Phone Seizure Seen as Example of Russian Corruption
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
With a shadowy economy, a growing bureaucracy and a capricious embrace of law, Russia has long been a maddening place for businesses to operate, a developing market that is at once lucrative and full of risks.
But the experience of Motorola has highlighted what executives, analysts and even some pro-government lawmakers in a largely pliant Parliament say is a worrisome trend: law enforcement agencies are not only taking sides in commercial disputes, but also precipitating them to enrich corrupt officials and their intermediaries.
The Russian government has a long history of criminal behavior that did not begin with the Bolsheviks assuming the trappings of power and clearly has not ended with their fall. I think that as we move further into the 21st Century we are going to see more and more examples of this sort of behavior from governments especially those that have a history of close collusion between the police apparatus of the state, including the military, government officials and so-called entrepreneurs who are more adept at executing regulatory arbitrage deals than in producing goods and services.
Look at China, for example, where the Red Army is involved in a vast array of quasi-legal and suspicious, if not criminal, ventures. The so-called People's government is actually condemning and seizing land owned by peasants and farmers and selling these parcels to developers at greatly appreciated prices for the private benefit of these government officials.
Several months ago Harper's ran a piece written anonymously by a high ranking officer in the Chinese Army that laid out in great detail the kinds of questionable deals and inappropriate business ventures the Red Army is engaged in on a routine, daily basis. These activities include, believe it or not, selling excursion rides in military fighter jets and taking groups of business people who have paid a fee in advance for target practice using the guns on Chinese warships.
All of this begins to make Milo Minderbinder's deal with the German Luftwaffe to bomb Allied bases while at the same time contracting with the Allies to use giant Lepage glue guns to glue the German planes together in formation seem altogether plausible. Clauswitz said that war was the continuation of politics by other means but since the Civil War we have been reluctant witnesses to the spectacle of war being the continuation of commercial enterprise by other means too.
The United States is hardly immune from these practices although our approach was carried out in a less dramatic form. The establishment of the national security state and the creation of the military-industrial-government complex has led directly to the diversion and hijacking of trillions of dollars of public money to create weapons of mass destruction and an annual budget that is bloated heavily in favor of so-called national defense.
Funds that could be used to repair and rebuild the crumbling infrastucture of this country's roads, bridges, public hospitals and schools, national parks etc. is instead appropriated and used to develop more and more military materiel. Tax dollars that could be better used to improve our public health system and allow us to create a single payer health plan for all Americans is sent to the Pentagon where it is distributed to arms manufacturers for new and more experimental weapons systems.
The so-called Global War on Terror is just the latest manifestation of this process of expropriating the value of the American people's tax dollars for the purpose of enriching a relative few over the greater majority. The effort to dismantle the Social Security system while allowing major, multi-national corporations to renege on their pension obligations to former and current workers are part of this growing worldwide phenomenon of governments using their power and threats of violence to provide sanctuary and protection for wealthy elites.