Prokhorov vs. Putin

In an surprisingly unsurprising situation in Russia, Vladimir Putin is deciding to run for a third term as President. I guess their election laws stipulate that the limit of two terms are only for consecutive groups of two.

In an actually surprising situation the Russian people are taking to the streets like so many other citizens in other countries. You know people all over are getting riled when the Russkies are taking to the streets. They're upset at early election returns that give Putin's, and current president Medvedev's, party a majority at the Kremlin. Fraud is the shout from the mountaintop.

In a strange turn of events, Mikhail Prokhorov is reported to be toying with the decision to enter the Russian Presidential race against Putin.

Mikhail Prokhorov is the youthful, tall, billionaire owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, a team that that will instantly become my new team the moment the finally move to Brooklyn. I remember seeing this lanky basketball looking guy in the newspaper reports when the sale went down. He was the new owner. A billionaire.

Billionaire? This confused me, until I read that he had been a nickel magnate.

A forty-something nickel-magnate billionaire Russian?

I'm thinking of a word...it starts with the letter 'G' and ends with '-ANGSTER'. I've read enough of Anna Politkovskaya to know how "politics" works in Russia. The Army, the liquor industry, the power structure, the erst-while KGB people in charge at all levels of government, the radiation poisoning of former spies ready to talk...it's all a different world over there.

Politkovskaya was an investigative journalist who spent her days exposing the various atrocities committed by various institutions in a scathing portrait of the ways things just get done in Russia. You can call her an alarmist. I guess. Anna was working on an article about that former spy that was killed by radiation poisoning in England.

She was mysteriously shot while going into her apartment and died in her building's foyer.

She had little to say about Prokhorov specifically in the material I've read, but I get it; I get the basic image of how this guy must have become a magnate. Irresponsible douche-bag trust-fund kids getting their hands on their family's money or company's and ultimately the government is not how the world works in Russia. Not in the Bill Gates kind of way, anyway. There's a level of roughness, violence, and plain gangster in the political realm that would absolutely astound Americans if they truly understood the level at which it really exists.

Corruption? Please. That word has very little meaning in Russian politics.

So, really, part of me is quite excited if Prokhorov truly intends to join the race.

It would be for President of Russia, true, but it would really be for the title World's Top Gangster.

Putin or Prokhorov...as president either would eclipse Kim in North Korea, Bashad in Syria, or any of the African thugs that are still holding onto power.

A comment on that article I've linked to wants Obama to then buy the Bulls, which would make for great inter-conference rivalry games.