There’s really nothing new left to say about yet another seizure of pension savings. I already wrote everything here.
It’s just that several million working-age Russian citizens believed the government’s call and set aside THEIR own hard-earned money to make old age a little easier. First, their annual savings were taken away “for Crimea”, and now they’re being taken again because otherwise Putin’s campaign promises can’t be fulfilled.
The most striking part of the whole story, of course, is this quote:
Cut spending or screw over several million people? Obviously, screw over the people.
And there’s no one to ask, “Why does the government think this way?” except ourselves.
Money was stolen from 25 million people. If they had come out into the streets even once with the peaceful slogan, “Please be so kind as to leave our money alone,” our government’s ideas about what is politically acceptable would have been sharply revised.
Our Anti-Corruption Foundation and the Progress Party were the only organized political groups that tried to mount a public campaign against this “pension robbery”.
Across the various iterations of the http://pension.fbk.info/ project, about 70,000 people took part (and we are very grateful to every one of them). By Russian standards, that is a lot, but it does not change the price of political acceptability. That’s 0.3% of those affected.
People need to be more active, because appetite grows with eating.
And I want to finish with an astonishing post written yesterday by Deputy Economic Development Minister Sergei Belyakov:
I don’t even know what is more remarkable here: Belyakov’s words, saying he is ashamed, or Medvedev’s press secretary, Timakova, rushing into the comments to remind Belyakov of the political unacceptability of his shame. P.S. Timakova deleted the comment, but Google’s cache remembers everything.