Intra-Country Meddling

The damage Russia did in the US elections in 2016 pales in comparison with the damage Congress and past Presidents have done over that past 100 years.

The Russian funding of protests and counter-protests in the US was wasted. The Democrat Party and George Soros are fully capable of keeping US voters divided and alienated. In fact, they are more likely to be colluding with the Russians than anybody.

There is a tendency on the part of countries to meddle in the affairs of neighboring countries, particularly where trade between these countries is involved.  If a country is getting a more-than-fair deal from one faction of a neighboring countries politicians, they will favor that group.

The US CIA was all over the world to keep poor countries from voting in Communist dictators and being taken over by Communist rebels and they failed. What they learned is that you can’t fix stupid. It’s easy to bully uninformed voters.

Russia meddles continuously in countries that were once part of the Soviet Union and meddles in elections to convince voters to elect these pro-Russian politicians.

I have friends who came from these countries to the US. They now own their own businesses here in the US.  They witnessed the change from being part of the USSR and being poor, then being independent and having their economy improve and then when a Russia-friendly politicians were elected, they were poor again. They came to the US to find a real free-market economy. They reported government employee corruption at the main-street level with Mafia-style extortion by local officials demanding bribes. They describe Russian citizens as “depressed”.

Those from Russia reported that they recognized the similarity of the US media and the Russian media as a politically controlled media, even using the same identical phrases on cable news. They were not Obama fans and said the US was going down the Communist path.

Before the collapse of the USSR, Russia had complete control over these countries and could get whatever they needed from them.  Now dozens of these countries are sovereign and many have expanded their trade to free-world Western countries. Russia will continue to meddle. They took back Crimea to secure their access to ports and pipelines.  Russia has more land than they know what to do with.  Russia has 6.6 million square miles of territory. It is twice the size of the US and has half the population, but Russia’s GDP is less than 1/10^th the size of the US GDP. Russia should develop resource-rich Siberia, but lacks the funds and can’t attract foreign investors. Russia needs to elect a real “business guy” to get their economy moving within their own borders.

I would rank cleaning up our own government in the top 5 and preventing Russian meddling in the bottom 40 just above Climate Change.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader