MOSCOW, July 2, 2007 -- Wednesday night came an SOS from Igor: Dane, can you send $ 30? It’s an emergency. Please.”
“I’ll try,” I SMS’d back.
As it turned out, I had $ 30 I could spare. I had had a class Wednesday morning and additional ones scheduled for Thursday morning, Friday morning, and Friday evening, and one with Valera Saturday morning, at which time another $ 100 payment would be due. Altogether, that would be $ 250, so if they all took came off as scheduled (they didn’t – Valera cancelled at the last minute), I could send Igor his emergency $ 30 and still be able to send Zhorik $ 50 to buy a flash card so he can put photos on the computer.
So promptly at 9 a.m. Thursday, I headed out for the Master Bank just two blocks away, which has a Western Union franchise. The “bank” consists of one tiny office smaller than my kitchen at the corner of Gruzinski Val and Tverskaya. There’s room for only one person at a time.
The bank opens at 9. When I arrived at 9:10, the guard was standing in the open doorway smoking.
“It’s closed,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and peered into the interior.
“It’s closed,” he repeated.
“When will it be open?” I asked in an annoyed tone of voice.
“I don’t know. The cashier isn’t here.”
“You mean she overslept.”
He nodded his head.
So I went back home and set out again half an hour later.
The cashier, the bank’s one employee, had arrived.
I filled out the Western Union blank and shoved it and the money into the drawer which she then pulled out on her side of the bulletproof glass – the standard configuration for all banks, currency exchange points, and any other place where money is transferred between customer and cashier.
“Passport,” she said.
Oh, shit! I had had to leave my passport with English Exchange for my visa renewal, and I had forgotten to bring the official company document and photocopy of my passport that serves as an interim substitute.
So another round trip.
Finally, I completed my errand of mercy and SMS’d Igor to let him know. “Spend it carefully,” I admonished. “I don’t know when I can send you more.”
“Thank you, Dane,” he wrote back. “You saved my ass. I miss you. Everyone tells you hello. I’m waiting for you, your Igor.”
“Your Igor?” Holy zits! Does he really consider himself my Igor? Things must really be bad in Moldova! Anyway, I like it.
“I’m glad you got it,” I wrote back. “I miss you and kiss you.”
“Honey,” he replied. Honey? In English? I call him honey all the time, but it’s the first time he’s ever called me honey. “Honey, I miss you very much. Things are very bad here.”
So I was right!
“I know. I’m sorry. We have to be patient a little while longer.”
“Is it impossible to find another apartment?” he replied.
“Honey, we can’t now.” And then a reminder: “When you come back, you are going to have to find a job and pay me $ 300 a month towards rent and the landlady will register you. Maybe later we can move, but not now.”
I don’t want him having any illusions that he can come back and continue to live the life of leisure that he was living before he went back to Moldova.
But his words of endearment make me wonder if he is viewing our relationship as something deeper and more permanent than I had assumed. We can only wait and see. I’m still going to try to go to meet him in Moldova in August, have a long, long talk about the realities of the financial situation, and bring him back with me. It sounds like life will be sweet when he finally returns.
I do miss him. At the same time, life is tranquil and serene without his manic energy and his constant demands on my time and money. I’m viewing it as a vacation – from him.
If Bush can invade Iraq for oil, why can’t Putin steal the North Pole? Well, he seems to think he can, according to a Guardian newspaper article posted on the internet last week, asserting that Russia is planning to annex “a vast 460,000 square mile chunk” of the North Pole containing ten billion tons of gas and oil deposits.
But according to the Guardian, under international law, no country owns the North Pole. Instead, the five countries whose borders surround it, Russia, the U.S., Canada, Norway, and Denmark (because of Greenland) “are limited to a 200-mile economic zone around their coasts.”
But last week, a group of Russian geologists returned from a six-week voyage on a nuclear icebreaker that had taken them to Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater shelf in Russia’s eastern Arctic Ocean, with the “’sensational news’ that the Lomonosov Ridge was linked to the territory of the Russian Federation, boosting Russia’s claim over the oil-and-gas rich triangle.”
Russia’s claim may run into some international problems, the Guardian conjectures: “To extend a zone, a state has to prove that the structure of the continental shelf is similar to the geological structure within its territory.”
And under current UN convention on the laws of the sea, no country’s shelf extends to the North Pole. Instead, the area is administered by the International Seabed Authority as an international area.
Even the international cooperation director of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Inst. in St. Peterburg considers the Russian claim “a little strange.”
“Canada could make exactly the same claim,” he asserted. “The Canadians could say that the Lomonosov Ridge is part of the Canadian shelf, which means Russia should in fact belong to Canada, together with the whole of Eurasia.”
So the Russian claim is, to say the least, a bit specious, but it paints the Bush Administration into an untenable corner, notes the Guardian, because “It is likely to prompt Russia to lodge another confident bid – and will alarm the U.S., which is mired in a 13-year debate over ratification of a UN treaty governing international maritime rights.”
The treaty, “the Law of the Sea Treaty,” is the primary international law by which disputes over exploitation rights and navigational routes in international waters are settled.
Russia and 152 other nations have already ratified it, but the Bush Administration has refused, protesting that it gives too much power to the UN.
But, notes the Guardian: “If the U.S. does not ratify it, Russia’s bid for the Arctic’s energy wealth will go unchallenged, proponents believe.”
So Bush is going to have to shit or get off the pot – or maybe he will just invade and democratize Russia.
Everybody knows it worked in Iraq, and nothing succeeds like success.
In cleaning out my e-mail box, I came across some predictions made by Tarp Honniker two years ago when he was busy escalating me to energy guru/icon while we were working together to figure out what is likely to happen to Russia after the oil peak hits (Chapts. 148, 160).
I didn’t report his conclusions at the time, so I’m doing it now: In a February 2006 e-mail, he predicted that Russia would continue to boom economically until oil’s “second peak” in 2010, while the rest of the world’s major economies would “languish under the pressure of high energy prices.”
All this isn’t as yet apparent, but we’ve got four years to go before the 2010 target date. Some say world oil has already peaked. Certainly, the currently hovering oil price of $ 70 a barrel seems pretty convincing evidence despite all the sham excuses – politics, periodic cycles, etc. – that are being pulled out of the hat by oil companies and politicians to explain it.
As demand continues to rise – from the U.S., China, India, etc. – while production is plateauing and declining, you can bet your sweet ass the price will go a hell of a lot higher than the current $ 70 a barrel. Only At that time will the average American begin to take William Kunstler’s “The End of Suburbia” seriously.
Till then, we can continue to close our eyes and pretend it’s not happening.
While the world’s other major economies aren’t “languishing” yet, the Bank for International Settlements, often described as “the central bankers’ central bank,” let the “D” word slip out this past week.
It said that the loose monetary policy of the preceding years “has fuelled a dangerous credit bubble, leaving the global economy more vulnerable to another 1930s-style slump than generally understood.”
Does everyone remember what a “slump…1930s-style” is? As Mr. Rogers on the TV kiddies’ program used to intone, “can you say ‘depression?’”
"Virtually nobody foresaw the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the crises which affected Japan and Southeast Asia in the early and late 1990s. In fact, each downturn was preceded by a period of non-inflationary growth exuberant enough to lead many commentators to suggest that a 'new era' had arrived", said the bank.
The “worrying signs” are all there, the report continued: “mass issuance of new-fangled credit instruments, soaring levels of household debt, extreme appetite for risk shown by investors, and entrenched imbalances in the world currency system.”
In its current economic exuberance, China seems to be repeating the past mistakes of Japan and others, the report says. More to the point, it is “far from clear” whether the U.S. will be able to “shrug off the consequences of its latest imbalances…, a current account deficit running at 6.5 % of GDP, a rise in US external liabilities by over $ 4 trillion from 2001 to 2005, and an unprecedented drop in the savings rate.
"The dollar clearly remains vulnerable to a sudden loss of private sector confidence," the BIS said.
So we have “worrying signs” of an upcoming depression. Seen any stock brokers selling apples on Fifth Avenue recently? It ain’t here yet, so why worry about it.
But “The crash of the U.S. economy has begun,” insists Richard C. Cook, who describes himself as a “dissident” economist and journalist, writing in Global Research (see this link)
According to Cook, its arrival was announced on “the morning of Wednesday, June 13, 2007, by economic writers Steven Pearlstein and Robert Samuelson in the pages of the Washington Post,” when they said the “extraordinary amount of debt vs. operating profits of companies currently subject to leveraged buyouts” couldn’t be sustained.
If I pretended to be an economic scholar, I would be as big a liar as Bush. I don’t speak po-economiskiy. All I know is that these are two of the most respected mainstream American economists who study all those little knots and curlicues of interwoven money trails, and that they have concluded things can’t continue like they have been, which economic chronicler Cook interprets as the beginning of the U.S. economic collapse.
Thus the crash of the U.S. economy isn’t just inevitable, if we are to believe Cook. It’s already underway.
The question is, how long it will take before the interwoven net of knots and curlicues that keep you in groceries, clothes, and gasoline come unraveled? How long before my Social Security pension check isn’t worth the piece of plastic I have to put in the ATM to get it?
Not everybody is going to go down the tube – just typical American wage earners like you and me -- note Cook and other economic writers like Michael Hudson, who predicted the burst of the housing bubble in a Harper’s magazine article back in May of last year. Now Hudson – as well as many others -- is foreseeing a “huge asset grab” by the rich when the SHTF.
Particularly notable among the vultures now circling the carcass, notes Cook, is the Carlyle Group, the equity fund that is practically a Bush family store. Its founding partner, William E. Conway Jr., recently acknowledged its flexing talons, according to Cook, when he gleefully advised that when the current “liquidity environment” – a high-toned synonym for cheap credit – ends, “the buying opportunity will be a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” Get in line, boys.
So guess what ruling American family starting with a B and ending with an SH is set to make millions, if not billions, by the financial collapse it’s engineered? B___ SH__. Did you guess it?
Anyway, a year from now, if all the major economies of the world – except Russia – are wallowing in economic depression, we’ll know that these gurus knew what they were talking about.
But you can bet your sweet ass that whichever way the wind blows, the Bushmaster is set to cash in. The Bush outback has lots of hedges. In the meantime, you should keep your own fingernails cut short. Chewed nails in the market place give you away as an insecure wimp.
The homophobic mayor of Moscow, hizzoner Yuri Luzhkov, has just been appointed by Putin to a fifth term. When Putin abolished elections for governors and decreed that thenceforth governors would be appointed by the czar (Chapt. 88), the mayoralty of Moscow was included, because his realm is considered politically equivalent to a region -- what in America would be labeled a state.
So Luzhkov is still mayor for the next four years, and gay parades are still banned. As a matter of fact, a gay “demonstration” that had actually been sanctioned was suddenly blocked last week by Moscow cops who said it would interfere with nearby construction.
Two of the demonstrators were arrested.
Some two dozen gay activists had been granted permission to gather at the European Union representative’s office to demand an international travel visa ban for Luzhkov because of his anti-gay stridency.
In his inaugural speech before the city duma, lord mayor Luzhkov promised to raise the average Muscovite’s salary from its current $ 750 per month to about $ 1500 within two years.
Just how a mayor waves his wand and suddenly doubles everybody’s income wasn’t explained. But if Luzhkov says it, it must be true.
Most Russians will have entered the middle class by 2020, thirteen years from now, promises a new report by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry. They will also own a car and live longer.
And average incomes for the entire country – as opposed to Moscow (see above) – will increase by 2-1/2 times to $ 1000 a month. Average Russian salary is just under $ 400 a month – although even that seems high from the anecdotal accounts I’ve heard.
Life expectancy will have increased from 65.3 years to 70.
Pensions will have increased four-fold and one in four Russians will be able to travel abroad, compared to one in twenty now.
Sounds like Luzhkov is going to have to wave his magic wand quite a bit – and not just in Moscow.
All this spiraling economic wealth is contingent on the country’s success in diversifying the economy into high-tech industry. Again, I have my doubts. Oil and gas exports are just too easy and diversification takes effort and planning and a government will, which so far has been notably absent.
But whether this pie in the sky materializes or not, there will be fewer people to divvy it up. By that time the working population will have shrunk by 13 million, from 90 million to 77 million, and the country’s entire population will have dropped from 142 million to 138 million.
Putin’s stature in the world community has dropped, the U.S. nonpartisan Pew Research Center has found.
But apparently not as much as Bush’s.
Although the Internet summary of the 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Survey, made available just last week (see: http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/http://uscpublicdiplomacy.com/index.php/library/), contains few details, it notes that since 2002 “America’s image has declined in 26 out of the 33 countries from which data was (sic) available”.
The survey also documents “widespread dissatisfaction with America’s continued presence in Iraq and Afghanistan and American leadership of the ‘War on Terror.’”
Public opinion about major powers such as China, and global leaders like Putin, “has also become more critical.”
So it looks like “soul brothers” George and Vladimir are in an equal opportunity global race for most contemptible president. Hard to pick a winner in this contest!
The noose continues to tighten around critics of the Russian government with the pending passage of a new law that would criminalize not only individuals and groups who write and publish “extremist” – i.e., anti-government -- literature, but also the printers themselves who allow such materials to be cranked out on their presses.
Opposition groups like The Other Russia were already having difficulty finding printers brave enough to print their campaign materials. Just before St. Peterburg’s summits last month, 150,000 copies of a newspaper publicizing the dissenters march were confiscated by the FSB before the papers even left the printing house.
“Other Russia” spokeswoman Marina Litvinovich told the Moscow Times that the last time they printed materials in Moscow, they were rejected by 25 printers before they finally found one bold enough to take their order.
“This bill will only add to the fear that’s been there a long time already,” she said.
The pending legislation will also stiffen penalties for such crimes as hooliganism and public disorder if they are committed out of “ideological, political, racial, national, or religious” motives.
So if the political literature of an opposition group is considered “extremist,” as it certainly will be if it expresses anti-government views (and if it’s opposing the government, how could it not express anti-government views), the group or individual – and the printer – will be subject to up to six years’ imprisonment.
Sergei Belyak, a lawyer who has defended the National Bolshevik Party, which has already been banned and declared extremist (Chapt. 245), told the MT that “There used to be a law on anti-Soviet activities, on spreading anti-Soviet views. Well, now there’s no Soviet system, so they’ve turned everyone into extremists.”
The newspapers of an anti-government youth group, the Red Guards, in Novosibirsk are already being investigated by the KGB>FSB on suspicion of containing extremist views – even without the new law.
The KGB>FSB said two of the groups newspapers, which were distributed during a May 1 demonstration in Novosibirsk, “contained articles that experts determined had advocated a violent overthrow of the government.”
The government went on to say that the articles “stressed the need for political protests and mass disorder and openly advocated the disintegration of the army.”
So calling for more political protests, a general strike, and dissolution of the cruel and ineffective Russian army is advocating violent overthrow of the government?
Independent thinkers in Russia are in deep trouble – again!
There is growing anger in Russia precisely because of Putin’s misuse of extremist laws and curtailing of press freedoms, former chess-champ-turned-Putin-oppositionist Garry Kasparov told the Hudson Institute in New York last week.
And he sees it benefiting opposition voices like The Other Russia.
However, from what I’ve seen it’s either a page from his wish book or part of his plan to get increased U.S. financing for his political campaign, although – as has been noted before (Chapt. 254, e.g.,) something’s got Putin running scared, so maybe he’s seeing the same rising anti-Kremlin anger.
But on Putin’s part I’m more inclined to attribute it to paranoia, and to Kasparov’s, wishful thinking. Putin nor his heir apparent will face a tide of opposition in next year’s election.
Bees and Borshch: Another borshch – less elegant than the last (Chapt. 249), but very tasty and very Russian -- comes from my dissident friend Andrei Sh. It’s base is dried beans, to which are added onions, beets, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, herbs, and fresh dill and parsley. I mashed the potatoes, which changed the consistency to closely resemble the universally acclaimed U.S. Senate cafeteria bean soup.
So it’s sort of Senate bean soup with beets. I’ve named it Senate borsch.
When I e-mailed Andrei to tell him how good it was, he replied:
“Yeah, it's something which makes our dreary life more palatable,” then added:
“By the way, I recently met a friend of mine who keeps bees. He says there's similar problem (colony collapse disorder) in Russia. This year he lost 10 hives out of 100 he keeps.
“In Russia they blame mobile phones and GM (genetically modified) crops, though my friend says the much worse problem in the Russian countryside is heavy drinking and migration (of the peasants hired to mind the bees) to cities in search of an easy life. He even cannot find anyone to keep an eye on his honey-bees for 300 rubles ($ 10) a day so that he could go to Moscow to sell the honey….
“….As for me, I think the root-cause is dropping tension of the Earth's magnetic field, and, consequently, its shifting poles and rising frequency. The humans and bees, and whatnot, being an inseparable part of the earth's environment, become disoriented and die out. Our stupid technotronic civilization is only a contributory factor here, accelerating our deaths.”
I wrote back, essentially asking – but circumspectly, of course – what the hell he was talking about. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
He replied:
“It's a scientific fact, first stated by the world media in 2000-2001, mostly ignored in America -- I suspect so as not to ring the alarm bells and scare the public.
“The Russian scientists, being turned into a new Russian proletariat, and therefore having nothing to lose, were more outspoken, and some of them, few in number of course, even went as far as to say that the change in magnetic poles would trigger similar change in geographic poles, i.e. that the earth's axis is first to tilt, then make a 180 degrees turn; that the earth had already undergone similar changes in its past history and there was lots of evidence to this.
“A guy I knew even cited a toy Chinese gyro as a model of the phenomenon: when such gyro loses its rotating speed it tumbles down and changes its poles; the top becomes the bottom, and the bottom becomes the top; after this, 'revolution' rotation continues. There are lots of interesting things which accompany this reversal, but it takes quite a time to describe and explain them.
“Anyway, since then a number of things occurred confirming this model: a strong earthquake, for example, in South-East Asia after which a minute tilt in the earth's axis was registered, and a drop in rotation speed; besides, last year there were also scanty media reports saying that the unusually severe winter of 2005-2006 in Central Russia is due to the shifting magnetic poles, triggering a similar movement of the so-called Frost Pole, which used to be in Yakutia, but is now moving westward at the speed of 50 km a year. One can cite lots of other environmental phenomena, but what's the use? The blind won't see even the most obvious.
“If you want to read about such things you might try and find the web-sites of some dissident American scientists, a thin but vibrant layer of American thought…”
Okay, give me a break! First peak oil, then global warming, nuclear annihilation, dying oceans, annihilation of bees, and now the earth is going to turn upside down? Putin is going to annex the South Pole?
Enough already! I can only wring my hands over so many world-ending catastrophes at a time.
But the borshch recipe:
Senate Borshch
Soak a cup of dried beans overnight. The next morning, drain, rinse, add water, and bring to a simmer. In the meantime, slice a couple of onions, cut one beet root into strips, shred one large carrot, add a little oil and sauté them together in a skillet until soft and tender. While they’re doing their thing, dice and boil one large potato in a small saucepan with just enough water to cover, then mash it in its own water.
After an hour and a half or so, when the beans first start to peel when you blow on them, add the sautéed vegetables and tomatoes -- either fresh or canned -- to taste to the boiling beans. As for spices, “round up the usual suspects,” to quote Claude Rains Jr. in “Casablanca” -- i.e., bay leaf, dried thyme and basil, and chopped fresh dill and parsley -- and boil for another few minutes to half an hour to let the flavors thoroughly marry. Serve with a generous dollop of sour cream in each bowl.
It brings new meaning to the old adage: The best things in life are free – well, at least cheap.
To hell with sex, just give me my cell phone! Back to the bees: So according to Andrei Sh., the Russians, too, are laying at least part of the blame for the disappearing bees on cell phones. When I suggested cell phones weren’t being blamed in America because they had become too sacrosanct to even think about banning (Chapt. 253), I was mostly kidding. But a new British survey suggests I might have been on the right track.
A poll conducted jointly by the Carphone Warehouse and the London School of Economics found that most respondents between 16 and 24 would rather give up alcohol, chocolate, tea, coffee – or sex – than live without their mobile phones for a month!
One in three people said they wouldn’t give up their cell phones for a million pounds!
So it looks like the bees may just have to fend for themselves. What the hell, we don’t need vegetables and fruit anyway. But it’s going to be tough making borshch and wine without them.
Photo of Maxim from my Diplomatic Academy class.
This summer is proving a dry spell for English lessons, but beautiful Maxim from my just-completed Inst. of Diplomacy class (see photo) just dangled a carrot that makes the wait worthwhile.
In an e-mail last week, he wrote: “I found you 4 students for your private classes. One of them is my friend Emil, I told you about him. Another one is my cousin, but he wants to take classes in August. And if he likes it I hope that he will continue. I also want to ask you to give private lessons to my brother. What I can tell about his level is that he knows several tenses and has small baggage of vocabulary.”
But Maxim saved the best till last: “And as you can understand the last person is me.”
Heart be still!
So we’ve already agreed on price and times. His cousin will start in August, and the rest in September. I can only hope the other three are half as beautiful as he is.
He left Moscow after his final exam at the university to go back to his home in Tatarstan, where his father works for an oil company. He doesn’t have a computer, but will use his father’s at work so we can stay in touch.
He’s also going to England for a couple of weeks to study English during the summer. So we will have lots to talk about when he starts lessons this fall.
For good mental health, we should always have something to look forward to :-)
See also related pages:
Chapt. #256 - Independence Day: Why is there tyranny?
Chapt. #253 - Landlady lifts sense of oncoming disaster
Chapt. #249 - “Illegal Moldovans” threaten apartment crisis
Chapt. #245 - Zhorik exits; and so do human rights
Chapt. #160 - A legend in my own time! Junkyard dogs
Chapt. #148 - Icon and lyricist: Ode to Ejaculation
