Russia Could Learn From Alaska's Permanent Fund

Russia's Vladimir Putin could take a page from Alaska’s Permanent Fund and establish a multibillion-dollar clump of money to make small annual payments to Russians to assure a measure of political servility. Alaska's Department of Administration invests royalty payments from global natural resource extraction corporations in the market sometimes leaning heavily toward investing in the same global extraction businesses such as oil that in turn assures the state of Alaska will kick back its policies to those businesses. While Russia would need more than the 38.6 billion dollars the Alaska Permanent Fund has, even a trillion dollar fund to make a payment to its citizens once a year could grease compliant political fealty from the Kremlin's subjects.

In the long run it is useful to develop a public government that is paid for largely by global corporations in order to fundamentally be immune from political control by the electorate. The voters instead, being paid off a little go along with the mafia like administration that prefers its own proprietary policies for its preferred employees decade after decade. Such modern corporatism could be helpful for Russian political stability although it is counter-productive to global environmental and alternative to fossil fuel energy interests of the public.

The state of Alaska has no income tax, and that keeps the public and corporations happy enough though it although the government to be largely unaccountable to public will such as might exist if the public had to pay income tax and demanded a more diversified and effective government.Politicians can be elected to serve corporate interests and that of the state. Their political ideologies much be consistent with the continuity of the bureaucratic entity, oil, gas and mining development. Russia to might be able to adapt to corporatist servility and slowly develop and evil extraction industry empire bent toward destroying life on Earth through global warming.

It is a hard fact of life that voters that pay for their government themselves, and who pay for welfare benefits to their non-working fellow citizens would rather have a healthy economy with full employment and civil equal justice, and that voters that do not have little concern if their government is corrupted, decadent or an evil empire with chronically unemployed and a declining economy. Corrupt governments first seek ideological servility from their citizens before income streams are allowed to occur. Even higher educational opportunities may be finessed to extinction.