A recent letter in The Economist contained a very telling phrase. It was all the more so because the letter spans Russia and England in its concerns:
“For the majority of Russians, Mr. Khodorkovsky continues to personify the excesses of 1990s capitalism, when the dubious activities of the few exacerbated the misery of millions. To understand the depth of such animosity look no further than the anger presently directed towards bankers such as Sir Fred Goodwin, Royal Bank of Scotland’s former boss. Rightly or wrongly, such figures come to represent everything that was wrong with the former system. …”
The important words are: “former system.”
Aside from the egregious error of mistaking capitalism for the national criminal syndicate that emerged in Russia under “Mad Vlad” Putin’s pay-to-play government, the letter writer makes two flawed assumptions. The first is that capitalism is now a “former” >>>
