Putin has looted trillions from Russia

When Bill Browder showed up on CBC recently, I thought Brodie Fenlon’s CBC News must be the last news network to give this charlatan any cred. I was wrong. Here he is on MSNBC; Putin's a mafia boss trying to hold on to power. Bullshittin’ Bill has a whole new take on the Ukraine war, not to mention a new book to flog. Apparently this war isn’t about NATO expansion or any of that stuff, not at all. Instead, it’s about Putin the mafia boss desperately trying to stay in power. Hmm… Well, Bill should know a thing or two about mafia bosses. “His” Hermitage Capital was the wunderkind of a couple of Israeli mafia bosses. If you drew a venn diagram of Israeli and Russian mafia bosses you’d see an extraordinary overlap. They had a decade of salad days looting post-Soviet Russia. They originally supported Putin on the mistaken assumption that he would allow the party to continue. He didn’t. Bill got most of his ill-gotten loot out of Russia in the nick of time, and reinvented himself as a human rights crusader, a discredited schtick that apparently still has traction at CBC and MSNBC. Here’s a NYT story about the much-suppressed doc about Browder, The Magninsky Act; Behind the Scenes. You can still find it online if you make the effort. My favorite scene is near the end, where the pudgy middle-age Jew leaps out of his limo and sprints a hundred yards in nine seconds flat to avoid a guy trying to serve a subpoena! Bullshittin’ Bill still bills himself Putin’s enemy #1. If that’s the case, Putin doesn’t have much to worry about.