Obama Has Played Liberal Jews For The Fools They Are and The Same For Blacks and Americans in General! Being Heartless Is A Shanda! Being President!

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Was Obama's plan all along to substitute America's relationship with Israel with Iran?

Liberal Jews still do not comprehend Obama is not  only not their friend but also played them for suckers and they fell for it and continue to do so.

The sadder part is these same liberals , if they give a damn,  do not understand the price/bill Israel, and  ultimately all Jews, might  pay is yet to be presented and could come by way of a nuclear bomb compliments of Iran as they take over the Middle East..

When you are taken for granted you lose leverage.  

Black Americans have yet to learn this simple logic as well and consequently, they continue to pay a price for their misplaced loyalty. Moynihan warned them and they called him  a racist.

The same is true for Americans in general who trust Obama's failure to depict radical Islamists for who they are and lamentably believe Iran does not intend to control The Middle East and will be prevented from obtaining nuclear bombs. (See 1,1a and 1b below.)

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I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Gulfstream Aviation yesterday and was taken on a tour of their mamouth facility where their new Corporate Jet is being assembled.

I discussed with the Vice President, who led our group, about the company's labor force, which is non-union, how the company treats and compensates their workers etc.

Gulfstream appears to be the epitome of the best Capitalism offers. The company is also a great corporate citizen and thus,  a very positive force in Savannah.

After my visit, I read these articles (See 2 and 2a below) and began to think about the recent labor report which continued to suggest the nation's economic recovery is one of the weakest in recent history.

There are many and varied reasons in my opinion and among them is the uncertainty caused by government's overpowering intrusion into every facet of our lives and politicians unwilling to pay for anything.

Undefined and penalizing over board regulation creates uncertainty and thus restraints on increased employment and economic activity. 

There is no doubt Obama's aggressive distaste for our Constitution has to be unsettling and add to that his many policy failures and lies told to defend them and that has to be a disturbing fact weighing on people's minds..

So much of any economic recovery is a function of a collective psyche and I maintain it is not favorable and will remain so until after the election and will only worsen if Hillary (yes I used her first name) is elected.

As I have noted there are so many structural reasons why our recovery has been weak and I believe poor education is also a factor and I see nothing, on the political horizon, which offers much hope matters will change in this regard.  

The idea that more money is always the answer has worn thin and proven to be a myth but the politically correct crowd perpetuates this ruse because it is convenient and proves effective since politicians love to spend everyone else's money.

Furthermore, if you are against spending more on a problem you come across as, and are vulnerable to being called, heartless. Since liberals are all heart being heartless is a "shanda!"

"Getting and spending we lay waste our powers" because we are more likely to destroy ourselves than will others.

Meanwhile, is there hope Jews and Blacks will desert Democrats and become a voting block to be enticed? I see nothing convincing such is in the offing.

As for Hispanics, they and Greens have become Democrat groups of choice.  This is another reason why Obama is unwilling to lift a finger to redress our vulnerable borders and restrain illegal immigration.  In fact, many hundreds of thousands are being given legal identification documents (driver's licenses) so they will be able to vote with the presumption they will repay Obama by casting for Democrats. Obama has ignored resolving illegal immigration and has actually encouraged its increase through entitlements. This may serve his party but it will metastasize into a dangerous problem  for America. 

I am not opposed to immigration. I simply believe a nation that refuses to protect its borders puts itself at dire risk and therefore, we need to rationalize our immigration policies.

As our population ages and those nearing retirement find themselves having under saved that is not an encouraging sign. 

Far too many public pension funds are underfunded and either cuts are likely or taxes will be raised further depressing recovery prospects. (See 2a below.)

In conclusion, I am not suggesting our economy is not in a recovery mode, I simply maintain it will be more subdued. We may deserve better but we brought much of our problem(s) on ourselves. We are still a largely free people and can turn the ship of state around but, if we continue along the course we have allowed our leaders to set, this opportunity will slip away.
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Switching to actual politics, two of the more unlikely Republican candidates, among a horde of yet to announce ones, have made known they are running and immediately the press  and media piranhas began their atttacks.

If any republican candidate thinks he will receive fair treatment they do not deserve consideration to be nominated and if the same goes for allowing the turf on which they play to be defined by others.

Republicans must take the offensive and stop playing defensive.

As for the presidency, there is no prior job that totally qualifies any candidate to be president because being president entails a foreign policy component. Rarely do candidate ever has these opportunities for this qualification. (Hillary comes closest but has nothing to show for it beyond failures)   

What voters should look for is administrative ability and accomplishments, a personality that evokes humor, honesty, a personalhistory of integrity and  genuine believability, a mind unmistakably bright. and a temperament even and solid.  Communicative skills are necessary to convey the message and the message should be lacking in fluff and signifies well thought out reasoning and balance.

In my opinion, background as a governor is useful and for a member of Congress a record of achievement by way of legislative enactments and service as Chairperson of significant Committees 
should be another criteria.

Some of our best presidents possessed this background but not all. In a more modern sense, I submit FDR, Eisenhower,  Johnson, Ford,  Reagan, the two Bushes qualify as did 
"Bill" Clinton.  Truman, Nixon, Kennedy, Carter and Obama did not.  In retrospect Johnson was not a total success, Truman, Nixon,Ford and Clinton outshone in many aspects but had flaws. Kennedy's tenure was tragically cut short and his flaws were hidden. Carter and Obama should never have been elected.

Based on the above I find Hillary totally disqualified, Cruz and Paul too inexperienced, Bush and Walker meet some of the criteria as does Huckabee.  Rubio is bright but inexperienced yet, more than capable of growth.  Fiorina has some of the attributes and certainly could do well as a second on the ticket. 

It should be a Republican year but too early to tell.

That said, as always, in the final analysis you pays your money and takes your chance. 
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Russia visits containment .  This time, its own! (See 3 below.)
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My  previous posting of the implementation of 'dhimmitude' as part of Obamacare is not factual as I feared.  The bill does not say anything specific by way of exclusions by naming various religions etc.

Several friends and memo readers called my hand.
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Dick

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1) Honey, I Shrunk the Jews!

By Lee Smith 

Almost as soon as the White House reached the nuclear framework agreement with Iran, it began sending out senior administration officials to brief domestic allies and rivals in order to sell the deal. The president himself called Speaker of the House John Boehner, while National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power got other legislators on the phone. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz made the administration’s case for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Agreement over the weekend on the Sunday talk shows. Guess who didn’t get briefed.

Well, not exactly. Key Jewish community leaders did get a briefing—not from the president or the secretary of state or the national security adviser, but from Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Colin Kahl. One participant told CNN that the call went smoothly. “There were definitely pointed questions,” said the source, “but it was very respectful.”

Maybe CNN’s source was biting his tongue, or perhaps he just doesn’t get the joke. Kahl was the administration official who removed the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel from the 2012 Democratic platform. And it was as a scholar at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Center for New American Security that Kahl floated a 2013 trial balloon hinting that the administration’s policy was, contrary to President Barack Obama’s promises, not prevention of an Iranian nuclear bomb but containment and deterrence of it. As it turns out, this was the exact same policy Kahl outlined to American Jewish leaders last week, in what amounts in policy circles to a victory lap.

It’s a pretty nasty joke the White House played. But even if Kahl didn’t have a long personal history as the administration’s point man on the downgrade Israel beat, the fact that Obama sent the vice president’s aide to brief Jewish leaders on an issue of vital concern to them suggests how little the commander in chief now respects or fears the power of a community he once courted so assiduously. 

For instance, there was the famous 2009 conference call during which he told a gathering of community leaders that it was in the best interests of Israel as well as the United States to put some “daylight” between the White House and Jerusalem. Having been warned nearly six years ago, in person, it should hardly come as a surprise to those same American Jewish leaders that it’s now daytime.

The vanishing political import of the American Jewish community appears to have taken least some of its leaders—used to Oval Office sit-downs and plenty of concerned hand-holding—by surprise. But you can bet it didn’t take Obama six years to comprehend the political import of James Baker’s famous observation about the Jewish community’s voting patterns. If, as the former secretary of state once said, “F— the Jews; they don’t vote for us anyway,” Obama saw the flip-side of Baker’s crude insight: The president could stick it to the Jews, since they’d vote for Democrats no matter what.

Obama was able to hammer away at AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby largely because the liberal segments of the Jewish community found it convenient to believe that Obama’s target was just Benjamin Netanyahu, the stubborn and arrogant right-wing prime minister who drove decent people crazy. Sure, Bibi speaks proper English and went to MIT. But he built housing in settlements, he didn’t end the occupation, he stopped pretending to negotiate with a partner who also stopped being willing to pretend to negotiate, and then he made public his disagreement about Obama’s Iran deal, and spoke to Congress, to boot. Whatever stresses existed in the American-Israeli relationship were clearly Bibi’s fault. If he stopped being such a jerk, then good American Jewish liberals like themselves would all be eating latkes in the White House again.

What these community leaders seemed not to have fully understood is that American Jewish political power is linked not just to the financial power of Jewish donors or the influence of Jewish voters in a few key cities but more fundamentally to the strategic importance of the American-Israel relationship. What they certainly did not see is that tension with Bibi served Obama very nicely in a much bigger strategic move, which was the main aim of Obama’s Middle East policy since 2009: namely, to downgrade the U.S. alliance with Israel in order to make room for America’s new can-do regional partner, Iran.

The hardly coincidental byproduct of Obama’s dramatic and far-reaching Middle East realignment is that the American Jewish community is getting a down-grade. The irony of course is that the more distance the American Jewish community puts between themselves and the Jewish national homeland, the less they matter to anybody on either side of the American political divide or in Israel. That’s just basic political math. The fact that the American Jewish community flunked its political math test is why the White House sent Colin Kahl to deal with Jewish community leaders—as far as Obama is concerned, it’s addition by subtraction.

1a) Negotiating in the Middle East

By Sherwin Pomerantz

In what can only be called a surprise move, former U.S. Secretaries of State Kissinger and Schultz co-authored an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal criticizing the framework agreement reached in Switzerland last week with Iran.

In their analysis they posit that the framework agreement with Iran effectively concedes any option of using military force to compel Iranian compliance.  To quote: “Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of UN resolutions, Iran has gradually turned the negotiation on its head.  Iran’s centrifuges have multiplied from about 100 at the beginning of the negotiation to almost 20,000 today. The threat of war now constrains the West more than Iran.”

“While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point officially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for 10 years Iran will never be further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be significantly closer.”

Seeing this I realized that the gulf that has developed between Israel and the U.S. regarding how each views this situation is really caused by the failure of the U.S. and the West to understand the negotiating mentality of the Middle East.

As Kissinger and Schultz rightly note the West saw Iran’s coming to the table as a major concession and, therefore, felt obligated to make whatever concessions it had to make in order to come to some agreement.  But Iran came to the table because the economic sanctions were crippling their economy and making life miserable for the Iranians.  They did not deserve any gifts just for agreeing that they had been beat.  Rather the screws should have been applied to accomplish the stated goal of preventing nuclear arms development.  The West did not understand this but Israel did, and so did many of our neighbors in the region.

Israel knows that in this part of the world when you enter negotiations you make as many outlandish demands as possible with both sides knowing full well that many of those demands are simply unreasonable, but are able to be conceded during the negotiation.  If you don’t go into negotiations with such demands, you simply have nothing to concede.  So when Netanyahu says now that the West should not sign a final accord with Iran unless Iran acknowledges Israel’s right to exist, he knows full well that they can never do that as it would be against the basic religious tenets of the mullahs who run the country.  The same is true for demanding a full stop of their nuclear development capabilities, that is also not realistic.  But that needs to be the starting point of negotiations with an adversary in this part of the world.

The West on the other hand, led by U.S. Secretary of State Kerry but smartly challenged from time to time by the French, went into the negotiations seeing the Iranian side as elucidated by Kissinger and Schultz that “Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate as a concession.”  By agreeing with that point, and entering the discussion in that state of mind the West projected weakness to the Iranians and the Iranians took advantage of it.

In a word, we who live here survive in a souk mentality where everything is a negotiation, where each side starts with outlandish claims they know will never be realized and where, even after the negotiation there is often a re-negotiation, as there will surely be with this framework agreement as well. 

There is an old story about a negotiation for a price that went on here for hours and, after it was concluded and a price of 650 was agreed upon for the item in question, the buyer began to pay the seller in Israeli Shekels to which the seller responded, “Shekels?  I thought we were talking about dollars.”  At which point, of course, the negotiation began anew.

This is what Netanyahu understands and what Obama fails to internalize.  We do not live in a world where moderation and compromise are the watchwords.  We live in a world where the last thing anyone wants to be is a frier, which, in Hebrew means a sucker.  You never walk away from a deal thinking you have been made a sucker.  In this case the West simply does not realize yet that they have been suckered by Iran

1b)

The Incredible Obama Doctrine

Speak softly and claim to carry a big stick, which you have no intention of ever using

By Daniel Henninger

Last weekend, with the ink on the Iran nuclear deal still being deciphered, the ObamaDoctrine fell out of an interview between President Obama and Thomas Friedman of theNew York Times.

“You asked about an Obama doctrine,” Mr. Obama said. “The doctrine is: We will engage, but we preserve all our capabilities.”

In nine words, Mr. Obama explained what has been going on the past six years, culminating in what we now see is the nucleus of the Obama worldview, an accommodation with Iran.

The corollary of the Obama Doctrine, as the president explained, is that if engagement with a hostile power turns dangerous, everyone in the world knows that U.S. “military superiority” will emerge and prevail. In case of emergency, Uncle Sam will break glass.

Mr. Obama then offered an example of how this would work—U.S. support for Israel: “What we will be doing even as we enter into this deal is sending a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there.”

This statement, and indeed the Obama Doctrine, is a hoax.

Set aside that “messes with Israel” and “America will be there” are phrases with no real operational meaning.

“America will be there” could mean that if someone set off a nuclear backpack bomb in Tel Aviv, where the Obama administration would be the next day is on New York’s east side, condemning the attack in a U.N. Security Council resolution.

Any American foreign-policy doctrine needs interpretive wiggle room for the commander in chief. But anyone would assume that the phrase “America will be there” refers to the deployment of what Mr. Obama invokes as “our military superiority.”

Unless it doesn’t.

In the case of the Obama presidency, it doesn’t. There is next to no chance that this president under any circumstance—and that would include China’s invasion of Taiwan—will use the U.S. military on the scale he implies here.

Dick Cheney said Tuesday Mr. Obama is the worst foreign-policy president ever. Sen.Lindsey Graham said Sunday Hillary Clinton would be better. Personalizing criticism of the Obama foreign policy like this is a mistake.

It is a mistake to suggest U.S. foreign policy is weak only because Barack Obama is running it. On the cusp of a presidential election, the more pertinent question is whether U.S. foreign policy is weak because a Democrat is running it.

Would U.S. foreign policy be substantively different if run by a President Clinton or President Warren or President O’Malley?

Mr. Obama’s “doctrine” is essentially that if something bad happens, he will send in the 82nd Airborne Division. But he won’t. No Democrat whose view of large-scale U.S. military power was formed by the Vietnam War or the Iraq War will do that. Other than aerial bombardments, using the full range of U.S. military assets ended for Democrats with the Johnson presidency.

The last Democrat in that earlier tradition, former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, was expelled from the party precisely for this reason. The assertion today that they can take risks because of overwhelming U.S. power is a public-relations bluff.

Put it this way: Any conceivable Democratic presidential candidate would associate withTeddy Roosevelt’s foundational dictum—Speak softly and carry a big stick. That sounds like the Obama Doctrine, or what Hillary Clinton and progressive foreign-policy pundits call “smart” power. But the reality of modern Democrat foreign policy is—Speak softly and claim to carry a big stick, which you have no intention of ever using.

To understand the bluff, look closely at the Democrats’ Doctrine on paper or in practice, and you’ll notice that it’s always prospective. It promises to act at some point in the future if circumstances become so dire that they oblige the U.S. to “overwhelm” the problem with superior power. Never has there been a bigger “if.”

This verbal reassurance always gets rolled forward to the horizon, never quite arriving at a decision to coerce adversary behavior. “Smart” policy means stringing together endless casuistic reasons for not acting.

Instead, their real imperative is to temporize with high-minded “talks”—at the U.N., with allies, enemies, even with our own bureaucratic selves, as with the inability in 1996 to attribute blame for the Khobar Towers bombing.

U.S. responses to the crises in Ukraine and Syria are case studies of the “overwhelming-power” bluff. The Iran deal, a monument to talk, is its apotheosis.

The Democratic Party’s promise of threat when set against its doctrinal aversion to act means it is not credible, and so it is dangerous. It is dangerous because it incentivizes opportunists like Vladimir Putin or Islamic State’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to act, knowing the U.S. will wait for the “mess” to build into a crisis beyond control. At that point, the U.S.’s options collapse to two—the massive, indiscriminate use of U.S. military power. Or losing.

The Obama Doctrine has been conventional Democratic foreign policy since the presidential election of 1972. It is not going to change in 2016.

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2) Heritage Foundation's Stephen Moore: 'Government Discourages Work'

By Dan Weil

Stephen Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, offers an interesting description of weakness in the job market.

"The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor ‎force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers," he writes on Forbes.com.

The labor force participation rate matched a 37-year low of 62.7 percent last month, but unemployment totaled only 5.5 percent, a seven-year low. 

"While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high in certain sectors," such as mechanics, computer technicians and nurses, Moore says. "The shortage of trained employees and of low-skilled employees willing to work," represent major problems now. 

Moore sees four obstacles for increasing employment.

• "First, government discourages work. Welfare consists of dozens of different and overlapping federal and state income support programs.
• "Second, our public school systems often fail to teach kids basic skills.
• "Third, negative attitudes toward blue collar work. I’ve talked to parents who say they are disappointed if their kids want to become a craftsman instead of going to college.
• "Fourth, a cultural bias against young adults working."

2a)Rahm’s Second Chance

Chicago’s mayor should join Bruce Rauner in a reform double team.

Teachers and other public unions targeted Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for re-election defeat, and for a while it looked like they might succeed. Mr. Emanuel’s victory Tuesday is good news for America’s Second City, assuming he isn’t cowed by the attempted liberal coup.

Mr. Emanuel defeated Cook County Board Commissioner and Chicago Teachers Union favorite Jesus “Chuy” Garcia 55% to 44%. Mr. Emanuel had faced off with the unions in a showdown that included a 2012 teachers strike and the closing of some 50 underused and underperforming public schools. Mr. Emanuel conceded raises of 16% over four years, but union enmity continued when the mayor pushed for more charter schools.

Over his first term Chicago added 35 charters for a total of 138 serving 57,000 students, according to the Illinois Network of Charter Schools. The teachers union contract expires again in June and Mr. Emanuel’s re-election offers a liberation moment. The former White House chief of staff might as well borrow his own famous advice and not let a crisis go to waste. Why not call for a city-wide school voucher plan?

The mayor’s other big issue is the city’s public pensions, which threaten to engulf the budget. In 2012 he testified in Springfield for a 10-year break on cost of living adjustments and an increase in worker contributions to their own pension plans.

The unions hated him for that too, but someone has to act. Last month Moody’s cut Chicago’s rating to Baa2, within shouting distance of junk status. The city has some $20 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and next year it will have to find an extra $600 million from its budget for retirees.

Those issues, plus reviving economic growth, are also new Republican Governor Bruce Rauner’s agenda for all of Illinois. The mayor and GOP Governor are friends, and the best news for the city and state would be if they joined forces to tackle the problems of slow growth and out-migration, unaffordable pensions, and rotten schools. That might even make Mr. Emanuel’s re-election worth his trouble.

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3) Amid an Economic Crisis, Russia Contains Dissent

Summary

With Russia entering its second recession in six years, the country's economic and financial hardships are starting to weigh on the Russian people and regional governments. In times of severe economic crisis, such as those in 1905 and 1998, the Russian populace and regional authorities traditionally react against federal authority, fragmenting the country. Those in power in Moscow understand this and are taking measures to ensure that they counter and prevent any social or regional backlash and dissent.

Analysis

The Russian economy has been in steep decline for more than a year and is slipping into another recession. A constellation of factors is causing the decline, including lower oil prices, the West's sanctions and sour Western investment attitudes because of the Ukraine crisis. This has led to massive capital flight of $160 billion in 2014 and an estimated $80 billion in 2015, a volatile ruble that lost 40 percent of its value in late 2014, and a likely federal budget deficit of approximately $45 billion in 2015.

The Russian people are starting to feel the pain. In March, inflation skyrocketed from just under 7 percent the previous month to nearly 17 percent. According to a Levada poll, Russians see inflation as the most acute problem facing Russian society.

Food price inflation has risen even faster because of Russia's ban on importing food from the European Union and the United States. According to the Agriculture Ministry, during the past six months the cost of cabbage in Russia has risen 66 percent, onions rose 40 percent, potatoes 36 percent, carrots 32 percent, and beef 10 percent. At the end of February, most Russian supermarkets announced a two-month price freeze on more than 20 socially important items, including meat, fish, milk, sugar, salt, potatoes, cabbage and apples. Some regional grocery chains, such as the ones in the Norilsk region that are run by Russia's largest mining firm Norilsk Nickel, are taking losses to subsidize food prices.

Hardships Spawn Protests

Another area of dissatisfaction among the Russian people is the closure of medical facilities in some regions, such as Moscow, Novosibirsk and Vladivostok. In Moscow, nearly a quarter of inpatient medical facilities have been closed since November, sparking minor protests in the capital.

In addition, the economic pressure is affecting the country's job market. Russia's Labor Ministry estimated that some 154,800 jobs were cut in 2014, and approximately 127,000 jobs were cut in the first two months of 2015. According to Deputy Labor Minister Sergei Velmyaikin, the majority of these layoffs were at large Russian firms, such as Rosneft, Rostelecom, Avtovaz and Mechel, which are run by the state or oligarchs. There are also reports that in the Murmansk and Zabaikalsk regions, salaries for teachers have not been paid in three months. The teachers in Murmansk are petitioning their governor to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin for increased financial subsidies. The teachers in Zabaikalsk have held three minor street protests.

The federal government has allocated $300 million for employment subsidies for some Russian regional governments, such as Tatarstan, Altai Krai, Samara and Tver. These subsides are aimed at maintaining employment at regional companies such as KAMAZ, Avtovaz, AltaiVagon and Tver Carriage Works.

Sporadic minor protests have also taken place across Russia during the past month. Communist Party members in Stavropol got in coffins to protest their regional government's low pension payouts. In Novosibirsk, farmers dumped manure in front of state-run Sberbank with signs saying, "Bankers are enemies of the people," and, "Down with credit slavery."

The Kremlin Offers Assistance

The worsening economic situation in many of the regions has prompted the Kremlin to call "socio-economic" meetings between Putin and many of the regional heads. During the past two months, Putin has met with the heads of the Kursk, Karelia, Astrakhan, Moscow, Tula, Irkutsk and Kaliningrad regions, and the republics of North Ossetia and Khakassia.

Most of the Russian regional governments are ill equipped to handle this economic crisis; 63 of the 83 regional governments are at risk of defaulting on their debt or going bankrupt in the next few years. Since the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the regional governments' debt has risen by more than 100 percent. Standard and Poor's estimates regional government debt in 2015 will reach $103 billion. Russia's overall government debt — the federal and regional governments combined — is around $300 billion, or 14 percent of Russia's gross domestic product. This is small for a country as large as Russia, but the problem is that so much of the debt is concentrated in the regions, which do not have as many debt reduction tools as the federal government does.

The Kremlin is concerned that the worsening economic situation could force some of the regional leaders to break with some of the federal government's strategies, such as how to handle protests, or how to allocate funds or pay taxes. Increasingly dissatisfied populations and business leaders as well as the federal government are pressuring regional heads. Specifically, the Kremlin wants the regional governments to continue paying extraordinarily high taxes instead of keeping the funds at home. Of the taxes and revenues generated in each region, only 37 percent stay in the regions while the rest goes to the federal government. Some funds — but not more than 20 percent — are returned in the form of subsidies.

In response, the federal government approved a plan March 20 to restructure loans the regions have taken out from the federal budget. The Kremlin is earmarking $1.6 billion for the restructuring. In addition, the payment deadlines are being moved back from 2025 to 2034.

When approving the plan, Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev said, "We cannot leave members of the Federation to deal with this alone" — a nod to the Kremlin's concerns about dissent and instability in the regions. It is difficult enough for the Kremlin to control all of Russia's 83 regions even when there is not an economic crisis and social unrest. The Kremlin knows fragmentation and unrest can lead to government change; Putin himself came to power under similar circumstances. In order to keep their regions stable during the 1998 financial crisis, regional leaders began breaking with federal policies on how to handle protesters and on paying federal taxes.

An Eye on Dissent

Besides financial assistance programs, the Kremlin is also setting up ways to crack down on the regional leaders should there be dissent or should they not be able to control their respective regions.

On March 30, a Kremlin-linked think tank, the Civil Society Development Foundation, released a rating of the best and worst regional heads. The study was mostly rated on improvements in the regions' socioeconomic conditions. The foundation also said it would be releasing this ranking every quarter, as if the Kremlin will now have a quarterly check on the regional leaders' competency.

Putin has never been shy about reshuffling regional heads. Since the start of the year, he has appointed new or acting leaders in six regions: Tatarstan, Amur, Sakhalin, Yamal-Nenets, Khanty-Mansiysk and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Now it looks like Putin is ensuring that all the governors and regional heads can see where they stand and has created a system to drum up public sentiment against those governors that do not comply with Putin's policies.

Putin tightening his grip on power may not be controversial among the Russian people. In the 1998 financial crisis, some 71 percent of Russians believed that keeping order in the country was more important than democracy, according to a Levada poll. Interestingly, Levada released a poll on March 31 that indicated 45 percent of Russians think the crackdowns that Soviet leader Josef Stalin conducted during economic hardships were justified — a sharp rise from just 25 percent in 2013. Consequently, Russians could be increasingly in favor of crackdowns and a tighter Kremlin hold, as long as the country remains stable.