We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, September 26, 2016

Elections to the Russian Duma in 2016

Click here to access article by "The Saker" from The Unz Review.

This Russian born commentator and blogger, who is living in Florida, assesses the significance of the recent elections in Russia's parliament, the Duma. Although the winning party, United Russia, is a party divided between nationalist Russians like Putin and the Medvedev faction (aka the Atlanticists), he argues that the increase in the United Russia party's representation in the Duma really represents increased and solid support for the Putin faction. Here is an excellent description of the Atlanticist faction and what the election results represent for them:
The truth is, the real opposition to Putin is precisely that, the economic-financial ministers of the Medvedev government and all the factions which they represent: bankers, IMF-drones, corrupt businessmen from the 1990s who hate Putin because he does not allow them to steal like in the past, all the ex-Nomenklatura and their kids who made a killing in the 1990s and whose heart is in the West, the Atlantic Integrationists à la Kudrin who are basically “Washington consensus types” and who hate the Russian people for voting for Putin. That is the real opposition and that opposition is far more dangerous than the US and NATO combined. And for that opposition the result of the elections was a crushing defeat.