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We've truly entered a Bizarro World universe, where up is down, right is left – and the Russians, of all people, are now lecturing us about the virtues of free enterprise. Yes, it happened at the Davos conference of bigwigs, insiders, and their sycophantic hangers-on, where the elite meet to munch canapés and discuss the way the world works, or, in this case, the way it isn't working. The conference was heavy with the sort of pessimism that doesn't usually accompany a gathering of the rich and pompous, yet instead of the usual self-congratulatory vaunting of their own virtue and "concern" for the world's peasants, these aristocrats of the conference table were less than ebullient about the downward spiral of the global economy – which, you'll remember, yesterday was touted as the savior of us all, but these days is portrayed as the instrument of our collective doom.
While the walkout of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan grabbed the biggest headlines – he didn't like it when David Ignatius of the Washington Post shushed him in favor of letting former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres drone on uninterrupted – the real shocker was Vladimir Putin's peroration, which sounded more like Ron Paul than the leader of a nation that has intruded the state into the economy and polity in a big way.