Putin's economic ideas "a woodcutter's recommendation on how to grow trees" - Communist functionary
MOSCOW. Jan 30 (Interfax) - First deputy leader of the Communist Party and first deputy speaker of the State Duma Ivan Melnikov sees a chain of borrowing and a knot of contradictions in presidential candidate, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's article on economic problems.
"Putin's so-called economic article is filled with unbelievable contradictions and it illustrates his election tactics," he told Interfax on Monday.
"On the one hand, the author borrows almost all statements and judgments from opposition programs, first of all from the Communist Party's program, but presents them in a softer way, as if they were temporary setbacks and obstacles in a generally right course, not fundamental problems," Melnikov said.
"But on the other hand, Putin offers his answers and solutions as part of an exclusively liberal legal capitalist economic model that is bursting at the seams globally," he said.
"The author claims that private investments create new production lines and new jobs. However, almost $85 billion leaked abroad under his government last year, which indicates that all conditions have been created for the opposite trend," he also said.
Melnikov mentioned President Dmitry Medvedev's article titled "Russia, Forward!" written a few years ago. "Medvedev made a few profound points and he proclaimed a departure from the economic model based on raw materials and spoke considerably about the role of innovative industrial branches. But all this ended up with an actual effect of zero. The government does not want to put any serious money either into infrastructure or science, or into modern technologies," he said.
Economic development problems can be tackled only if the raw material resources and strategic industries are nationalized. This is the basic step without which the situation will not change, or will even deteriorate. Only the Communist Party leader, presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov, can make such a step," Melnikov said.