A very apt joke on Twitter said that in the headline “The funded portion of pensions will be frozen — Golodets,” the word “Golodets” can successfully be replaced with a more fitting word that also rhymes nicely.
In other words, this year too, the funded portion of pensions has been stolen from millions of people.
A direct violation of the false promises made in 2013 after the first “pension robbery”:
It is important here to note why this became possible.
First and foremost, because there were almost no political forces willing to stand up for these 25 million people from the most economically active segment of the population—the very people whose money was stolen:
Far smaller injustices provoke far more outrage from all kinds of parties and organizations if they affect pensioners, the poor, rural residents, and so on.
But here, it is mostly residents of large cities with stable incomes. There are a great many of them; they are the most capable and the economy rests on them, yet politically they have been abandoned.
I cannot recall anyone besides us—the Party of Progress and the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation)—who tried to organize any kind of collective action in defense of these 25 million people who were robbed.
We carried out several stages of the campaign http://pension.fbk.info/; about 70,000 people took part, but that was obviously not enough. What was needed was outrage from the “legally existing parties,” the officially registered ones—but although they receive billions from the state budget, they did absolutely nothing.
And here is the result: in 2017, the money will be stolen again. Despite last year’s “we swear, this is the last time.”
The political conclusion is this: Russia’s educated urban population is numerous, but has no political representation at all. The only party that can and wants to represent it is the Party of Progress, and that is precisely why it is barred from elections.