Running out of money to steal

According to Sarah Dougherty of GlobalPost in an article reposted in Towleroad there are six openly gay athletes at Sochi. Interesting that all of them are lesbians. The article includes another five athletes of international stature who recently came out, some of whom will appear at the next Summer Games.

There have also been several arrests of protesters. Rachel Maddow has a 3 minute report.

Arun Rath, weekend host of All Things Considered on NPR, spoke to Svetlana Zakharova of the LGBT Network in St. Petersburg and Julia Ioffe in Moscow for the New Republic. They say the gay crackdown in Russia is part of the aftermath of the protests against Putin in 2012. Part of the reason for the law is to distract the people from real problems and to blame gays for those problems. Part of it is a push towards a traditional conservative patriarchal image of Russia and the gov't.

In a way it has worked. There aren't big street protests now. Citizens began to see protests as not accomplishing anything. Instead, they are doing quieter civic activism. But the Russian gov't budget has become bloated and oil prices and the economy aren't growing to match. That means the economic elites are running out of money to steal. And that will end badly. Yes, Putin has crushed his opposition. But all he has to show for it is a country falling apart.