Both MAGA and the Russian economy are being hammered. In both cases, rendering the truth of collapse is important to head off whataboutism
Whataboutism
Whataboutism or whataboutery denotes in a pejorative sense a procedure in which a critical question or argument is not answered or discussed, but retorted with a critical counter-question which expresses a counter-accusation.?
Hold on to that thought because in a real sense, both MAGA, and the boosters of the Russian economy in the mists of the Russian war with Ukraine have mastered this procedure to an art form . Whataboutery is used by MAGA every time an inconvenient truth is being raised,. whereas Russian officials whom wish to insist that the EU and America are the true losers in a tit for tat ratchet up of geo political tensions endlessly proclaim that the Kremlin due to extensive networking of energy to NON European economies can, at a wrist flick, raise umpteen resources to commence obtaining the means to destroy Ukraine
quote, from an August 2022 review and update
- Despite Putin’s delusions of self-sufficiency and import substitution, Russian domestic production has come to a complete standstill with no capacity to replace lost businesses, products and talent; the hollowing out of Russia’s domestic innovation and production base has led to soaring prices and consumer angst
- As a result of the business retreat, Russia has lost companies representing ~40% of its GDP, reversing nearly all of three decades’ worth of foreign investment and buttressing unprecedented simultaneous capital and population flight in a mass exodus of Russia’s economic base
- Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention to smooth over these structural economic weaknesses, which has already sent his government budget into deficit for the first time in years and drained his foreign reserves even with high energy prices – and Kremlin finances are in much, much more dire straits than conventionally understood
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You literally will NOT see this in the evening news. Russians especially in the DUMA are experts in Whataboutism or whataboutery
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- Russian domestic financial markets, as an indicator of both present conditions and future outlook, are the worst performing markets in the entire world this year despite strict capital controls, and have priced in sustained, persistent weakness within the economy with liquidity and credit contracting – in addition to Russia being substantively cut off from international financial markets, limiting its ability to tap into pools of capital needed for the revitalization of its crippled economy
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This is in tandem with the whataboutism and whatabotery used to hide MAGA's problems
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Altogether, it seems Trump is in more legal peril than ever before. His misconceptions about the criminal justice system and his supporters’ wishful thinking do not diminish the danger of indictment.
Trump’s lame overtures to Attorney General Merrick Garland to “reduce the heat” of the political fallout from the Mar-a-Lago search — while simultaneously insinuating that violence might occur if the Justice Department keeps pursuing him — is as disingenuous as it is utterly irrelevant to Garland. The Justice Department’s prosecutors and investigators certainly don’t care if Republicans are still enthralled with Trump. They will go after anyone who engages in acts of violence, as Garland made clear in his remarks last week in which he demanded that people stop impugning and threatening the FBI.
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That a lot of Trumps strategy and framework pretty much dictated the Whataboutism defense which has in the local level lead to hysteria about Obama allegedly taking classified documents too. Which is a lie. Not true
In both cases, the overlap of verbal defenses about the Russian economy and MAGA used to obscure the truth is startling and should be considered in itself evidence in a legal inquest in future hearings on both events
see this for the record
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The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama Presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). NARA moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama Presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, DC, area. As required by the PRA, former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.
In other words, there’s no parallel.
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We see whataboutism used to perpetuate the myth of an invincible Russian economy too. All done by similar types of people, for the obvious reasons
So see this for further inquiry
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Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy
118 Pages?Posted: 20 Jul 2022?Last revised: 2 Aug 2022Jeffrey Sonnenfeld
Yale School of Management
Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute
Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute
Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute
Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute
Date Written: July 19, 2022
Abstract
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters into its fifth month, a common narrative has emerged that the unity of the world in standing up to Russia has somehow devolved into a “war of economic attrition which is taking its toll on the west”, given the supposed “resilience” and even “prosperity” of the Russian economy. This is simply untrue – and a reflection of widely held but factually incorrect misunderstandings over how the Russian economy is actually holding up amidst the exodus of over 1,000 global companies and international sanctions.
That these misunderstandings persist is not surprising. Since the invasion, the Kremlin’s economic releases have become increasingly cherry-picked, selectively tossing out unfavorable metrics while releasing only those that are more favorable. These Putin-selected statistics are then carelessly trumpeted across media and used by reams of well-meaning but careless experts in building out forecasts which are excessively, unrealistically favorable to the Kremlin.
Our team of experts, using private Russian language and unconventional data sources including high frequency consumer data, cross-channel checks, releases from Russia’s international trade partners, and data mining of complex shipping data, have released one of the first comprehensive economic analyses measuring Russian current economic activity five months into the invasion, and assessing Russia’s economic outlook.
From our analysis, it becomes clear: business retreats and sanctions are catastrophically crippling the Russian economy. We tackle a wide range of common misperceptions – and shed light on what is actually going on inside Russia, including:
- Russia’s strategic positioning as a commodities exporter has irrevocably deteriorated, as it now deals from a position of weakness with the loss of its erstwhile main markets, and faces steep challenges executing a “pivot to Asia” with non-fungible exports such as piped gas
- Despite some lingering leakiness, Russian imports have largely collapsed, and the country faces stark challenges securing crucial inputs, parts, and technology from hesitant trade partners, leading to widespread supply shortages within its domestic economy
- Despite Putin’s delusions of self-sufficiency and import substitution, Russian domestic production has come to a complete standstill with no capacity to replace lost businesses, products and talent; the hollowing out of Russia’s domestic innovation and production base has led to soaring prices and consumer angst
- As a result of the business retreat, Russia has lost companies representing ~40% of its GDP, reversing nearly all of three decades’ worth of foreign investment and buttressing unprecedented simultaneous capital and population flight in a mass exodus of Russia’s economic base
- Putin is resorting to patently unsustainable, dramatic fiscal and monetary intervention to smooth over these structural economic weaknesses, which has already sent his government budget into deficit for the first time in years and drained his foreign reserves even with high energy prices – and Kremlin finances are in much, much more dire straits than conventionally understood
- Russian domestic financial markets, as an indicator of both present conditions and future outlook, are the worst performing markets in the entire world this year despite strict capital controls, and have priced in sustained, persistent weakness within the economy with liquidity and credit contracting – in addition to Russia being substantively cut off from international financial markets, limiting its ability to tap into pools of capital needed for the revitalization of its crippled economy
Looking ahead, there is no path out of economic oblivion for Russia as long as the allied countries remain unified in maintaining and increasing sanctions pressure against Russia, and The Kyiv School of Economics and McFaul-Yermak Working Group have led the way in proposing additional sanctions measures.
Defeatist headlines arguing that Russia’s economy has bounced back are simply not factual - the facts are that, by any metric and on any level, the Russian economy is reeling, and now is not the time to step on the brakes.
领英推荐
Download the visual slide deck accompanying this research monograph here: https://yale.box.com/s/7f6agg5ezscj234kahx35lil04udqgeo
Click here to read a brief summary of our research in Foreign Policy:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/22/russia-economy-sanctions-myths-ruble-business
Suggested Citation:
Sonnenfeld, Jeffrey and Tian, Steven and Sokolowski, Franek and Wyrebkowski, Michal and Kasprowicz, Mateusz, Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy (July 19, 2022). Available at SSRN:?https://ssrn.com/abstract=4167193?or?https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4167193
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whereas as to MAGA, see this
quote- This is from Steven Streitfeld??
1st degree connection
1st
Former Sr. Collector at Wells Fargo Business Credit
Now for what Steven posted, and thank you for doing it !
Trump And The GQP In Peril
by Jennifer Rubin
It is hard to keep track of all the criminal statutes that might apply to defeated former president Donald Trump regarding actions leading up to and after the 2020 election.
The media have lately focused on three statutes that Trump might have violated in retaining highly classified documents, as cited in the FBI search warrant for his Mar-a-Lago home: the Espionage Act; Section 1519 of the U.S. Code, relating to obstruction of an investigation; and Section 2071, relating to theft of government documents.
These potential violations could be on top of the potential charges regarding his phony elector scheme; his effort to pressure former vice president Mike Pence to illegally reject electoral votes; and his invitation and incitement of the crowd on Jan. 6, 2021. As to incitement, University of Chicago law professor emeritus Albert W. Alschuler, writing for Just Security, argues that Trump’s failure to act once the insurrection was underway and his 2:24 p.m. tweet further riling up the crowd against Pence might be powerful evidence against Trump on the charge of “aiding and abetting” the insurrection, since Trump had a legal duty to intervene.
And then, of course, there are the Georgia state criminal statutes that Trump might have violated in his effort to pressure state officials in Georgia to “find” just enough votes to flip the state’s election. Fani T. Willis, the district attorney for Fulton County, Ga., is moving full speed ahead with her investigation, with an eye on charges that could include conspiracy to commit voting fraud, interference with performance of an official’s duties and violation of Georgia’s racketeering law.
Considering the parade of witnesses appearing before the FBI, the federal grand jury and the grand jury in Georgia, prosecutors are no doubt collecting a mound of evidence against the former president. And the more witnesses who talk, the higher the risk that someone strikes a deal to incriminate Trump. The identification of Rudy Giuliani as a target in the Georgia investigation raises the potential that even Trump’s attorney might turn on him to avoid prosecution.
Altogether, it seems Trump is in more legal peril than ever before. His misconceptions about the criminal justice system and his supporters’ wishful thinking do not diminish the danger of indictment.
Trump’s lame overtures to Attorney General Merrick Garland to “reduce the heat” of the political fallout from the Mar-a-Lago search — while simultaneously insinuating that violence might occur if the Justice Department keeps pursuing him — is as disingenuous as it is utterly irrelevant to Garland. The Justice Department’s prosecutors and investigators certainly don’t care if Republicans are still enthralled with Trump. They will go after anyone who engages in acts of violence, as Garland made clear in his remarks last week in which he demanded that people stop impugning and threatening the FBI.
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And here is, for the record the insane reference to Obama and his post presidency stash of secrets
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The story behind Trump’s and Fox News’s specious ‘What about Obama’ parallel
Analysis by?Aaron Blake
Staff writer
Updated?August 12, 2022 at 2:39 p.m. EDT|Published?August 11, 2022 at 1:20 p.m. EDT
On few previous occasions has the Trump movement so embraced Stephen K. Bannon’s strategy (paraphrased here) of?flooding the zone with garbage?as after the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have pushed suggestions that President Biden himself ordered the search, that the FBI planted evidence, and posited all manner of other theories — all?without even the slightest?hints of evidence?to back up these suggestions.
But when it comes to the sheer embrace of innuendo and a concerted lack of logical consistency, it’s difficult to top the latest entry. And it’s?now led?to a highly unusual?rebuttal from the National Archives.
In recent days, Donald Trump and conservative media has debuted a new?whataboutism?defense: What about Obama?
Several Fox News shows on Wednesday picked up on?a New York Post column?that noted Barack Obama at the end of his presidency had 30 million records shipped to Chicago for his presidential library.
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“They shipped 30 million pages of sensitive and possibly classified materials to Chicago, and, by the way, he has yet to return any of it to the National Archives. Not one page,” Fox host Sean Hannity intoned. “So is his house about to get raided?”
Former Trump campaign legal adviser Harmeet Dhillon added on Jesse Watters’s show: “Are there SWAT teams descending on Chicago to get those documents? No. And so the double standard and triple standard here is very apparent.”
Watters added: “Now, Obama has got boxes of stuff in Chicago. ... But Trump is not allowed to have a love letter from little rocket man [Kim Jong Un]?”
Trump?and?Donald Trump Jr.?were also on the case,?promoting the New York Post’s story?on social media. And the elder Trump?was at it again both Thursday?and Friday, drawing a more direct comparison between his lot and what Obama supposedly did.
It’s the kind of thing that sounds superficially similar to someone with no base-level knowledge of how these processes work. They both have government documents! But it’s a ridiculous comparison wielded by people who in many cases probably know better.
The first thing to note is that the?New York Post’s piece?— an opinion column — doesn’t connect the dots and draw a parallel between Trump and Obama in the same way these pundits were so eager to do. It merely casts the Trump search as spotlighting alleged problems with the?Presidential Records Act?— the law at issue when it comes to documents Trump might have illegally stashed at Mar-a-Lago. It notes the Obama administration records that were shipped to Chicago have yet to be made available in digital form.
As with many issues of government transparency and document-sharing, it’s true that this is not great! You often have to wait years for requested documents, and this appears to be no exception. There was also plenty of?criticism of the decision to break with precedent and digitize the documents, rather than house them physically in a traditional library.
But that doesn’t mean it bears any resemblance to what prompted the Trump search. As was reported back in late 2016, the Obama team was?transferring the records to Chicago?through the National Archives, which legally owns the documents once a president leaves office. Once the documents ultimately reached a warehouse in Chicago, the Obama Foundation was then due to?pay the National Archives and Record Administration to digitize the documents. The lengthiness of that process aside, there isn’t the faintest hint of legal violations — nor does the New York Post’s story suggest as much.
The faintest hint of evidence, of course, is currently surplus to requirements on many portions of the right. Hannity stated conspiratorially that “they shipped 30 million pages of sensitive and possibly classified materials to Chicago,” without noting that the “they” included the National Archives.
The implication is that perhaps Obama, too, is surreptitiously obscuring his sensitive documents — but without being searched. But there’s no evidence he has hidden anything from the Archives or that he didn’t go through the processes required to share and protect those documents once they leave Washington.
And on Friday, after Trump raised the issue again, the Archives sought to put an end to the charade. It issued?a statement?outlining these facts and assuring that it has custody of classified documents:
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama Presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act (PRA). NARA moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama Presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, DC, area. As required by the PRA, former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the Presidential records of his Administration.
In other words, there’s no parallel.
In another unorthodox statement earlier this year, the Archives said on the record that it previously retrieved?15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago that should have been turned over to it, and The Washington Post has reported that some of those documents?were labeled classified and even “top secret.”?The search this week was geared toward other documents that should have been turned over but which the government believed to still be in Trump’s possession. There is a difference between having government documents and having government documents that you for some reason didn’t disclose to the Archives and/or perhaps aren’t sufficiently protecting.
There is actual evidence for a former president doing the latter. With the caveat that we still don’t know much about the evidence presented to obtain the search warrant, that’s the blindingly obvious reason that one ex-president was searched while the other wasn’t.
This post has been updated.
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Andrew Beckwith, PhD