- A few weeks ago it was Canada freezing bank accounts of their political opponents.
- The US still allows for civil forfeiture of arbitrary assets with no presumption of innocence or conventional due process.
- A little while back Cyprus arbitrarily stole private funds from innocent civilians who had committed no crime - just because the gov said they needed it to bail out their bankers
- The EU has had negative nominal interest rates for some time stealing money from savers for the benefit of central bank policy
- Nearly all western governments have had negative real interest rates on savings for some time. This is a conscious policy to inflate their currencies through money printing in order to more easily manage their national debts.
I didn’t read that from OP’s post and I don’t understand what exactly you are claiming here.
Do Russian oligarchs steal from the bank accounts of ordinary Russians or is there another mechanism of theft?
Any time West puts sanctions on oligarchs Putin makes a law so they can pay less taxes, meaning ordinary people keep paying taxes for them
If I recall correctly the government took trillions from ordinary citizens to pay out the banking elite as a thank you for the bankers and rating agencies committing rampant fraud in MBS and CDOs - all while none of them were ever charged with crimes and none went to jail. Many bankers even received massive bonuses from taxpayer-funded bailout funds as well.
For example the city of Montreal is notorious for similar corruption in their road construction industry. Other cities are known to operate with similar collusion, though it isn’t as widely reported.
If Nancy Pelosi was Russian we would certainly call her an Oligarch as it is widely known she has a net worth of $200 million+ on a salary of a few hundred thousand per year.
She gained her enormous wealth by feeding insider information, which she gained from her privileged position, to her husband, so he could insider trade and front-run the American people stealing from their 401ks and other investment accounts.
Insider trading is only a crime for regular Americans, not congress or senators. It is perfectly legal for them to insider trade all day long. Guess who wrote those laws?
Also, Pelosi isn’t the only American politician who abuses their power by insider trading - only the most successful.
No, absolutely not but that is a false dichotomy and I think you also know that. This isn’t a simple binary choice between doing nothing and imposing broad-stroke sanctions on every single citizen of Russia.
One simple first step could be for the US and Germany and the rest of Western Europe to simply stop buying oil from Russia and thereby cut off further direct funding for Putin’s war. We know that sanctions on regular citizens hurt regular citizens while cutting off oil purchases directly impedes the Russian state’s ability to wage war. Which do you think would be more effective?
As for increasing energy costs on Europeans and also Ukrainians who I understand are paying up to half their take-home wages to heat their homes, I think the easiest course of action would be for Western governments to directly subsidize energy prices in the short term while simultaneously cutting fuel and carbon taxes on those affected.
I don’t agree with your assessment of my logic that I would let Hitler exterminate anyone and I would appreciate it if we could keep the discussion civil.
I am not your enemy. I want this war to end ASAP as much as you do. We are simply advocating different strategies to achieve the same goal - peace.
Again, the west is not attacking Russian citizens, but the Russian government. We can't change the fact that ordinary Russians are subject to the Russian government and therefore will also suffer to a degree no matter how you try to slice the sanctions. Especially when Russia would rather destroy European food rather than give it to its starving people.[1] So if Russia is actively harming its own people how can we expect to protected them if their own government won't?
You can't just keep repeating the trope that the west is actively harming the Russians citizens when its their own government doing it. Yeah, living in a corrupt country with shitty leaders is bad for the people living there but it's not the west's responsibility to improve it for them. Ultimately, it's up to the Russian people to revolt against their government and fight for a better future, same how other countries did it. The price of freedom is always high.
It's not though. The west doesn't come to Russia and shove their grubby hands into the bank accounts of ordinary Russians to steal their money, resources and taxes, and starve them to death. Russia does that to their citizens and bares the sole responsibility of these actions, not the west. Like come on, Russia can choose to stop the wear at any time and the sanctions would be lifted but they're not doing that.
>I don’t accept the decision to dehumanize an entire nation’s citizens for the acts of their authoritarian elite.
So we should just let Russia invade whatever country it wants and kill their way through Europe because otherwise ordinary Russian citizens might suffer? What about Ukrainian citizens and their suffering? What about the poor pensioners in Eastern Europe who won't be able to afford the increased energy bills due to the war and might die because instead of buying medicine, now have to pay insane energy bills? What about the European taxpayers who will now have to pay increased costs to house and care for millions of displaced Ukrainian refugees? So Russia and Russians are not the only ones paying the price for Putin's actions, all of Europe is.
By your logic, you would have let Hitler exterminate an entire continent because fighting Germany would have been tough on the innocent people of Germany for the acts of their leader (not that it wasn't, but Hitler had to be defeated and that was the price). Except that now, to defeat Putin, instead of going to war with Russia and have millions of people needlessly die on both sides, we can bankrupt Russia and cripple it from the inside, and have minimal casualties on both sides (Europeans will also suffer from the war and these sanctions but the important thing is we save Ukraine and as many Ukrainians as we can, as I doubt Putin will ever see a trial in the Hague for his war crimes).