by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

For their daily bread, Russians pay much less than the citizens of the US, the European Union, and other bread-eating states in the warfighting alliance. 

At current prices, the Russian loaf of white bread is cheaper by almost seven times than the American; six times less than the Norwegian; four times less than the Italian and German; three times less than the French.  

In the war between armies marching on their stomachs, the Russian Army has already won hands down; that’s the farmers’, millers’, and bakers’ hands. 

On the home front, however, it is not this international comparison which counts for Russian consumers. They are suffering from the comparison they are obliged to make between the price they pay for bread today and the price last year, or before the Special Military Operation in February 2022. Before the war, between 2019 and 2021, the average rate of inflation for bread was between 5% and 7% per annum. In 2024, the bread price rose, according to the state statistics agency Rosstat, by 13.2%. In fact, according to published studies in Moscow, bread  inflation was double that rate at about 27% for the year.  

The sensitivity of voters to this inflation in food prices is so great, President Vladimir Putin and  Agriculture Ministry officials are trying to talk down the bread price and ask consumers to eat promises. According to Putin on February 7, “annual inflation stands at 9.5 percent, though as of February 3, this had reached 9.9 percent year-on-year. This presents a challenge, necessitating comprehensive measures to ensure balanced economic expansion.”  

In a meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the President said inflation is a goods supply problem which can be solved by targeted state intervention, including subsidies to producers, restrictions on exports of Russian foodstuffs, and jawboning oligarchs and other business owners to hold their prices down temporarily.  “One paramount priority remains the development of a supply-side economy,” Putin said. “During the coronavirus pandemic, the Government executed highly effective sector-specific interventions. As previously discussed, including during meetings with the business community – whose representatives have advocated for this approach – we agreed with the Government to reinstate such sectoral coordination. We must assess the prospects of individual industries, identify priorities, and provide targeted support where required.”  

Deputy Agriculture Minister Maxim Titov explained last week that state intervention in the food sector will be limited to asking the supermarket retailers to limit their bread-price markups to the government’s announced rate of inflation.  “In principle,” Titov said,   “as we see the dynamics of the price of bread, the price increase for the grain group that exists today has already been recouped.”  

Titov also issued a radical warning disguised by a negative. “The cost of bread production is constantly growing,” he said, “but grain is not the main component in the cost of bread production.”  The deputy minister means that after two years of bumper wheat harvests for the farmers and record tonnage of flour from the millers, the real reason for bread price inflation isn’t supply side at all. Instead, as Moscow think-tank research confirms, it is profit-making by the bread-sellers. Their profit margin has been reported as several times the average profit margin of the producers.

This is profit rigging and price gouging, as Russians understand it. Deputy Minister Titov is pointing the finger at Magnit (Dixy), Pyaterochka (X5),  Mercury (Red & White, Bristol), and Lenta (Billa, Monetka), and to the oligarch groups of Alexander Vinokurov, Mikhail Fridman and Igor Kesaev who control them.  Lenta,  however, is part-controlled by the US private equity firm TPG Capital, based in Texas. Together, these four retailers have been steadily increasing their control over the entire Russian food retail marketplace; at present, they have a market share of more than 30%. 
Reluctant as ministry officials and Russian agro-industry experts are to admit it, the reason for the acceleration in the price of bread is wartime profiteering. As a military source warns, “the picture is getting clearer; the outlook is getting dimmer.”

In global production of wheat,  Russia is currently third after China and India, with more than double the production of the US, Australia, France and Canada, which also trail behind Russia on the wheat export markets. As an exporter of flour, Russia ranks only 10^th  on the world trade charts,  but larger-volume flour exporters like Turkey and Egypt get much of the wheat they turn into flour from Russia. 

As the following chart shows, large wheat and flour producers like the US, Canada and Australia have much higher priced bread than Russia.  

CURRENT PRICE OF A 500g LOAF OF FRESH WHITE BREAD 

Source: https://www.numbeo.com/

(Read more…)

via in-politics Translated by Algora

These are news that should have shaken Romania, or at least seriously worried the citizens. Except that they have a small flaw: no matter how serious they are, they remain almost unknown to the general public, kept in the socket with the weather report, with the chase after a still uncaught thief, you wonder where, with the future job of President Iohannis etc.Let’s review just a few such news from the last few days, which outline a more than gloomy future, news that has barely seen the light of day here and there.

• In a single session, the other day, the Ministry of Finance borrowed 5 billion euros from the international market by selling three tranches of bonds, two in euros and one in dollars. 5.6 billion dollars in one day. For comparison, in 1982, the peak of Romania’s foreign debt, accumulated since the beginning of the 70s, reached 13 billion dollars, for the payment of which Ceaușescu introduced severe austerity for 22 million Romanians, for 7 years.

• Romania’s total external debt (public and private) jumped to 180 billion euros. Every Romanian is in debt, thus with approx. 10,000 euros.

• Romania will register this year an increase of only 1.4%, half of the most recent estimate of the governors, of 2.8%, – the official announcement from the EBRD.

– For the 2021-2027 budget period, through the Cohesion Policy, Romania has allocated 45.1 billion euros, of which 31.5 billion euros are European allocations and 13.6 billion euros are national contributions. At this moment, the absorption rate of European funds halfway through the 2021-2027 budget period is zero, the Fiscal Council says.

– The last request for financing on the PNRR has been blocked for over 6 months.

• A harsh warning comes from the big companies: the American Chamber of Commerce urgently recommends the government, in a press release, to balance the budget and reform the legal framework for attracting investments. “These are the last years in which Romania will have access to major financing for convergence with the EU, but also crucial years for entering a sustainable fiscal-budgetary trajectory”.

– The Fiscal Council warned that Romania’s budget deficit could even reach 8% of GDP in 2024, much more than what the government committed to at the beginning of the year (5% of GDP).

– Rompetrol Rafinare attacks the energy surcharge established in 2022 at the Constitutional Court of Romania and demands more than 100 million euros back from the Romanian state.

• Pepsi Cola is relocating its production from Romania to Greece, until the end of this year.

• The Minister of Public Finance, Marcel Boloș, recently announced that the structural fiscal plan aimed at reducing the budget deficit in the next seven years must be submitted to the European Commission by October 15, 2024. Free Europe has learned that the Romanian Government has asked the European Commission to accept that the plan be submitted only next year, in January. In other words, the Romanians should not find out until after the elections what austerity measures will derive from the recovery plan.

• The Ciolacu government adopted a GEO by which it grants itself a derogation from the legal obligation to take measures to reduce the budget deficit. The emergency ordinance shows that “the provisions of art. 25 of the Fiscal-Budgetary Responsibility Law no. 69/2010, republished, with subsequent amendments and additions, does not apply in 2024”. (Bogdan Tiberiu Iacob – Full material Here)

photo: Pixabay

Ed. Note: Long predicted by Algora, a possible realignment of the Eastern European bloc with Russia is more in the cards than ever. There is an irony there, in that the long-held aspirations of Romanians to bring the sister nation of Moldova back to the motherland might occur, but in the reverse. It might be Romania who is “unifying” to the former Soviet Moldova. There are major repercussions for Europe and the world should Romania move into the Russian space, together with the Hungarian state realigning with Transcarpathia, or Poland moving into the arms of Galicia and Volhynia.

Buffeted by negative economic headwinds and with the political class increasingly reviled over issues such as the migrant crisis, the Post-1991 order in Europe appears to be in terminal decline. In this situation, the birth pangs of something new, but also familiar, can now be observed. Nationalism and genuine Rightist thought is returning to the European scene. 

This confirms the era-defining importance of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine in and of itself, but also allows us to speculate on what comes next. As far back as 2014, Russian politicians have advocated for Eastern European nations to join them in a partition of Ukraine and now this seems to be a reality made true. By territorial appeasement, Moscow now has the chance to deliver the death blow to the EU by splitting off its Eastern members. From there, in concert with each other, an alliance can be born, thus establishing a new security framework in Europe in opposition to the liberal one existing in Brussels.

Things are rapidly changing in the world, and this process will undoubtedly continue as the American-led order continues to crumble and decay.

via Rost Online

At a separate event organised by AUR in Iași (Romania), AUR co-founder Claudiu Târziu spoke to a closed audience made up of AUR members and supporters, in what has been called a ”hateful, revisionist speech” by mainstream media and the staunch supporters of the neoliberal American empire because Târziu laid claim to the territories lost by Romania to the USSR after WW2.

Here are the most important excerpts of his speech:

(…) 2024 represents a historic opportunity for the Romanian nation. It isn’t just an opportunity for a political party to gain power, but to achieve the ideal of the Romanian nation, that is to recover our sovereignty, sovereignty which was put in the hands of certain international organisations (…)

Even in these international organisations, Romania can adopt a position of dignity and can reaffirm its sovereignty through hard negotiation like the Hungarians or the Polish (…)

For us to regain our sovereignty we need an adequate mindset, and a strong economy that can afford to fund an army, the army being the number one symbol of a sovereign state. As long as we have an economy built on begging for money guaranteed by the treaties we’ve signed or begging foreigners to invest and develop our country, we cannot speak of independence and sovereignty. As long as we have a small and underequipped army, we cannot speak of independence and sovereignty. With a strong army, a resilient economy, we will be able to afford an independent foreign policy based on our national interests (…)

Lastly, we will not achieve sovereignty until we return to the natural borders of the Romanian state. Bessarabia must return to its motherland, northern Bucovina must not be forgotten, Herța and Transcarpathia (Marmația), all that belonged to Romania shall belong to us again. This is the ideal that we were born for.

Reunification won’t be possible with a lackluster diplomacy conducted by the servants currently in power, that have robbed Romania and sold it for scrap, the servants which you see running towards foreign embassies and foreign capitals to obtain the firman [Firman = an act of recognition signed with the seal of the Ottoman Sultan when Wallachia or Moldavia gained a new prince, the act being a guarantee of the stability of the new ruler which was at risk of being usurped], the approval of others to become presidents, prime-ministers, senate and deputy chamber presidents (…)

165 years later, our situation has improved slightly but not by much. We are a people with a great potential capable to dominate our neighbours. What is preventing us from reaching this potential? Our goal is to carve out a place for Romania among the powerful states of the globe, to make Romania respected, to make our opinions count, and we will start by winning all four elections in 2024 (…)

“At the time when the EU project was strongly influenced by globalist ideology, it began to pursue the creation of a continental superstate, in which national states would dissolve and democratic control would disappear. The globalist project wants the unification of humanity into a large maneuvering mass, consuming goods and services, which will not cause problems for the ruling class. For this, a kind of bureaucratic aristocracy is created.

There those who decide are not elected, but appoint each other. They are not noble by blood, they are noble by relationship. They are accountable to no one and abuse their status as senior EU officials. It is an attack on freedom after all. This is why we are against the United States of Europe. But all these shortcomings can be fixed. In the European Parliament there are also representatives of parties in government in some member states which support family, faith, national sovereignty and the right to freedom. I am referring to the PiS parties in Poland, FIDESZ in Hungary, which hold power in their countries, or Vox, which is about to come to power in Spain. Why wouldn’t we also have a political force that would defend Romania’s interest from healthy positions?”, senator Claudiu Târziu asked.

According to him, AUR will join the Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, which is led by representatives of PiS, Vox and the Fratelli party in Italy.

❗️Bishop Longin suffers an induced heart attack whilst being stopped & harassed by Ukrainian troops at a checkpoint.

☦Metropolitan Longin is an ethnic Romanian Bishop from the Western Ukrainian region of Bucovina. He has refused to recognise Zelensky’s “new fake church”.

⚡️Previously, the Romanian Government, church and media have campaigned in defense of Bishop Longin and the rights of persecuted ethnic Romanians on Bucovina.

By persecuting Romanians in Bucovina Zelensky’s regime only accelerates the potential & justification for a Romanian annexation of Bucovina.

✊Go Romania! Protect your compatriots! Protect your Orthodox Bishops! Take back Northern Bucovina!

✅Putin has given you permission.

via @AussieCossack

The Hungarian President said it very well:

Orban: “One of the strengths of Americans is their ability to present what is really an American interest as a universal value. It seems like a small trick. But it has serious consequences intellectually, because if you frame foreign policy on the basis of values, hiding your interests, you deny yourself the opportunity for meaningful dialog. At the end of the day, one is not trying to align interests, one has to choose the values proclaimed by the other side. You can’t defend yourself against what you know are actually American interests, because then you have to argue against those values. That’s what happens day and night. We can’t have meaningful discussions on major foreign policy issues because no one is willing to commit to representing their own interests.”

Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky made this prediction in 1999:

“If Russia unites with Iran & the Arabs – it will be the end of America!”

Putin on the situation in the Gaza Strip:

 “We see that instead of punishing terrorists, Israel began to take revenge on the principle of collective responsibility… These bombings cannot be justified in any way. We must understand who is organizing the deadly chaos. Who benefits from it? The United States and its satellites are the main beneficiaries of global instability.

Ed. Note:

Ukraine decides who belongs to the civilized world and who does not, – Foreign Minister Kuleba told about a telephone conversation with a colleague:

“The Foreign Minister of one country called me and said: ‘Dmitry, I spoke with one problematic country and told them that today Ukraine decides who belongs to the civilized countries and who does not. If Ukraine does not give a signal that you are a normal country and with whom they can have business, then you will have problems’.”

From a recent comment:

All of Ulraine east of the Zhytomyr-Vinnytsia line is core historic Russian territory.
It ended up separated through a very unfortunate series of historic accidents.
But worse, it was being turned into a militantly anti-Russian platform for attacks against Russia.
Forget about Russian national interests, it is in your best interest as a US (or whatever other Western country you reside in) citizen for Ukraine to disappear from the map.
Because what is the alternative? The alternative is nuclear missiles situated there and Russian doomsday dead hand systems going on hair-trigger alert permanently, because now there are low single-digit minutes separating the launch from Moscow being vaporized.
With “long-term guarantees” we are all dead — we have miraculously survived so far through a disturbingly large list of situation in which the ICBMs were not launched only through sheer blind luck and because there was time to stop, think and assess the situation. That time will no longer be available with nukes in Ukraine.
On top of it all, there can be no such thing as a non-Nazi Ukrainian nationalism. That ship has long sailed. Just accept it as the fact of life that it is.
In the last 14 months the US has basically made official the alliance it entered into with the Nazis in March 1945, and from here on you can expect Ukrainization of the West, and by extension, open (re-)Nazification. Including of the US. The process is already very advanced in the Baltics, but it will spread further.
So on moral grounds alone you should be rooting for the complete erasure of Ukraine from the map and from future human history.

*

All the Banderites had to do was to keep things quiet for another 30 years so that nobody pro-Soviet and pro-Russian is left and three generations are raised in an environment completely saturated with Ukrainian nationalist brainwashing.That would have closed the case and Russia would never get those lands back again.
There are two other examples of how that works (or fails to work) further to the southeast. We have three such pairs of countries:
1. Ukraine and Russia
2. Macedonia and Bulgaria
3. Moldova and Romania.
In which a smaller part of the whole is torn off the rest due to various historical circumstances, then it launches on a path towards becoming a real separate nation, often through the application of brutal brainwashing.
With Macedonia that process is finished — it started a century ago, and the brainwashing is so complete that they really hate Bulgarians quite thoroughly there, and Bulgaria is never getting it back.
With Moldova there was never that much effort put into it by the Soviets, plus they only got it under their control in 1944, so it looks like it will eventually reunite with Romania.
Ukraine was somewhere in the middle.
But there is a substantial difference here — Bulgaria and Romania were always too weak to get their lands back militarily. Russia, on the other hand, is a nuclear superpower. So it always had the capability to use force and resolve the issue that way.
Fortunately for the Ukrainians, Russia has for three decades (and really, more like six) been ruled by traitors who had absolutely no interest in such silly ideals such as defending the long-term security of the country, reuniting the Russian world, etc. They were perfectly content to let the Banderites run wild in Ukraine as long as there was no direct threat to them.
So all the Banderites had to do was to not cause too much trouble for another 20-30 years, and Ukraine would have been irreversibly lost to Russia.
And if handing Crimea over would have bought them that time, that would have been a win.
But they just can’t help themselves. And now they might lose it all.
Provided that Russia is no longer run by traitors, of course…

Also, you will do well to find a Ukrainian textbook and learn what they teach children there. A lot of it concerns not just Russia, and when you see it, maybe there is a chance that it will be so ridiculous even to you, that you may ask yourself the question “Wait, if they are lying in such absurd way about all these other things, how are we supposed to believe them about Russo-Ukrainian relationships?”…

Posted by: shadowbanned

Alyev the president of Azerbaijan silences the British journalist who gives him lessons on human rights and freedom of the press by recalling the Assange case. Priceless.