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Quote of the Day: Bill Browder on Vladimir Putin
Last week’s Wall Street Journal Weekend Interview was with Bill Browder, described in the article as “the man behind the Magnitsky Act.” Also according to the article, Mr. Browder was the largest private investor in Russia, until his expulsion from the country in 2005, for daring to investigate the theft from the Russian treasury of $230 million in taxes paid by his company. Here are some pithy quotes from Mr. Browder regarding Vladimir Putin:
[He calls Putin]…the greatest kleptocrat of the modern era.
[A ready reckoner to calculate Mr. Putin’s wealth: Tot up the worth of every oligarch and divide the sum by two.] Half their wealth is held in trust for Putin.
[On Putin’s worth:] It’s north of $200 Billion. Basically, in order to to be rich in Russia, you can only do it at the pleasure of Vladimir Putin. He can take it away from you at any point unless you do things he asks you to do.
…His wealth is not about having it for his retirement. It’s about power.
The moment he’s not in power, none of these handshake deals with the oligarchs will be respected. [Mr. Putin has all this wealth] because you can’t be the most powerful person in Russia without being the richest person. It’s an alpha-male society on steroids, so you have to be the biggest, meanest, richest, everythingest person if you’re going to be the dictator.
Maybe this partially explains why Putin rides his horse half-naked.
Published in Group Writing[Putin has] a “prison-yard” psychology. He absolutely cannot allow anyone to disrespect him. [Someone who does] has to be attacked not just a little bit, but eviscerated… He wanted Ukraine to be a subservient country to Russia, and they didn’t want to do that… They wanted to be a democracy, not a part of Russia. And so the only answer to that is just absolute annihilation in his mind.
Whatever information blockade he puts up [in Russia] can’t prevent mothers from grieving for their dead sons. And for every dead son, there are family, friends, parents, siblings, who will feel that pain.
There may not be an oligarch uprising, but there may be an uprising of mothers.
Sounds about right, but it is hard compare autocrats, because when you have infinite power money is irrelevant. When Xi is named “emperor for life”, will he be the bigger autocrat? The world seems to be full of bad guys and most of them seem to have a financial relationship with the Biden family.
A few days after the invasion started I watched some of the Bill Browder interviews, some of which were a couple of years old. I see there are some new ones. They are probably worth watching. I have a few questions about some aspects of his message on sanctions, but he has information on Putin that I hadn’t known before.
Browder is himself a fascinating person, and brave to have gone up against Putin as he has. His battle, which seems to have been fired especially by the torture and killing of his Russian attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, seems personal, as well as public-spirited. Ironically, he is the grandson of Earl Browder, who was chairman of the CPUSA and candidate for President in 1936 and 1940. I leave it to you to decide whether “Conservapedia” is correct to attack Browder on the ground that he has been trying to “subvert Russian capitalism and democracy,” but the website is clearly an apologist for Putin.
THE biggest kleptocrat? We have a kleptocrat at the head of our country who is trying to get us involved in a shooting war with Russia because of his business interests in Ukraine. The question is who is more dangerous for us, the American people?
The WSJ with their neocon agenda is perfectly happy to have the US in wars spreading democracy or whatever.
I suspect everything is true up until this bit. That’s simply not how it works in the real world. Guys like Putin may very well end up in a bunker with a self-inflicted bullet in his brain or hanging from a lamppost over a gas station, but the mothers of the dead won’t be the ones to do it. The world is a brutal place and ordinary folk suffer the brutality without much ability to do anything about it. That’s just wishful thinking.
Putin’s brutality is another reason it’s so incredibly lame and stupid for Joe Biden, of all people, to threaten him. You corner that rat, and chances are good he’s going to lash out and make sure to take plenty of other people with him when he goes.
We are not a serious people anymore.
Is it shocking or incomprehensible to Americans that anyone, particularly those in government, should want to amass wealth for something other than retirement? Our government leaders don’t even retire.
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This post is part of the Quote of the Day (QOTD) Series, which is one of the group writing projects here on Ricochet. The other is the monthly group writing theme organized by @cliffordbrown, currently featuring musings from members on “Now and Then.” The Signup Sheet for April is here.
In some of his interviews he explains how he tried to rebel against his parents. Long hair and other hippie behavior didn’t seem to faze them, so he became a capitalist and got their attention that way.
Let’s hope the polling in Russia continues to support Putin. I don’t like the odds of the “school yard bully” being taken out before he attacks the West. If he thinks he has nothing to lose, punishment will be indiscriminate.
I hope he continues to lose support, and that the polls would show it. It’s not clear to me how that leads to him thinking he has nothing to lose. Maybe that part needs more explanation.
Putin’s palace on the Back Sea:
Wouldn’t the peasants love to confiscate that from him.
………………………………………………
ha “OUR palace, Comrade”
Agreed. I find these characterizations of Putin less compelling considering what has been happening in our own country. Certainly Putin is more direct and worse, but we are not without ‘sin’ as it were to be casting such stones.
I stumbled over his charge that Putin took tax receipts from his company and pocketed them. In other words, Bill Browder was standing up to Putin on behalf of the Russian people who’d been swindled, not his company who would have paid taxes anyway.
Could he come here and do the same thing for us? Please?
Of course our politicians aren’t putting these billions directly into their pockets. Only indirectly through, what Frank Neri of the Corleone family refers to as “buffers”.
Our country is corrupt and getting moreso by the day. It’s not just Biden. It’s systemic. Generals retire to be big-shots with giant weapons corporations something that Eisenhower recognized decades ago and it’s gotten exponentially worse.
???? …..there is no comparison with Putin-the Biden’s graft doesn’t even rate as decent gratuity compared to Putin’s haul. Why the Putin apologists continue to try to claim that Biden or Zelensky is as bad (or worse) than Putin is mind boggling. You overlook the scale of Putin’s corruption- his murders of numerous people in multiple countries- his starting of a war predicated, after the 1st 48 hours, on war crimes to succeed. The US didn’t start this war- Putin’s Russia did.
No. It was all that Machiavellian mastermind Joe Biden’s doing. Putin is a classic 1930’s vintage Totalitarian thug and Biden, behind that ludicrously transparent facade of being a doddering, senile wretch in search of his next pudding cup, has played him every step of the way, from funding his aggressions by throttling US domestic fuel production to rallying a suddenly revivified NATO to confront the threat at their doorstep. We are so blessed to have stumbled onto such great leadership. Xi must be so very proud.
Here is the original exposé of the palace–the one that was released shortly after Navalny returned to Russia after recovering from his poisoning. There are English subtitles. It has had 123,000,000 views so far. There has also been a video since then which included additional information that Navalny’s group hadn’t been able to verify well enough by the time of the release of the original video. There are more than 123 million people in the world, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re not alone.
The people who downplay Putin’s corruption and repressions are people who might not be on our side in the battle to keep our country from getting just as bad. I put those people in the same category as Joe Biden, who had been helping Putin carry out his conquest of Ukraine (and I’m not so sure he’s not still doing it).
Browder and Magnitsky were part of the crowd pillaging Russia’s assets as the USSR fell apart. Clinton helped get Yeltsin elected to facilitate the process. When Putin took over, his model was a bit different. I guess you could say that his ego was more tied to restoring Russia’s stature and was willing to get rich a bit more slowly to do so; he developed his own set of oligarchs who would play ball.
Magnitsky and Browder were on the outs. He and Magnitsky had committed enough crimes to be vulnerable when the wind changed under Putin; Browder has hated Putin since.
Magnitsky was arrested and died in prison. Browder has been saying for years that Magnitsky was a whistleblower who was persecuted for telling the truth. His family pursued an action against Russia and Putin in the International Court for Human Rights, which recently ruled.
The Magnitskys mostly won; it was determined that his rights had indeed been violated—but not by his arrest, which was determined to have been made with sufficient evidence following an investigation into his tax evasion which predated the purported whistleblowing by (IIRC) a year or two. His rights were violated by his treatment while imprisoned. This failure to provide proper medical care most likely caused his death, though the court did not find that to have been deliberate.
In other words, Brower has likely been lying about the events for years, got the Magnitsky Act passed based on a lie, and continues to lie despite the ICHR’s findings in the case.
Your last statement and others are not corroborated by the court ruling.
So it’s the amount of the theft and depth of corruption that counts in your world of morality?
And, sir, you apparently are hallucinating. No one is apologizing for Putin, and I have seen nothing saying Biden or Zelinsky is “as bad”.
Your allies in the Intel agencies and certain corrupt Democrats and Republicans who failed to contain Putin, want to cover for themselves by pretending any criticism of their ties, their actions and their hubris is defense of the evil madman Putin.
They knew who Putin was before all this.
The court’s words:
(I’ve deleted the case citations from the ruling for brevity; they are available at the link to the ruling.)
Browder was certainly in a position to know the facts as found by the Court. His public statements contradict them.
My “allies in the Intel agencies”?- are yours therefore in the FSB?
if you think Putin’s invasion was justified you are an apologist for him.
More hallucinations in black and white. Because someone doesn’t think our side is saintly, and made mistakes does not mean that the invasion was justified. Can you just stick to reading the words on the screen? Because you fill in the blanks very badly.
A 50 percent cut is not getting rich more slowly.
Browder himself has told how he bought up shares during the ill-fated privatization scheme because their value would go up due to Russian governmental support. Some people might call that pillaging. I don’t think it’s something to brag about, mainly because it calls into question the whole libertarian notion of privatization that was recommended to Russia by North Americans idealogues. But it is nothing like the pillaging that was being called out by Browder or Alexei Navalny.
Putin’s method of “developing his own set of oligarchs” was to put a couple of them on trial to intimidate the others and get them to cut him in for a large share of the action if they wanted to continue to operate.
So are we all vulnerable. Each of us commits about three felonies a day.
Those three felonies a day again. What the court ruled about Magnitsky’s death does not seem to contradict Browder’s assertion that he was beaten to death in prison. Yes, you can refer to the episode as as failure to provide proper medical care.
That Browder participated in some illegal tax dodges may be true.
The words of the court ruling that you posted in #21 do not seem to support your assertion that the Magnitsky Act got passed based on a lie.
I don’t get the impression that they think there’s anything to save.
More snipes at our patriotism? Unless I’m reading this wrong…
It is true that I, for one, lament our general loss of freedom and how quickly the trend is accelerating. Our culture has become ridiculous by any standard. Our leaders are corrupt. Our military is deteriorating – and it’s not money they lack – and our top generals (not all) are political aspirants and/or grifting advocates for Ratheyon or some such.
Our Intel agencies from the top to however far down are paranoid creeps that crave power and control and are intensely politicized.
Our judiciary is replete with leftist crazies, our journalists are not-so-covert operatives for their corporate masters and the deep state.
Our heads of Disease Control are frauds and liars. Our police forces (not all officers but too many) are automaton control freaks who are essentially tasked with organized theft and believe themselves to be heroes for doing so.
And now those of us who notice – or are the first ones to feel the pain, are treated by so-called conservatives as insufficiently patriotic.
I would add that many of these people including @JamesLileks, have consistently downplayed one of the main forces that precipitated our decline; the corporate press.
I remember an old podcast(s) no more than 10 years ago when James and Rob were making arguments that their friends on the right were too harsh on the press being “biased” and we Republicans just need to suck it up and win!
That was during the Obama era. Once Trump actually won, against one of the most dangerous politicians the Democrats have ever fielded for battle, they were tepid at best. Quickly believing any and every fabricated and easily debunked charge against him. Sniping at every obvious personal flaw with some participating gleefully in trashing him alongside Democrats.
James continually defends his personal and not-so-personal friends in the press. It’s a club, you see, and we ain’t in it.
I always thought Obama’s campaign slogan for 2012 should have been, “Meh. Could be worse.” That’s the impression I get from a lot of Republicans/conservatives when talking about our current situation. “Meh. Could be worse.”
I don’t find that particularly comforting.
I got mine, don’t worry about theirs. And, of course, the inevitable despicability, nay, sheer evil, of have nots in the eyes of the haves. Trump was evil because he increased wage competition. Raising the standard of living for the despicable have nots. And ruined the incentive plans of our corporate executives by bucking Xi. My heart really goes out to them. Not.
For those who downplay Putin’s corruption, The job is getting harder- strong evidence of Russian war crimes left as they retreat from Kyiv-
https://www.ft.com/content/84b82726-d4d0-446c-a409-f61037686315