The sanctimonious twaddlers at the New York Times are at it again.
Every Sunday the local paper offers up a New York Times supplement. You get a sampling of what the finest minds in American journalism are up to without feeling guilty about the half-acre of trees that give up their lives for every copy of the gargantuan NYT weekend edition.
Today there are no less than three articles bemoaning the lack of democracy in Putin’s Russia. Bill Keller begins his massive op-ed with a gratuitous slander of a communal housing program in the last days of the Soviet Union, and moves quickly to the discomfort that a certain segment of contemporary Muscovites have with the "soul-sucking consumerism" that now defines them. The failures of both the socialist housing scheme and the capitalist money-above-all attitude are of course in some way attributable to Putin.
Andrew Kramer relates the sad story of Nikolia Maksimov, a man once on the Forbes billionaire list, now reduced to a net worth of a few hundred million. Mr. Maksimov was one of those lucky dupes who was in the right place at the right time when the invisible hand of the free market was let loose in the land to redistribute state assets to the oligarchs. Because of Putin he has been forced to squirrel away the remnants of his fortune in Britain.
Finally, Ellen Barry provides a profile of a group of young people who are affluent, upwardly mobile, and social-media savvy. Because of Putin they are forced to take time from their winter vacations in Egypt and Turkey to protest the results of the December elections.
But she unwittingly makes it known that in Russia young people have jobs!
Things can’t be that bad with Putin.
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