Has another crusade begun? (See 1 below.)
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Dems and the PLO and their respective beds. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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The enemy is always us. When it came to Viet Nam it also included Fonda and Cronkite. (See 3 below.)
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Israel Amb. to the U.S will be appearing at Columbia but the administration has cut the number allowed to attend. (See 4 below.)
Bibi's comments before boarding plane to come to America for his meeting with Trump and others in the administration. (See 4a below.)
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Walter Russell Mead gives Trump round one vis a vis China. (See 5 below.)
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California Governor, Jerry Brown, needs money from the government and "... now wants the President to declare California a disaster after the January storms that have run rampant in the region. The letter was sent Friday after a huge extent of storms, flooding, mudslides and evacuations. There have been 8 people that have died." If Trump is smart he will ignore the letter and declare Brown a disaster.
Meanwhile, it is amazing to witness how many nut cases are engaged in mass hysteria as Trump enforces the immigration laws in response to the media engaging in false reporting. Just another day in sunny California.
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George Friedman on Russia. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)IT has finally started.....Crusades as predicted!
The first countries to ban Islam: See how the world is acting fast on
The threat posed by Islam and its barbaric Sharia Law.
Japan has always refused Muslims to live permanently in their country
And they cannot own any real estate or any type of business, and have
Banned any worship of Islam. Any Muslim tourist caught spreading the
Word of Islam will be deported immediately, including all family
members.
Cuba rejects plans for first mosque.
The African nation of Angola and several other nations have officially Banned Islam.
Record number of Muslims, (over 2,000) deported from Norway as a way of fighting crime.. Since these Muslim criminals have been deported, crime has dropped by a staggering 72%. Prison Officials are reporting that nearly half of their jail cells are now vacant, Courtrooms nearly empty, Police now free to attend to other matters, mainly traffic offences to keep their roads and highways safe and assisting the public in as many ways as they can.
In Germany alone in the last year there were 81 violent attacks
targeting mosques. Citizens are fed up with Merkel’s new open door policy!
Austrian police arrested 13 men targeting suspected jihad recruiters.
A Chinese court sends 22 Muslim Imams to jail for 16 to 20 years for spreading Islam hatred. And have executed eighteen Jihadists; China campaigns against Separatism (disallowing Islamist to have their own separate state). Muslim prayers banned in government buildings and schools in Xinjiang (Western China). Hundreds of Muslim families prepared to leave China for their own safety and return back to their own Middle Eastern countries.
Muslim refugees beginning to realize that they are not welcome in
Christian countries because of their violent ways and the continuing wars in Syria and Iraq whipped up by the hideous who are murdering young children and using mothers and daughters as sex slaves.
British Home Secretary prepares to introduce 'Anti-social Behaviour Order' for extremists and strip dual nationals of their Citizenship. Deportation laws also being prepared.
The Czech Republic blatantly refuses Islam in their country, regarding it as evil.
Alabama - A new controversial amendment that will ban the recognition of "foreign laws which would include Sharia law".
The Polish Defense League issues a warning to Muslims. 16 States have all Introduced legislation to ban Sharia Law.
Many Muslims in Northern Ireland have announced plans to leave the country to avoid anti-Islamic violence by Irish locals. the announcement comes after an attack on groups of Muslims in the city of Belfast. Groups of Irish locals went berserk and bashed teenage Muslim gangs who were referring to young Irish girls as sluts and should be all gang raped, according to Islam and ''Sharia Law''. Even hospital staff were reluctant to treat the battered Muslim patients, the majority were given the Band-Aid treatment and sent home with staff muttering ''Good Riddance''.
North Carolina bans Islamic "Sharia Law" in the State, regarding it now as a criminal offence.
A Dutch MP's call for removal of all mosques in the Netherlands. One member of the Dutch Parliament said: "We want to clean Netherlands of Islam". Dutch MP Machiel De Graaf spoke on behalf of the Party for freedom when he said, "All mosques in the Netherlands should be shut down. Without Islam, the Netherlands would be a wonderful safe country to live in, as it was before the arrival of Muslim refugees''.
Australia has a woman wearing a burqa defying courts by denying they have any power over her, refusing to remove her burqa or to stand for the judge stating that she would only do so for Mohamed, Prime Minister Turnbull will be too weak to take any action over this atrocity. She should be deported for not accepting the laws of the country which has given her and her family refuge.
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2)
Dems Made Their Bed with Leftists, Now They Must Lie in It By Karin McQuillan
Something new is happening before our eyes. Radicals are completing a takeover of the Democratic Party. Sure, there’s been a lot of mockery among conservatives about hyperventilating Democrats. Pundits point out the obvious: that Democrats screaming that Trump is illegitimate deliver no positive message for working class voters who want jobs and that mobs in black masks are not appealing. Such analyses fall short.
After 8 years of exploiting and enflaming the grievances of identity politics, the Democratic Party is being eaten by the monster they rode to power.
Radicals don’t need to be a majority – they never are. They dominate through mob violence, media manipulation and threats. They are now dominating Democrat politicians, not allowing them to “normalize.”
The Los Angeles Times: Democrats in Congress began the year less defiant, with a more tentative, case-by-case approach to an untested new president. They were ready to work with Trump, they said, if he met them halfway. Democratic senators confirmed a few of Trump’s Cabinet nominees without much fuss. Then their base erupted.
The Wall Street Journal: Leftist throngs have been gathering outside Mr. Schumer’s residence in Brooklyn, N.Y., demanding that the Senate minority leader “get a spine” and oppose President Trump on everything.That probably isn’t his natural inclination. Mr. Schumer once said that a “pause” in Syrian immigration “may be necessary,” and after the election he declared himself ready to “work with” Mr. Trump. But now he has yielded to the noisy crowd.
The always insightful John Hinderaker has noticed something is up in, “What Part Of ‘You Lost’ Don’t Liberals Understand?”
The Democrats need to understand that when you lose an election, the other guys get to take office. You don’t stamp your feet and demand that they quit.
(At) a town meeting conducted last night by Congressman Tom McClintock in Roseville, California. Liberal activists … behaved so … threateningly that the Congressman had to be escorted from the hall by armed policemen.
Another disgusting moment in the history of liberalism, but this is what I find mystifying:“I can no longer just sit back. … These people need to understand, we want them out,” said Vietnam War veteran Lon Varvel, referring to Trump and McClintock.
“We want them out”? There is a mechanism for that. It is called an election. In fact, McClintock is … was re-elected in November, with more than double the vote total of his nearest Democratic challenger.
Hinderaker may be mystified by what he persists in calling liberal behavior because he mislabels it. These Democrats are not liberal. They are radical. These people are not just stamping their feet, they are knocking Trump supporters unconscious and beating them with clubs. They are trained, organized and well financed political agitators.
As for abandoning identity politics? Forget it. Look at the contenders to lead the DNC – they seem to be listening to Bernie Sanders’s black press secretary, Symone Sanders, who told CNN, “we don’t need white people leading the DNC.” We have a white female candidate who says her job is to tell other whites to shut up. One leading contender is Keith Ellison, antisemitic, a former Nation of Islam Black Muslim, with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. The weirdest part of all is that Ellison is backed by Chuck Schumer.
It seems like a parody, until you admit the radicals are ascendant, and it is no joke.
The Democrats will have to find a lot of political courage and resolve if they want to try a course correction. The radicals are professional bullies. They believe in what they call “direct action,” that is, coercive violence. They demand no compromise. They are awash with money. They are professionally trained, ten thousand alone by Obama’s Organizing for America foundation. The radical agenda, now the Democratic Party’s agenda, is ideologically driven to destroy all normalcy in our government.
We see Democrat leadership and the media settling in for permanent demonization of America’s heartland, endless lies about Trump, more divisiveness. It’s easy to say this will become tiresome and lose impact, but that is not inevitable. Lies repeated often enough create their own reality, as President Bush learned. President Trump is correct in countering every one of them, and creating the counter narrative that Democrats are hopelessly dishonest.
Democrats’ heated rhetoric and resultant political violence is designed to provoke a law and order reaction. What the Democrats hope for is an over-reaction by the Trump administration, one that could turn the tide of public opinion against him. They’re all ready with their soundbites on “constitutional crisis.” (See my column, Democrats Find a Use for Violence.)
Republican lawmakers now fear for the personal safety of themselves, their families, and their staff. The GOP House Chair invited Rep. Dave Reichert, a former county sheriff famous for apprehending the most dangerous serial killer in American history, to brief them on safety measures inside the halls of Congress and at constituent meetings.
So far as I have seen, not one single Democrat has condemned the bloody attacks on Republicans.
solovey is a descendat of the famous soloveichik rabbinic family
2a) White House Puts Palestinians, United Nations in Crosshairs
Trump admin no longer willing to swallow anti-Israel agenda
BY:
The White House is sending a strong signal that it will no longer tolerate Palestinian intransigence at the United Nations or the international body’s long record of anti-Israel action, according to White House officials and sources in Congress who told the Washington Free Beacon that the Trump administration will "unabashedly support Israel" in the months and years ahead.
The Trump administration sent shockwaves through the U.N. late last week when it took a stance against the appointment of a senior Palestinian official to serve in a top post overseeing Libya.
Senior officials at Turtle Bay expressed outrage over the Trump administration's move to block the appointment of former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as a special U.N. representative for Libya. The move was widely supported by U.N. members, and, for a time, the Trump administration.
Sources inside the White House told the Free Beacon that the move was meant to send a signal to the Palestinians that they can no longer manipulate the U.N. system in order to bolster their international clout. This type of action, the sources said, undermines Israel and the ongoing peace process.
White House officials, as well as senior sources in Congress, told the Free Beacon that the move is part of a larger effort to solidify U.S. support for Israel and counter a range of last-minute moves by the former Obama administration aimed at severing U.S.-Israel ties.
The Free Beacon first reported earlier this year that the Trump administration and Congress had already been working on a range of measures meant to boost U.S. support for Israel at the U.N.
"The United States was disappointed to see a letter indicating the intention to appoint the former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister to lead the U.N. Mission in Libya," Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said in a statement opposing the selection of Fayyad. "For too long the U.N. has been unfairly biased in favor of the Palestinian Authority to the detriment of our allies in Israel."
"The United States does not currently recognize a Palestinian state or support the signal this appointment would send within the United Nations, however, we encourage the two sides to come together directly on a solution," Haley said in a vast departure from Obama administration rhetoric. "Going forward the United States will act, not just talk, in support of our allies."
A senior White House official familiar with the move told the Free Beacon that the Palestinians will no longer get a free pass to push their anti-Israel agenda and win statehood outside the parameters of the peace process.
"It is so refreshing to have an American ambassador to the United Nations who will unabashedly support our ally Israel," one senior member of the White House's National Security Council told theFree Beacon. "The appointment of Salam Fayyad as the official U.N. envoy to Libya would be an incremental step towards unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood by the U.N. absent an agreement with Israel."
"Ambassador Haley took the only appropriate action and we are looking to supporting her actions any way we can," the source said.
One senior congressional aide who works on Middle East issues told the Free Beacon that Trump’s approach to the U.N. is centered on backing Israel from any action that could harm its interests.
"The U.N. is not a friend of Israel. After the Obama administration's eleventh-hour attack on the Jewish state, President Trump is attempting to turn the page," the source said. "Our new administration is already pushing back against the U.N.'s rampant bias and reasserting America's strong support for Israel. This is a good step in the right direction."
Fayyad, who is widely viewed as a reformer in Palestinian society, appears to have been caught up in a larger battle between the White House and U.N. over the international body's efforts to delegitimize Israel.
While Fayyad was seen as an acceptable pick for the Libya post, his ties to the Palestinian Authority and its rogue efforts to achieve statehood via the U.N. provoked ire in the White House, sources said.
The White House is determined to keep what it views as the U.N.'s anti-Israel bias in check, particularly after the Obama administration's last-minute efforts to secure a resolution condemning Israel.
One senior official at a national pro-Israel organization said the Trump administration's moves would help preserve international agreements barring the Palestinians from seeking statehood outside of the peace process.
"Pro-Palestinian officials at the U.N. thought they had found a clever way to mainstream the Palestinians as legitimate state actors, which is contrary to American policy and violates two decades of signed agreements between the Palestinians and Israel," said the source, who was not authorized to speak on record. "They figured that the Trump White House would be too worried about optics to take a stand on behalf of our Israeli allies. The White House refused to be intimidated."
Regional experts tracking the issue think Fayyad could become a lighting rod in a larger matter surrounding U.S. opposition to any U.N. action meant to elevate the Palestinians on the international stage.
Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Free Beacon that the controversy surrounding Fayyad actually benefits Palestinian leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas, who fought against Fayyad's efforts to eradicate corruption.
"The thing people are not asking is why Fayyad was even considering working the Libya file instead of trying to reform the Palestinian Authority at home,” Schanzer said. "The answer is, Fayyad was pushed out by Mahmoud Abbas in 2013. He and Abbas were in an epic battle over corruption and clean governance and reform. Fayyad lost that battle, as Abbas went full dictator."
The Obama administration is responsible for allowing Fayyad to be pushed out of the Palestinian Authority, Schanzer said.
"The U.S. refused to come to Fayyad's defense. I lay this at the feet of the Obama administration," he said. "Fayyad's reform and clean governance program was gutted, and when Fayyad created an NGO it was raided by Abbas' forces—and still the Obama admin refused to lift a finger to help him."
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3)General VoNguyen Giap.General Giap was a brilliant, highly respected leaderof the North Vietnam military. The following quoteis from his memoirs currently found in theVietnam war memorial in Hanoi:
'What we still don't understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder,just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battle of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.
But we were elated to notice your media was helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!'
General Giap has published his memoirs and confirmed what most Americans knew. The Vietnam war was not lost in Vietnam — it was lost at home. The same slippery slope, sponsored by the U.S. media,is currently underway. It exposes the enormous power of a Biased Media to cut out the heart and will of the American public.
A truism worthy of note: . . . Do not fear the enemy, for they can take only your life. Fear the media, for they will distort your grasp of reality and destroy your honor.
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4) Columbia University Forces Organizers of Upcoming Event With Jewish State’s UN Ambassador to Slash Number of Pro-Israel Attendees
by Lea Speyer and Rachel Frommer
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4) Columbia University Forces Organizers of Upcoming Event With Jewish State’s UN Ambassador to Slash Number of Pro-Israel Attendees
by Lea Speyer and Rachel Frommer
Event flier for Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon’s upcoming talk at Columbia University.
Organizers of an upcoming program at Columbia University featuring Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon have been forced to slash the number of non-university attendees after school officials threatened to shut the event down, citing security concerns, The Algemeiner has learned.
The move will effectively reduce the number of supporters of the Jewish state who will be able to attend the Monday lecture.
“We were originally asked to limit non-Columbia people to around 70, and to hand in a list of names for pre-approval,” Rudy Rochman, president of the Columbia chapter of grassroots activist group Students Supporting Israel (SSI), said. “Now we are left with maybe 10 non-university individuals, outside of the ambassador’s team, who we can invite.”
...
Event co-sponsor Victor Muslin co-sponsor of Columbia Alums for Campus Fairness (ACF) — part of a national network engaged in combating antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campuses — toldThe Algemeiner he was “disappointed” by the school’s decision to issue the strict cap of 20 non-university individuals permitted to attend the event. This number includes the ambassador’s security detail.
“This decision will affect a number of alumni who are entitled to attend,” Muslin said.
Those with a valid student, faculty or alumnus ID are not included in this new quota, but they will now have to register beforehand, rather than simply showing their identification at the door
.
Rochman said the university’s decision came after he described a “war zone” atmosphere playing out on campus in the days before the scheduled speech. Rochman said school officials cited his “figurative language” when raising concerns about potential clashes flaring up between pro- and anti-Israel activists.
In a recent letter, obtained by The Algemeiner, Columbia ACF called on university officials to take steps to “live up to its commitment to free speech and student safety” after anti-Israel groups launched a campaign to protest Danon’s talk.
“Given the [protest] organizers’ inflammatory rhetoric, the recent violent protests at UC Berkeley and the history of anti-Israel groups disrupting events with high-level dignitaries, we wanted to ensure that this event will proceed without endangering anyone,” Muslin told The Algemeiner.
As The Algemeiner reported on Thursday, student groups at Columbia — such as the school’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace and Columbia University Apartheid Divest — are planning a “Racists Not Welcome” protest against Danon’s speech.
Organizers have accused Danon of representing a country “born, like America, through savage ethnic cleansing of the original inhabitants.” Israel, they wrote, “is a state that has besieged and bombed the Palestinian people since its inception. Their alliances are global, and ours must be too. We will beat the far-right, but we will only beat them if we turn up everywhere to fight them.”
Columbia SSI’s Rochman told The Algemeiner on Wednesday: “You can survive here if you stick to yourself and don’t express your opinions. If you stand up for Israel, you are viciously shamed, targeted and slandered by these terrorist sympathizers who call Hamas a ‘liberation organization.’ This is the life we activists live here on campus.”
Responding to the controversy surrounding his Columbia appearance, Danon told The Algemeiner he won’t be prevented from “speaking in any place, and at any time, on behalf of the world’s only Jewish state.”
Columbia was recently ranked by The Algemeiner as the “worst” campus for Jewish students in 2016, in large part due to dozens of antisemitic and anti-Israel incidents on campus.
Columbia officials did not immediately respond to The Algemeiner’s request for comment on the event.
4a)
| PM Netanyahu's Remarks upon Boarding his Plane for Washington |
| (Communicated by the Prime Minister's Media Adviser) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this afternoon (Monday, 13 February 2017), made the following remarks upon boarding his plane to Washington: "I'm going to Washington to have a very important meeting with President Trump. I'll also be meeting with Vice President Pence, with Secretary of State Tillerson and with Republican leaders and Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill. The alliance between Israel and America has always been extremely strong. It's about to get even stronger. President Trump and I see eye to eye on the dangers emanating from the region but also on the opportunities. And we'll talk about both, as well as upgrading the relations between Israel and the United States in many, many fields. Thank you very much." |
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5) US vs. China: First Round to Trump
In his first presidential phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump re-iterated the longstanding “One China” policy that he had earlier questioned with his provocative Taiwan call. The New York Times depicts the call as an ignominious climbdown from Trump:
The concession was clearly designed to put an end to an extended chill in the relationship between China and the United States. Mr. Xi, stung by Mr. Trump’s unorthodox telephone call with the president of Taiwan in December and his subsequent assertion that the United States might no longer abide by the One China policy, had not spoken to Mr. Trump since Nov. 14, the week after he was elected.Administration officials concluded that Mr. Xi would take a call only if Mr. Trump publicly committed to upholding the 44-year-old policy, under which the United States recognized a single Chinese government in Beijing and severed its diplomatic ties with Taiwan. […]For Mr. Trump, it was a significant reversal. In an interview with Fox News in December, he said the policy should be contingent on extracting concessions from Beijing.
The implicit framing of the Times story is clear enough: dumb Trump backpedals when his advisors are finally able to pound some facts into his tiny brain. Such a narrative is unsurprising given the media’s continual underestimation of Trump, and the proliferation of hysterical narratives charging Trump with treason, racism, or reckless inexperience.
What should not be lost in the non-stop uproar is this small reality: in the first round of exchanges between Trump and Xi, it is advantage Trump.
Why? The U.S. policy on China never changed; the One China policy has been in effect all through the early weeks of the Trump administration. But by raising the question, Trump is now able to get credit for reaffirming something he wasn’t ever going to change. His reaffirmation of a 30 year-old boilerplate piece of American foreign policy is now a “gesture toward China.” As an ex-CIA expert quoted by the FT puts it, by reaffirming this longstanding policy, “President Trump opens the ground for a constructive dialogue with Beijing on the difficult but resolvable issues of rebalancing the trading relationship that has tilted in Beijing’s favour.”
The NYT‘s framing also obscures the significance of the call’s timing, which occurred on the eve of a major visit—complete with golf date—by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, right after Trump clarified the U.S. position on backing Japanese control of the Senkakus against possible Chinese attack. The timing of the call amounts to a Chinese recognition that it cannot frighten either Japan or the U.S. from strengthening their alliance.
It is far too early to assess how well Team Trump will succeed in foreign policy, but both the press and foreign powers will need to avoid the kind of blind underestimation that wrecked the careers of savvy and seasoned opponents like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Already a kind of Trump Derangement Syndrome has set in, interfering with the ability of many people to see what Trump is (and isn’t) accomplishing. Creating TDS is part of Trump’s method: making his opponents underestimate him turned out to be a very useful element in his winning campaign strategy. And stampeding the media into a frenzy of contradictory invective and attack is one of the techniques he uses to weaken his opponents, cloud their minds, and discredit them in the minds of his supporters and, over time, he hopes, some doubters as well.
There are certainly downsides to Trump’s transactional approach to great power relations, and these may well cost Team Trump dearly down the road. But there are advantages as well. Trump so far has reasserted the strong U.S. alliance with Japan while pressing Japan to reduce its trade surplus with the U.S. and invest in manufacturing capacity here. At the same time, his threat to reassess the trade element of the U.S.-China economic relationship has brought some sobriety to China’s calculations. That isn’t a bad start.
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6)
Something Rotten in the State of Russia?
By George Friedman and Jacob L. Shapiro
Geopolitical Futures’ forecast for 2017 says the following: “In hindsight, the coming year will be an inflection point in the long-term destabilization of Russia that we predict will reach a boiling point by 2040.” This may seem counterintuitive in light of the Russia hysteria following the US presidential election. Yet in the first six weeks of 2017, it is already possible to observe indicators that this forecast is on track.
These indicators fall roughly into four separate categories of instability: the distribution and prevalence of wage arrears, pressure on the Russian banking system, low-level social and economic unrest, and government purges. The map below summarizes these developments.
Show Me the Money
The bottom part of the Russia map shows wage arrears as reported by region. “Wage arrears” is a fancy term for workers not being paid. In December 2016 (the last month for which Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service has data), total wage arrears amounted to 2.7 billion rubles (roughly $46.4 million in USD).
The regions with the largest wage arrears can be divided into two categories. The first is port regions. Primorsky region, whose capital Vladivostok is Russia’s largest port on the Pacific, has by far the worst incidence of wage arrears. It accounts for 21.2% of the country’s total. The area where it is the second most prevalent is Siberia (in places like Irkutsk and Novosibirsk).
The importance of these wage arrears is not their size in absolute figures. It is where Russian workers are not getting their paychecks. Russia’s economy is highly regionalized. More than a fifth of Russia’s wealth is generated in Moscow and its surrounding areas. The central government keeps the Russian Federation together by redistributing wealth to interior regions.
The first places to expect economic trouble are port and interior regions. The port regions will struggle because trade is the oxygen that port cities need to breathe, and Russia’s main export, oil, is facing prolonged low prices. The interior will struggle because the central government will have less money to allocate. This forces a lose-lose choice between austerity and cutting military spending
The wage arrears map is an indication that GPF’s model for Russia is accurate. If the model is accurate, the probability of the forecast coming to fruition greatly increases.
Russia’s Banking System
The decline in the price of oil has had a predictably negative effect on the Russian banking system. Incidents of Russian depositors applying for deposit insurance have increased markedly.
Some regions are suffering from banking crises. In Tatarstan, for example, the region’s leading bank suspended operations in December, depriving both individual depositors and businesses of access to funds. This led to workers not being paid and to bankruptcies. It also required intervention from the central government.
The above map identifies regions where over 100 banks have had their licenses revoked. By itself, this indicator does not present a clear picture. Russia’s banks could be under severe pressure. The fact that the main fund used by Russia’s Deposit Insurance Agency has decreased in value by 75% in two years gives this argument some weight. Russia could also be cleaning up its banking system and shutting down banks involved in illegal or irresponsible activity. In view of the other negative indicators about the current state of Russia’s economy, the former is a more likely explanation.
Protests in the Countryside
The logical consequence of economic difficulty is social unrest. The world is not always logical, but in this case, what logic would dictate appears to hold true. Small-scale protests have been observed throughout the Russian countryside. Small incidents have also occurred in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. The map plots areas where protests have been observed.
It is important to note two things. First, none of these protests have indicated any sort of wider national organization. Second, they are relatively small (often in the low hundreds). They are important, but they should not be over-exaggerated. The Russian countryside is not singing the songs of angry men, nor is it close to doing so.
There are, though, concrete signs of dissatisfaction bubbling to the surface. These are tangible indicators of frustration with salary cuts, unpaid wages, and social services reduced by Moscow. These small events are the canary in the coal mine and spell trouble down the line for the Russian government.
Purges
The remaining two items on the map show political and security purges ordered by President Vladimir Putin. Russian media have described these moves as a “major political reshuffle.” That is a euphemism for what it really is.
The point of a purge is to get rid of potential challengers and install loyalists in their place. On Feb. 6–7, two governors from Perm and Buryatia regions were forced to resign. Vedomosti, a leading Russian-language business daily, reported that additional resignations and removals are expected in the regions identified in the map.
Unlike wage arrears, these purges are not confined to any one geographic area. Some are in Siberia to the east, some are in the regions toward the Caucasus, and others are in the immediate vicinity of Moscow. That Putin feels unsure enough of his own position to carry out these kinds of political changes reveals a great deal about the position in which he currently stands.
Presidential elections are coming for Russia. They will likely be held in 2018 (though there have been rumors they could happen in 2017). Like President Xi Jinping in China, who is using “anti-corruption” as a pretense to remove rivals ahead of his reappointment at this fall’s Communist Party Congress, Putin is securing his political position in the name of fighting corruption.
The purges are not limited to governors who have significant powers in the Russian Federation’s political system. Putin has also removed generals from the Interior Ministry as well as the Ministry of Civil Defense, Emergencies and Elimination of Consequences of National Disasters. These ministries are responsible for forces that are used to control domestic social order and quell protests. Ensuring the loyalty of such ministries is essential and must be done before serious problems emerge. A total of 16 generals have been removed, according to RIA Novosti, and two of those were also removed from military service.
Writing on the Wall?
This report is not meant to be alarmist. It is not GPF’s forecast that the Russian Federation is in danger of imminent collapse. None of these data points by themselves indicate that GPF’s forecast has been confirmed. They simply highlight Russia’s underlying weakness and explain why Putin, who just a few months ago was strutting on the world stage, has gone somewhat quiet. Important things need to be done at home. This is where Moscow’s focus is right now, and in choosing that focus, GPF and Russia have something in common.
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