With Vladimir Putin’s ceremonious (and hollow) appointment to yet another six-year term as Russian President (Czar?) this week, one of my ponderings settled on the American economy and its similarities and differences with some of our fellow earth-bound inhabitants like the Russians – yes it can be remarkably scary between these two ears…

When one thinks of Russia, we often think of two things (besides the fact that they have some good vodka): First, Putin is hands down a pretty bad guy and second, there is a shocking income disparity between their economic layers (OK, that’s where my mind went, yours might go somewhere else). This perception is carefully crafted by our domestic media because if you scrape the surface veneer, you’ll see that much of the mass media skips over a key aspect of their society – their upper class holds firm to their position by use of an oligarchy (where a small number of rich people hold all the power). What does that mean? It means that the oil industry is controlled by an oligarch (one or two incredibly rich and powerful people), the banking industry controlled by another oligarch or two, the agriculture by another, and so on. By one account, about 95 men (and a woman or two) control the bulk of Russia’s economic output. When they aren’t fighting each other, they are colluding with each other to exert further control of their particular industry. Is any of this starting to sound just a little familiar?

Those ~95 people control their industries by use of a monopoly which is where one, sometimes two, company(s) gradually control the economic output of an industry. One might say “Well, that’s Russia for you” to which this one would say “yeah, not so much…” For now, let’s skip the obvious (although it would be interesting to do a poll of all of you and see what each of you thinks is “the obvious”…) and talk agriculture. Four companies – Bayer, Corteva, ChemChina and Limagrain – control 50% of the global seed market. Syngenta, Bayer, Corteva and BASF control 70% of the global pesticide market. Want to start your own seed company or use someone else’s seed? Good luck with that as these companies have been known to exert fiscal, legislative, and actual physical pressures on small farmers to control what they grow and on those small seed businesses to get them to either close or agree to be brought into the fold. Funny enough, none of those companies is Russian.

Staying with agriculture, small farmers are increasingly unable to maintain their own equipment and are being forced to use authorized repair centers run by just a couple of equipment manufacturers (John Deere being the largest). The majority of American farmland is owned by corporations who often dictate the crops to be grown and who supplies the seed for those crops. We could do a whole blog post just on water control.

I’m getting hungry so let’s pick another industry – technology – and look at a little something called Meta/Facebook. Since inception Meta has bought up nearly 100 companies, either folding them into their proprietary deliverables or simply closing them down if they were a competitor to one of Meta/Facebook’s existing social media offerings. With one guy at the head of this behemoth, that sure sounds like an oligarch. Alphabet/Google, same story. And if anyone thinks that Mr. Bezos leaving has changed Amazon or their tactics, they are probably sampling some of the lower quality Russian vodka.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I can’t and won’t endorse communism, firmly believe most of what is happening in Mother Russia is ethically criminal, and am pretty sure that, like a bear, the Cold War is only hibernating; that being said, it does seem that throwing stones is more than slightly hypocritical.

Хорошего дня, have a good day…