Peter Westin launches In from the Cold: the rise of Russian capitalism
Russia’s transformation from central planning to a market-based economy over the past 20 years must rank as one of the biggest economic stories of our time, according to a new book on the rise of Russian capitalism. launched in London by its editor, Peter Westin, Chief Equity Strategist and Economist for ATON, Russia’s oldest independent investment group.
Like the editor, many of the contributors to this book have lived and worked in Russia for much of the past 20 years, not only bearing witness to that country’s remarkable economic transformation but participating in the dynamic capital markets that sprang from almost nothing.
The authors – all economic and finance professionals who have invested in the nuts and bolts of the Russian transformation – demonstrate why the positive economic achievements of the last 20 years should be more widely recognized in the West.
For example, the Russian government has been far more fiscally prudent than many Western countries, taking advantage of high oil prices to create a fiscal fund that by the end of 2008 held a combined $225bn, much strengthening the nation’s public finances.
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Presidential Human Rights Council dissatisfied with Magnitsky case investigation
The Presidential Human Rights Council is dissatisfied with the tempo of the investigation into the death of Hermitage Capital attorney Sergei Magnitsky at a Moscow detention ward.
Human rights activists are no longer invited to witness investigative procedures in the Magnitsky case, Council member, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee public organization Kirill Kabanov said at the Council’s meeting in Moscow on Thursday.
“The Investigative Committee has assigned a new detective to the case. The new detective is not cooperative with human rights activists and the Presidential Council; that is the right he has by the Criminal Procedure Code,” he said.
A short time ago the Presidential Council’s working group believed that some progress had been made in the Magnitsky case, he said.
“We started to interact with the detectives. For the first time ever an Investigative Committee detective invited human rights activists to witness investigative procedures and asked their opinion about particular episodes,” Kabanov said.
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President Obama must stand up for Russia’s dissidents
A network of student presidents from universities around the world, College-100 (or C-100), has done a sterling job of exposing corruption in Russia, producing the video below about the case of Sergei Magnitsky.
To get you up to speed, Mr Magnitsky was a Russian tax attorney who uncovered a $230 million tax fraud perpetrated by corrupt bureaucrats working in league with the FSB (the KGB’s successor agency). Instead of thanking him for his spadework, which might have recompensed the Russian taxpayer, the state allowed the very criminals Mr Magnitsky had exposed to arrest and torture him to death in a gruesome year-long pre-trial detention. Russia is now trying Mr Magnitsky posthumously for the crime no one -not even his jailers – believe he committed.
European parliaments, the House of Commons, the European Union and the United States Congress are all mulling separate forms of legislation to issue travel bans and asset freezes to the 60 known conspirators in Mr Magnitsky’s persecution (the logic being that criminals in Russia like to go abroad to spend their stolen fortunes).
The US Senate bill, sponsored by two-thirds of the Senate, actually threatens to impose sanctions and visa restrictions against anyone from any foreign country credibly accused of “gross human rights violations.” In other words, it’s a universal proscription that might come in handy the next time a lawyer tries to do his job – or smuggles himself into a US embassy.
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U.S. Attorney General Holder Meets with Russian Legal Officials
From May 14 to May 17, a Department of Justice delegation led by Attorney General Eric Holder visited Russia.
While in Russia, Attorney General Holder held bilateral meetings with Prosecutor General Chayka, Investigative Committee Chief Aleksander Bastrykhin and Minister of Justice Konovalov.
He also spoke at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum, met with the Federal Advocates Chamber, spoke to law students at St. Petersburg University and chaired the second meeting of the Bilateral Presidential Commission Rule of Law Working Group.
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Russia says action on Syria, Iran may go nuclear
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev warned on Thursday that military action against sovereign states could lead to a regional nuclear war, starkly voicing Moscow’s opposition to Western intervention ahead of a G8 summit at which Syria and Iran will be discussed.
“Hasty military operations in foreign states usually bring radicals to power,” Medvedev, president for four years until Vladimir Putin’s inauguration on May 7, told a conference in St. Petersburg in remarks posted on the government’s website.
“At some point such actions which undermine state sovereignty may lead to a full-scale regional war, even, although I do not want to frighten anyone, with the use of nuclear weapons,” Medvedev said. “Everyone should bear this in mind.”
Medvedev gave no further explanation. Nuclear-armed Russia has said publicly that it is under no obligation to protect Syria if it is attacked, and analysts and diplomats say Russia would not get involved in military action if Iran were attacked.
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Cardin and Putin
Some of the world’s most powerful leaders come to Frederick County’s doorstep today, with the exception of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It’s strange to think that one man who may have contributed to Putin’s decision to blow off the other seven G-8 countries was sitting in the conference room at The Frederick News-Post on Monday. It was a moment of odd synchronicity
At that editorial board meeting, we wondered aloud if U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin’s authorship and support of the Magnitsky Bill might not have played a part in the Russian leader’s decision.
Foreign-policy analysts have speculated any number of reasons for Putin’s decision, of course. But the Magnitsky Bill is a sore point in Russia-U.S. relations, according a May 10 article in The New York Times.
The bill is named for Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who worked to uncover tax fraud by Russian government officials. Magnitsky was imprisoned for almost a year and suffered abuses while behind bars that led to his death in 2009.
If enacted, his namesake legislation would deny visas to foreign officials accused of human rights violations, as well as freeze any assets they hold in the U.S.
The Obama administration has opposed the bill, but not hard enough for the Russians, according to the Times.
However, the Magnitsky Bill has attracted wide bipartisan support, with the likes of Sens. John McCain, Joe Lieberman and John Kerry on board. Cardin is clearly passionate about it.
“We’re going to pass this bill,” he told us emphatically.
The administration has given up on its lobbying efforts, he said.
“They’re lobbying against it, but they know it’s gonna be passed,” Cardin said. “I think it’s going to be this type of a situation, that the administration will oppose it and then explain, particularly to the Russians … that it was that independent legislature that just happened to put that on there.”
We asked Cardin directly if he believed there was any connection between Putin’s no-show and his bill. “I don’t think so,” Cardin replied.
But overturning it is third on a list of foreign policy objectives Putin has put forward, Cardin said: “He’s gonna lose that one.”
The Magnitsky Bill may have played its part in persuading Putin to make a show of not attending the G-8, but to what extent, we’ll never know. The trade may be worthwhile, however. Russia’s human rights abuses should not stand, and this legislation will go some small way in urging countries that engage in such abuses to clean up their act. unshaven girls займ онлайн на карту без отказа https://www.zp-pdl.com zp-pdl.com hairy woman
G8 absence threatens US-Russian rapport
When the G8 leaders gather at Camp David on Friday, one will be missing. Vladimir Putin, who was scheduled to have a post-summit meeting with Barack Obama, US president, sent his Dmitry Medvedev, prime minister, at the last minute instead.
The reason for his absence is still hotly debated in Moscow – almost no one believes the officially proffered reason that Mr Putin wants to stay in Moscow to interview prospective cabinet officials.
The cancellation casts a sudden pall over US-Russian relations, especially in the wake of Mr Putin’s aggressively anti-western campaign for the presidency, which he won on March 4. He barely let a public appearance go by without accusing the US of secretly plotting to overthrow him.
His absence seems to realise the worst predictions that the re-election of Mr Putin would mean the end of the tentative thaw in relations known as the “reset”, described in March by outgoing president Mr Medvedev as “the best three years in Russia-US relations in a decade”. Those may indeed now be over.
“The beginning of the Obama-Putin relationship doesn’t look optimistic,” said Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies in Moscow, who declined to guess at the reasons for Putin’s absence, underlining the extent to which even senior experts are puzzled by the Kremlin’s Byzantine ways.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, the think-tank, said: “The [US-Russia] relationship is certainly wrong-footed at this point.
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U.S. should go slow until Russia curbs shameful human rights abuses
Bradenton Herald
The Obama administration should “go slow” on normalizing trade relations with Russia until Moscow shows it’s serious about curbing human rights abuses.
A key part of “normalization” is extending Permanent Normal Trade Relations (PNTR) status to Russia. This has been denied since 1974, when passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment barred the U.S. from granting that status to any country that restricts emigration.
Designed primarily to free Soviet Jews and other minorities from state repression, the amendment is largely non-responsive to conditions in post-Soviet Russia.
That’s why every American president, with the exception of Ronald Reagan, has routinely granted Moscow a waiver from the amendment since the collapse of the Soviet empire.
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Sergei’s Law: “Hit Them in Their Laws, Because That is What They Care About”
Sergei’s Law is an advocacy video that has a bit of a propagandistic feel to it (it’s the dramatic sound track), but that’s perfectly ok, because we never get to hear the sustained arguments on behalf of this case and this law, the Magnitsky Accountability Act.
Why? Because there’s a din of pro-Kremlin noise in the US media and blogosphere lately that is actually quite appalling — a very creepy collusion of old socialist left, new new new Twitterati left or “progressives,” libertarians, and conservative pragmatists all bound by a cynical RealPolitik regarding the Kremlin. They can never jump over their own knees to get past whatever flaws their own country has to see the graver flaws of Russia that are a threat to its own people and the world.
I’m still trying to come up with a term to describe these people, as the old paradigm of hawks/doves doesn’t work and I flat-out reject the term used nastily all the time by Joshua Kucera — Russophobes — without ever deploying the opposite “Russophiles”.
Magnitsky is the litmus test for these two camps in America. On the side of human rights and support of Magnitsky in mainstream and new media, outside of a few human rights groups and the sponsors of the bill, and of course this blog, there are virtually no voices. There’s the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, thank God, but a ready bunch of young stars like Mark Adomanis to savage him for taking a moral stand (creepy — this is “IR” — International Relations” programs produce nowadays.)
On the opposite side are much larger heavy-weights with administrative resources: the Obama Administration, the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, the endlessly prolific and retweeted Mark Adomanis with the heft of Forbes behind him (shouldn’t business people care more about ending impunity for corruption and justice for corporate lawyers?!) Raymond Sontag in the American Interest — these and more are all lining up against the Magnitsky bill. Why? They could have their reset and eat it, too, and still endorse this narrowly-focused bill that has to do with ensuring that there is no impunity for a very specific set of persons violating human rights. It would really cost them nothing.
Instead, we hear all kinds of specious arguments against Magnitsky, as I’ve been recording. For example, that it’s lacking in judicial process to punish anyone suspected of a crime before a court of law has convened. That simply betrays ignorance about how you have to battle impunity: entry into the United States, and shielding wealth here, these are privileges, not rights. And if there is a list of persons responsible for the harassment of Magnitsky and letting him die deliberately in a Russian jail — facts that are established — it is more than fine to act. In fact, it’s a duty to act, especially when the corruption involved has drawn in the US and the UK because of attempts to hide the funds here.
Raymond Sontag’s arguments (like the rest of the tweeting RealPolitickers) are notably specious — just because you can’t do everything about all countries or are weak in protecting human rights in some areas of foreign policy (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc.) doesn’t mean you should do nothing (the Registanis invoke this silly argument, too). Just because your bill with a list of names doesn’t have any actual international prosecutorial clout doesn’t mean you don’t take a political stand anyway, based on morality and human rights law. And it’s especially dishonest to invoke any notion that Medvedev is changing the law and therefore everything’s fine — the only way you get change is by really implementing laws, not just articulating them.
“Hit them in their laws,” says chess master and opposition figure Gary Kasparov — by which he means get them to take their own laws seriously and implement them, by invoking your own legislation. That is indeed what we have to do.
Sontag really is out of ideas when he fetches up this argument:
The Magnitsky Bill’s backers point to the fact that corrupt Russian officials like to travel and keep their money abroad as evidence that denying them these privileges will make them less corrupt. But these arguments miss the rather obvious point that if these officials did not engage in this corruption, they would also be effectively barred from Western banks and trips abroad not by American laws but by the fact that they could never afford such luxuries on their meager official salaries in the first place. These arguments also miss the point that, however irritated Russia’s leaders may be with the Magnitsky Bill, its sanctions are nowhere near sufficient to get them to take on their own security services.
Huh? But that is indeed the idea; to deter officials from corruption by not making it easier for them to ex-patriate their wealth and enjoy it abroad. Hello! And the problem isn’t that Russia’s leaders can’t take on their own security services; Putin, a former KGB man, *is* the security service. Hello again!
If that line of accommodationist reasoning wasn’t queasy-making enough, you can still head on over to The American Conservative (fortifying once again my premise that conservatives are just as pro-Russian in the US these days as leftists, and it makes no sense. I’m grateful to Liberty Lynx on Twitter for reminding me of the anniversary recently of this debate with the awful Kevin Rothrock at A Good Treaty; he was a sterling example, as an American Enterprise Institute researcher, of just these conservative pro-Kremlin views, but he denied the phenomenon even existed.)
Daniel Larson thinks it’s posturing on Jackon Diehl’s part just to say the honest, moral thing:
Now that Putin has canceled, maybe it’s time to put human rights in Russia back on the agenda.
In fact, Bush — and Colin Powell, when he finally begin to speak up — did have some deterrent effect on Russia. And the idea isn’t that you imagine you can directly and immediately affect their behaviour; the idea is that you don’t break faith with victims; you show solidarity with the likeminded opposition who share our values, and you don’t let the bad guys win. It’s a moral proposition, and this kind of morality is what is expected in American politics. Why it has gone missing from the hearts of conservatives or for that matter leftists who are supposed to be pro-human rights is a vexing mystery. But then so prostrate have our intellectuals become before the Kremlin that they can’t even understand when the G-8 snub is a snub — they will justify ANYTHING that Putin does. Larson quotes Dmitri Trenin who says Putin “hates” international jamborees. Oh? Well, that doesn’t stop him from going to the CIS and CSTO summits in the near abroad!
The strange scrambling to justify not endorsing this bill just doesn’t make sense. It’s as if the only thing that really powers it is all the official Russian screeching about it — so accommodationist to the Kremlin are those who are complaining about the Magnitsky bill. Why?
We saw some manuevering from Sen. John Kerry recently in delaying the debate on this bill. Diehl reports that there was insistence by the White House and the State Department that the bill had to be postponed. This was ostensibly due to the fact that newly-crowned President Vladimir Putin was going to come to the US for the G-8. But now he’s sending his swapped-seat-mate Medvedev instead, possibly to dis the US over antimissile systems in Europe, which two senior Russian military officials have now vowed to attack preemptively if they continue to be deployed.
But what’s Kerry’s excuse, really? I don’t think it’s about Putin’s visit, or Medvedev’s visit. I think he is simply too supportive of Obama’s position, and McFaul’s position, and others in the Administration, to risk going against them. Obviously he doesn’t want the political embarassment of the president vetoing such an obviously decent human rights law, so his strategy is probably to tread water. delay, and hope support dissipates (Lugar, a key supporter, just lost his election). Why? Kerry wants to be the next secretary of state? Or simply be supportive to the president for everything else he wants to achieve?
I hope people will listen to the long line of political and civil figures in this film in both the US and Russia to hear their sustained arguments for why this bill needs to be passed. I’m glad to see that at least these young future foreign affairs professionals who made this film, mentored by Amb. Thomas Pickering and Governor Bill Richardson (former UN ambassador), have their heads and hearts in the right place on where human rights fits into American foreign policy. buy over the counter medicines займ на карту https://zp-pdl.com/get-a-next-business-day-payday-loan.php https://zp-pdl.com/apply-for-payday-loan-online.php payday loan
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To learn more about what happened to Sergei Magnitsky please read below
- Sergei Magnitsky
- Why was Sergei Magnitsky arrested?
- Sergei Magnitsky’s torture and death in prison
- President’s investigation sabotaged and going nowhere
- The corrupt officers attempt to arrest 8 lawyers
- Past crimes committed by the same corrupt officers
- Petitions requesting a real investigation into Magnitsky's death
- Worldwide reaction, calls to punish those responsible for corruption and murder
- Complaints against Lt.Col. Kuznetsov
- Complaints against Major Karpov
- Cover up
- Press about Magnitsky
- Bloggers about Magnitsky
- Corrupt officers:
- Sign petition
- Citizen investigator
- Join Justice for Magnitsky group on Facebook
- Contact us
- Sergei Magnitsky