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In reply to the discussion: Ukraine Violence Spreads: At Least One Killed in Odessa Riots [View all]muriel_volestrangler
(101,311 posts)and which gained it as new territory as a result. You don't seem to understand the meaning of the phrase 'imperial aggression'.
I know that some people are convinced that anything that happens that they consider bad (such as the overthrow of Yanukovych) must have been done by Americans, since they think no-one is capable of such an act without rally being controlled by Americans, but the world really isn't like that. Non-Americans are capable of independent action, and it's rather insulting to imply they wer just stooges of Americans.
The US has a far better record in the past 45 years than the USSR/Russia on race, LGBT rights and marginalised groups in general. The US is a more equal country than Russia. Both are capitalist, and I can see why people want to resist the USA on those grounds, but Russia is not the country to whose arms you should rush in that case.
This years Global Wealth Report by Swiss bank Crédit Suisse records that 22 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the gulf between the broad mass of the population and the super-rich in Russia is greater than in any other major country in the world. Thirty-five percent of the countrys total wealth is in the hands of 0.00008 percent of the population, or 110 out of a total population of 143 million.
The study states: Russia has the highest level of wealth inequality in the world, apart from small Caribbean nations with resident billionaires. Worldwide, there is one billionaire for every USD 170 billion in household wealth; Russia has one for every USD 11 billion. Worldwide, billionaires collectively account for 1%2% of total household wealth; in Russia today 110 billionaires own 35% of all wealth.
At the same time, 94 percent of the adult population own less than $10,000. The richest one percent of the population, or about 1.43 million people, control 71 percent of all wealth.
Even at the top of the wealth pyramid, Russian wealth is distributed very unequally. According to Crédit Suisse, 5.6 percent of the population possesses between $10,000 and $100,000, 0.6 percent between $100,000 and $1 million, and 0.1 percent more than $1 million. The bank estimates that the number of millionaires will increase from the current total of 84,000 to 133,000 in five years.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/10/19/russ-o19.html