One thing Putin is undeniably lucky about is that people seem almost completely indifferent to all the forms of robbery they are subjected to.
Even the most active part of society. Remember the "pension robbery"—the seizure of 243 billion rubles in pension savings from the working-age population—about which I wrote a lot, while the ACF even organized a number of protests at the time, and together with you we sent 26,000 letters to State Duma deputies?
When we raised a scandal over this, the deputies and the government were at least a little embarrassed, and they said things along the lines of, "we’ll find a way to compensate for it." Today, the finance minister put an end to that story:
Moscow, June 25. INTERFAX.RU — The 2014 pension savings that were "frozen" during the period when non-state pension funds (private pension funds) were being converted into joint-stock companies were never intended to be returned to the funds, and there are no sources of financing for that, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters.
"There are no sources for this. Nobody was planning to return that money, because it went to Crimea, to anti-crisis measures. For now, as long as this resource still exists, it will most likely go toward supporting the program for the socioeconomic development of Crimea and Sevastopol," he said, commenting on a proposal by Economic Development Minister Alexei Ulyukayev to return 243 billion rubles in 2014 pension savings to the non-state pension funds that had completed corporatization, so that the money would count toward the funded pensions of citizens who had chosen that option. Source.
Let me remind you of the grim arithmetic that applies to anyone who chose a funded pension plan: Suppose your take-home pay is 40,000 rubles per month. That means your gross salary (including the 13% income tax) is 45,970 rubles. So your funded pension contribution (6%) comes to 2,750 rubles per month, or 33,000 rubles per year. Anyone can calculate the exact amount for themselves using our calculator: http://pension.fbk.info/
Those are the very funds Siluanov is talking about: nobody is going to return anything; it will all go to Crimea.
This seems to be a new variation on the old idea that "war excuses everything." No time to explain—everything went to Crimea.
Last year there was no Crimea issue yet, but they were taking the money anyway. And now they have even stopped talking about returning it. What room can there be for doubt when it’s supposedly "for Crimea"?
Why not send Sechin’s income of 5 million rubles a day to Crimea instead? Or save money from the 1 trillion rubles stolen every year through state procurement? Or send the salaries of those idiots in the State Duma—who get 420,000 rubles a month—"to Crimea"?
No, instead they have to take several tens of thousands of rubles from a working person—money that person is saving for retirement.
In short, it is utterly vile—and even more vile that there is not even the tiniest group of deputies in the State Duma willing to stand up for the interests of these 25 million people being robbed. So much for "political representation."
At the very least, let’s inform the people we know about what is happening.
Update:
This 2013 news item looks especially good now: Putin: the issue of confiscating pension savings is not under discussion | RIA Novosti http://ria.ru/economy/20131002/967307748.html