13 mind-blowing facts about Russia’s economy

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/russia-economy-facts-2019-4-1028116037#asbest-russia-produced-315-000-tons-of-asbestos-last-year11

Following World War II, the Soviet Union emerged as a global superpower to rival the United States.

But when the Soviet Union crumbled in the early 1990s and reemerged as Russia, it had to reinvent its economy. In the decades that followed, the communist nation has experienced plenty of economic struggles.

As Russia continues to try to reassert itself as a global power, it faces a fluctuating currency, declining population, and an economy that is in many ways dependent on oil and gas.

Here are 13 mind-blowing facts about Russia’s economy:

Russia loses 700 people every day

The Russian population is decreasing by approximately 700 people a day, or more than 250,000 people annually, according to the Eurasia Daily Monitor.

Some cities, like Murmansk, have experienced population declines of more than 30% since the end of the Soviet Union.

The decrease is due in part to aging demographics, falling immigration rates, and a failure by the government to enforce health and food regulations. Some observers place the blame on Western economic sanctions, which have contributed to Russian poverty and economic uncertainty.

The decline could continue to pose problems for Russia’s economy for years to come.

Russia has more than $460 billion in reserve funds

Russia has more than $460 billion in reserve, with a debt level of 29% of the gross domestic product and 15.9 months of import cover.

These basic macroeconomic statistics lead experts to believe Russia can withstand some global shocks, even if its economic growth remains at its low rate of approximately 1.5%.

Russia’s economic output plummeted 45% in the decade after the Soviet Union broke up

From 1989 to 1998, Russian output dropped 45%, as the economic reforms following the Soviet collapse in 1991 took effect. By 2000, the nation’s GDP was between 30% and 50% of its pre-collapse output.

Several factors are attributed for the post-transition recessions, all which made it a chaotic time with poor economic policies.

Oil and gas make up 59% of Russia’s exports

Russia is rife with oil, and its economy is heavily dependent on the resource.

By the end of last year, Russian oil production was at an all-time high, at 11.16 million barrels a day, according to Reuters.

In 2017, gas made up 59% of Russia’s exports and 25% of its total revenue, according to the World Bank.

More than 13% of Russians live in poverty

Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed in his state-of-the-nation speech last year that he would halve Russian poverty, which currently impacts more than 13% of the population. Official state statistics at the time showed 19.3 million Russians living below the poverty line, according to the Irish Times.

The speech highlighted an investment of 25.7 trillion rubles – that’s $380 billion – in modernizing Russia’s healthcare, education, infrastructure, housing, and agriculture to help those in need and potentially curb Russia’s population decline.

Still, Russia’s poverty rate has decreased significantly from the immediate post-Soviet rate of nearly 35%.

Russia has more than 70 billionaires

Russian wealth inequality is high and Moscow is often atop the list of global cities with the most billionaires – Russia as a whole has more than 70. Many of those billionaires obtained their wealth during the 1990s, when corruption swept through the country as it came out of a communist economy.

Oligarchs have plenty of influence in the Russian government and have started investing in the West, including in sports teams like the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, owned by billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov.

Russia’s currency, the ruble, has dropped in value by 50% this decade

The Russian economy suffered a significant financial crisis from 2014 to 2017, which saw the ruble’s value get cut in half.

Last year, the Central Bank of Russia blamed US sanctions on the ruble hitting a two-year low of 69.40 against the dollar. In 2013, the ruble was at 33 per US dollar.

The economic crisis, as a whole, was caused by massive oil price declines in 2014 and international sanctions imposed on Russia when it intervened militarily in Ukraine.

The average monthly wage in Russia is $670

Russia is ranked in the top 10 nations in terms of economic production. But despite the high GDP compared to the rest of the world, the average monthly wage is $670 – or 42,413 rubles.

That has grown since nearly 50% since 2016 – when it was $437.

Wages in Russian took a massive hit with the recent ruble instability as Russians were able to buy 40% more goods and services in 2013 than they could in 2018.

Ikea owns 20% of the Russian furniture market

The Swedish superstore chain Ikea opened its first store in the Russian capital of Moscow in 2000, and the store quickly became one of the company’s top stores.

Over the next 18 years, Ikea opened another two Moscow stores and a total of 14 stores across the massive nation.

With Russians looking to stretch their money further, Ikea now owns 20% of the Russian furniture market.

Russian vodka consumption has dropped by more than 50% in the past 20 years

At the turn of the millennium, Russians bought 214.6 million decaliters of vodka – or 567 million gallons.

By 2015, that number had dropped to below 100 million decaliters, while champagne consumption jumped from 18.3 million decaliters to 23.6 million.

The BBC cites a westernization of the Russian culture over the past two decades, with Russians shifting more toward beer and wine.

Asbest, Russia, produced 315,000 tons of asbestos last year

Asbestos are the key export of the aptly-named city of Asbest, Russia. Despite the well-known health hazards of asbestos, the city saw an increase in its asbestos output last year, according to The New York Times.

The 315,000 tons of asbestos produced from the city’s mine last year was the first increase in production the city had seen in years. A full 80% of that output was sold abroad, including 67 tons to the United States.

Asbestos are banned in more than 60 countries.

Russia invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars in Zimbabwe’s diamond industry

During the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union competed for influence in Asia, and now Russia has turned its eye toward Africa. Both Russia and China have made massive investments throughout the continent trying to cement their influence.

In January, Russia made a $267 million investment in Zimbabwe’s diamond industry.

Russia doesn’t have the historical roots of other European nations, nor the money China holds, but its influence in Africa is largely affected by its military exports and state natural resource companies.

Russia spent $50 billion on the 2014 Winter Olympics

As the Winter Olympics descended on the Russian city of Sochi, the government spent more than $50 billion to get the city ready. The investment included not just the construction of new sports venues and hotels, but roads, bridges, low-pressure gas pipelines, and other infrastructure projects, as well.

But the investment seems to be working: Russian officials reported 6.5 million people visited the resort town in 2017, injecting life into a local economy that had once been known only for summer recreation.

In 2018, Russia hosted the FIFA World Cup, which reportedly cost more than $11 billion in construction and preparation work.

Chamber Of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue Made $4.7 Million In 2010

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/chamber-commerce-tom-donohue-salary-compensation_n_1097375?ri18n=true

Tom Donohue, the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, made a record $4.7 million last year, at a time when the rest of the country was seeing high unemployment and falling wages.

Donohue’s pay package included a $3.6 million bonus. His compensation in 2010 was $1 million higher than it was in 2009, when he was the sixth-highest paid lobbyist in the country.

In March, Donohue made headlines for saying that the compensation of public workers is “over bloated” and their pensions are “out of control.”

Donohue’s compensation was revealed in the Chamber’s 990 tax forms, which became publicly available this week. The Chamber itself also did quite well in 2010, collecting a significant number of million-dollar donations.

According to information compiled by the group U.S. Chamber Watch, the business lobby received at least $189 million in dues from 1,511 members, including corporations, individuals and organizations. Eighty-eight percent of those donations were for $100,000 or more, and 53 percent of the members donated $1 million or more. The Chamber also received two contributions that were each in excess of $10 million.

On its website, the Chamber boasts that it represents “3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors and regions,” more than 96 percent of which are “small businesses with 100 employees or fewer.” A significant amount of its funding, however, appears to come from a relatively small number of entities.

“The U.S. Chamber is an organization that’s made up of the one percent, to advocate for the one percent, said Christy Setzer, spokeswoman for Chamber Watch. “That’s reflected in every aspect of the Chamber’s operations, from the nearly $5 million compensation package received by their president, Tom Donohue, to the policies for the wealthy that they’ve taken their biggest stances on — including their support for extending the Bush tax cuts and a tax ‘holiday’ on overseas profits. That may be cool comfort to big corporate CEOs, but hardly helpful to struggling Mom and Pop shops across America.”

The Chamber did not return a request for comment.

Russian space sector plagued by astronomical corruption

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-russian-space-sector-plagued-astronomical.html

With millions of dollars missing and officials in prison or fleeing the country, Russia’s space sector is at the heart of a staggering embezzlement scheme that has dampened ambitions of recovering its Soviet-era greatness.

For years, Moscow has tried to fix the industry that was a source of immense pride in the USSR. While it has bounced back from its post-Soviet collapse and once again become a major world player, the Russian space sector has recently suffered a series of humiliating failures.

And now, massive corruption scandals at state space agency Roscosmos have eclipsed its plans to launch new rockets and lunar stations.

“Billions (of rubles) are being stolen there, billions,” Alexander Bastrykin, the powerful head of Russia’s Investigative Committee—Russia’s equivalent of the FBI—said in mid-May.

Investigations into corruption at Roscosmos have been ongoing “for around five years and there is no end in sight,” he added.

In the latest controversy, a senior space official appears to have fled Russia during an audit of the research centre he headed.

Yury Yaskin, the director of the Research Institute of Space Instrumentation, left Russia for a European country in April where he announced his resignation, the Kommersant paper reported.

He feared the discovery of malpractice during an inspection of the institute, according to the newspaper’s sources.

Roscosmos confirmed to AFP that Yaskin had resigned but did not clarify why. His Moscow institute is involved in developing the Russian satellite navigation system GLONASS designed to compete with the American GPS system.

Stopping corruption ‘primary goal’

Corruption has particularly affected Russia’s two most important space projects of the decade: GLONASS and the construction of the country’s showpiece cosmodrome Vostochny, built to relieve Moscow’s dependence on Baikonur in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan.

Almost all major companies in the sector, including rocket builders Khrunichev and Progress, have been hit by financial scandals that have sometimes led to prison sentences for large-scale fraud.

Russia’s Audit Chamber, a parliamentary body of financial control, said financial violations at Roscosmos in 2017 stood at 760 billion rubles (around $11.7 billion), accounting for nearly 40 percent of the total irregularities in the entire economy that year.

Roscosmos told AFP that “eradicating corruption” is one of its “primary goals”, adding that it regularly cooperates with investigations by the authorities.

In mid-April, President Vladimir Putin stressed the need to “progressively resolve the obvious problems that slow down the development of the rocket-space sector.”

“The time and financial frameworks to realise space projects are often unjustified,” the Russian leader said.

More money, more corruption

Rebooting the space sector is a matter of prestige for the Kremlin. It symbolises its renewed pride and ability to be a major global power, especially in the context of increased tensions with the United States.

Almost destroyed in the 1990s, the sector stayed afloat thanks to foreign commercial contracts.

But independent space expert Vitaly Yegorov told AFP there were still “executives of a very high professional level” at that time and fewer accidents during launches.

The first module of the International Space Station (ISS), Zarya, was manufactured in Russia and launched in 1998 despite a major financial crisis at the time.

Paradoxically, the situation deteriorated in the early 2000s, when the Russian economy was growing. The influx of public funds fuelled fraud, and space research stopped advancing, experts say.

“Today, the space sector works like this: give us money and we will launch something—one day,” Yegorov said.

Only the ISS continues to be “an unshakeable ivory tower”, he said, since it plays a “political role” aimed at maintaining international cooperation.

Analysts say Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin, a former deputy prime minister known for his anti-Western statements, is struggling to deal with the industry’s problems.

Russia’s scientific community has criticised Rogozin, who is a journalism graduate, for his lack of knowledge of the space sector.

“He probably would have made an excellent spokesman for Roscosmos,” joked Yegorov, adding: “Even Superman could not handle this avalanche of problems.”

Cosmic Voyage (1936)

Cosmic Voyage or The Space Voyage (Russian: Космический рейс, romanized: Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella) is a 1936 Soviet science fiction film produced by Mosfilm. It was one of the earliest films to represent a realistic spaceflight, including weightlessness.

Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella was initially conceived in 1924 by Russian filmmaker Vasili Zhuravlov, but it was not pursued for production until 1932, when Komsomol (the Communist Union of Youth) recommended the creation of film that would spur an interest in space studies. Zhuravlov consulted with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the noted aeronautical theorist and rocket science engineer, on the screenplay. Tsiolkovsky died shortly after the film was completed.

Two spaceships in the film were named after the Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin and Kliment Voroshilov. The film’s cosmonauts enter liquid-filled chambers to buffer the impact of takeoff and landing, and they communicate their landing to the Earth by spelling out “CCCP” (the Russian-language acronym for “USSR”) with reflective substances spread across the lunar surface.

Steven Jones Continues to Demo Truth Movement

https://nomadiceveryman.blogspot.com/2019/09/steven-jones-continues-to-demo-truth.html

Back in 2003 the RJ Lee Group was contracted by Deutsche Bank to do a study to identify signature markers of the dust created by the destruction of the World Trade Centers on Sept. 11th 2001.

Apparently the new owners of the Trade Centers or their insurance company didn’t want to pay for the cleaning of the dust and the damage to the Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street, New York. So Deutsche Bank paid the RJ Lee Group to prove that the dust and damage to their building did indeed come from the event at the World Trade Center that day. The report was titled WTC Dust Signature Report Composition and Morphology. Who was to know that the key evidence of the demolition of the Trade Centers would turn up in that report.

“Various metals (most notably iron and lead) were melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical metallic particles. Exposure of phases to high heat results in the formation of spherical particles due to surface tension. Figure 21 and Figure 22 show a spherical iron particle resulting from the melting of iron (or steel).” 2003 RJ Lee Group report page 17

“In addition to the spherical iron and aluminosilicate particles, a variety of heavy metal particles including lead, cadmium, vanadium, yttrium, arsenic, bismuth, and barium particles were produced by the pulverizing, melting and/or combustion of the host materials such as solder, computer screens, and paint during the WTC Event. Combustion-related products are significant WTC Dust Markers, particularly if seen in combination. However, it is worth noting that fly ash and partially combusted products can occur in trace concentrations in ordinary building dusts, but not in the concentrations observed in WTC Dust.” 2003 RJ Lee Group page 19

“The differences within the WTC Dust and typical background dusts include the fineness and evidence of heat, the size and concentration of the chrysotile, and the length and concentration of the mineral wool and other fibers, as well as the frequency of occurrence of spherical particles produced by fire and heat, char and soot, and other building products.” 2003 RJ Lee Group report page 19-20

What the RJ Lee Group found was that MANY types of heavy metals and plastics were melted instantly under great pressure during the event of 9/11 and that the evidence showed that this was due to a combustion event similar to an explosion. This kind of heat, this kind of pressure, could not have existed in the readily accepted Bazant “crush down crush up” theory. Key to the formation of these micro-spheres of molten metal is that they would have had to have been formed in space so that the surface tension would form them into spherical shapes. That means that they weren’t crushed or pulverized into these shapes, but rather massive amounts of heat and pressure were generated and the molten metal results were then formed via surface tension while they were then free floating in space.

This was then and still is now one of the strongest piece of scientific evidence which clearly disproves the official, gravity driven hypothesis of the events of 9/11.

The end result of that study should have been that it was taken up by dedicated researchers and scientists of the Truth movement and expanded upon and it would have been if BYU, an ultra-conservative university in Utah which gave Dick Cheney an honorary doctorate of Public Service degree in 2007, hadn’t paid Dr. Steven Jones to mislead the Truth movement for years about those findings. Ironically (or maybe not so much so) it was right around the same time that BYU also honored Dr. Jones by raising his status at BYU to that of Professor Emeritus.

When Cheney received his honorary doctorate, he also gave the Commencement address to the class of 2007 at BYU. This was part of his opening:

“…And it’s always an honor to be in the company of this university’s chairman, a distinguished American and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Gordon B. Hinckley.” Dick Cheney, 2007

Gordon B. Hinckley, spiritual leader of the Mormon religion, had an interesting quote back in 2003 which I think is extremely relevant to this topic.

“It may even be that [the Lord] will hold us responsible if we try to impede or hedge up the way of those who are involved in a contest with forces of evil and repression.” Gordon B. Hinckley, 2003

How could it be that BYU would pay Steven Jones to conduct research into “super secret military grade explosives” like “nanothermite”, pay for at least two other researchers to do the work at BYU, have the head of that department “peer review” his paper, and pay for the publication of such a paper in a vanity press like Bentham Publishing? The Chairman of the school and spritual leader of their religon had made it clear that the Lord wanted good Mormons to HELP Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, not “impede” them.

The only logical answer, given what we now know about their “nanothermite” paper, is that from the start Dr. Jones was in fact helping Dick Cheney and George W. Bush by distracting the Truth movement away from the valuable evidence exposed in the RJ Lee Group report from the very beginning.

Since that time, Dr. Jones has behaved in some rather disappointing ways, ways I believe are designed to discredit the Truth movement from within.

  1. Prof. Jones refused to test for residues of high explosives in the WTC dust even though he repeated claims that NIST should have done just that.
  2. Prof. Jones embarrassed Richard Gage at his press conference for AE911Truth by bringing up “earthquake weapons” in front of the assembled press corp at the reception.
  3. Prof. Jones has repeatedly encouraged Truth advocates to listen to Glenn Beck’s show stating that Beck was “getting better”
  4. Prof. Jones has been trying to instruct Truth movement activists as to what they should and shouldn’t say about the Truth movement and his “peer reviewed” paper.
  5. Prof. Jones will now be headlining with “Master Witches and Hyper Intuitives” at Conspiracy Con.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Prof. Jones is now over at 9/11 Blogger still pushing his “nanothermite” distraction but he is also incorporating his “earthquake weapons” and “free energy” research into the mix as well.

It is certainly not a coincidence that Judy Wood, another fake truth advocate who promoted the “dustification” theory and “ray beams from space”, also promoted “free energy” research for many years and her recent book with an embarrassingly stupid title also incorporates “free energy” research right there on the cover.

Jesse Ventura also just recently showed his true colors by claiming on Alex Jones’ show that the towers were not brought down by controlled demolition but rather by “ray beams from space” while a woman who sounded a lot like Judy Wood fed him lines during the interview.

So it would seem that the planned implosion of the Truth movement is going to center around on of it’s most obvious and ridiculous fake “truthers”, Judy Wood. With Ventura and Jones now channeling the dustification lady with just a few months to go before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and the staged killing of Osama bin Laden, it would seem that the stage is being set for our targeted assassination.

This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention. Judy Wood and Steven Jones started out together in the Truth movement. Seems they will finish together as well. Let’s just hope they don’t finish us as well in the process.

Check out the Judy Wood interview that makes her perfect Weapon of Mass Destruction for the Truth movement. If people start to associate this bullshit with us, we are truly done for. The fact that Steven Jones actually created an organization called “Scholars” for 9/11 Truth with this idiot, should tell us a lot about why he got into the Truth movement to start with.