforcement and called for a change in the country's foreign policy agenda. He also hinted at the possibility of liberalism without resorting to chaos and instability in Russia's polity, noting, "Instead of the archaic society, in which the leaders think and make decisions for everyone, we will be a country of intelligent, free and responsible people." In the long Thursday speech, Medvedev slammed the country's dependence on oil and natural gas revenues and branded the 'primitive' economic model of raw material exports as "humiliating" for the nation.
He also called for an increase in foreign investment and a complete overhaul of the socialist era military and civilian programs and said "We are interested in the flow of capital, new technologies and modern ideas." Russia is the world's largest non-OPEC producer of oil and natural gas and has suffered from the latest global economic downturn despite its early exit from the economic recession. | |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #4 No intellectual property rights, no intellectual property created. And the Chinese can undercut the Russians on pirated merchandise every time. |
| Posted by: ed 2009-11-14 12:54 |
| #3 If they still can't make a decent t-shirt then the typical Third World country is a leg up on them. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-11-14 09:34 |
| #2 'moose, As well as Central government of this kind leads to just exploiting raw materials the whole Marxist accounting system almost forces this. The concept is that nothing that does not have a human labor component has no value (i.e. a free-good) which sounds fine except it means that to cut costs you cut labor and exploit the "free" material. Therefore, you maximise profit by minimizing manufacturing and maximising raw material removal & sale. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2009-11-14 08:53 |
| #1 Medvedev has an interesting predicament. During the era of the Tsars, before Peter the Great, in Russia there was Moscow, and the parts of the country that were noblemen owned landholdings, worked by peasant slaves. Peter created St. Petersburg so that the country would have two centers, instead of just Moscow, but things were still terribly centralized. Stalin tried to force the building of new cities in the hinterland, but nobody wanted to live there. And, with the fall of communism, everybody wanted to move back to Moscow, which is where all the action is. The irony of this is that if you take the Trans Siberian railroad in summer, you will pass through hundreds upon hundreds of miles of what looks like Indiana, but all empty. Central government of this kind leads to just exploiting raw materials, instead of anything more complex, which requires lots more people "out there". And Russians don't "lure" very well, by prospects of a better life in the frontier, as do Americans, they tend to need to be forced to leave the cities. In short, Russia needs suburbs. As things stand right now, the country is like a cramped 10 story tall apartment building in the middle of a plowed field. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-11-14 07:59 |