What is surprising about that?
It’s what the laissez faire capitalists in America, and elsewhere in the world which aren’t countries run by simple dictatorships, want. Except that the original laissez faire principle required no government intervention in commerce, whereas the modern adherents of this ‘dog eat dog as long as I’m the top dog’ economics and the political systems which go with that invariably want lots of government intervention to stop things which might interfere with their ability to plunder their own and all other nations without restraint, starting with hysterical opposition to the right to freedom of association in trade unions and everything else which might give workers even weak rights and powers to defend themselves against the rights and powers of the rich. Read Upton Sinclair’s early 1900s novel ‘The Jungle’ for a description of the world we are heading back to after a century of supposed advancement of workers’ rights and general social advancement.
The ultimate irony is that this hostility to workers usually reaches its zenith in communist (i.e. workers’ paradise) nations run by the likes of Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Min, Castro and, most currently and most gloriously, Kim Jong un and, with the exception of the last two, where the capitalist / communist economies / political systems have more in common with the freebooting age of America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, along with the even worse colonialist exploitation of supposedly lesser peoples by the European colonial powers up to WWII.
For all their faults in WWII, the Japanese unintentionally (or, sort of, intentionally given the noble anti-colonialist principles of their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as long as one ignores that Japan intended to replace the European colonial powers with Japanese colonialism under Japan’s military heel) did countless millions of people alive then (well, at least those who survived Japan’s war of aggression; ethnic cleansing such as of Chinese following the fall of Singapore; subsequent occupations; maybe 250,000 non-POW people dying as native labour on the Burma Railway, not to mention countless more on other enterprises; and barbaric retreats such as laying waste to Manila towards the end of their war) and many more born subsequently by sowing the seeds for self-determination of many nations in Asia. Much the same but less directly by collapse of European colonialism for other reasons flowing from WWII in the Middle East and Africa, although with rather less consistent post-colonial success than in Asia.
Given that the big money people in the US are horrified by, for example, the notion that ordinary people should have affordable health care rather than have to pay for it out of the meagre incomes the working poor are graciously allowed by the likes of anti-union capitalists such as Wal-Mart who are the modern incarnation of Henry Ford’s hostility to workers who wanted more than he was willing to give them and had his thugs kill some of them to enforce his bountless generosity, why are you surprised that what you have in Russia is what the same crew of US politicians and their political and economic philosophy want to exploit their own people, and everyone else of similar belief around the planet such as trying to manipulate the pharmaceutical benefits scheme in my country which ensures affordable medications for almost everyone for almost all minor to serious illnesses for as long as they need them, but which really pisses off the US drug companies which can’t make as much profit as they’d like from the illnesses of Australians?
Not that Australia is short of our own politicians of the same conservative selfish outlook who also can’t stand to see anyone but the rich enjoy life, and who can always be relied upon to prostitute themselves at the rich man’s table for a few scraps of political donations to fund their miserable political lives oppressing the legitimate aspirations of average people who want nothing more than their fair share of the wealth grabbed by the rich in the West and the oligarchs in Russia, and the tiny proportion of grasping sociopathic arseholes who infest every society and, like the rotten apple at the bottom of every barrel, ruin it for everyone else.
It’s the same all around the world. Every primary school has at least one bullying shit of a kid who takes lunch money or something else they want off other kids. Thirty plus years later they’re running our major corporations and governments, or criminal organisations which frequently have close links with government and some corporations.
