Why is Russian usury protected from criminal penalties?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

A year and a half ago, a law banning "usurious interest" came into force.

Martin Luther

The Russian Federation was born into the world immediately as a state of usurious capitalism. By the end of 1992, more than 2,000 banks were registered in the Russian Federation. There has never been such a number of credit institutions in the Russian state. In tsarist Russia, before the revolution, the number of commercial banks was only about fifty. In Soviet times, during the NEP era (1920s), their number was estimated at several dozen. And in subsequent years - until the collapse of the USSR - the number of banks did not exceed a dozen (each of them was specialized and occupied its own niche).

But the point is not only in the number of banking organizations, but in the fact that the banks of "democratic" Russia rushed to engage in usury right off the bat. At the same time, the Central Bank of the Russian Federation was no exception. Moreover, it was he who initiated the setting of prohibitive interest rates.

In the first three months of its activity (until the beginning of April 1992), the Bank of Russia set the refinancing rate (analogous to the current key rate) at 20%. Then its rapid escalation began - up to 80% in May 1992 and up to 180% in September 1993. And then, at some moments, it even rose to 200% and higher. Naturally, the interest rates on loans from commercial banks were even higher. Loans were not uncommon, even at 500% per annum.

All this looked like complete savagery against the background of loans that were issued by the USSR State Bank and the USSR Promstroybank to enterprises in different sectors of the economy. Annual interest rates overwhelmingly ranged from 1 to 2%. In pre-revolutionary Russia, rates on loans from commercial banks were usually expressed in single digits; crossing the 10% level was an extremely rare event.

I believe that the usurious chaos of the 1990s was not just some kind of uncontrollable element. I do not exclude that some of those "reformers" who deliberately destroyed the Soviet model of economy and society were familiar with the works of the founder of Marxism. And Karl Marx wrote about the revolutionary role of usury:

… usury has a revolutionary effect only in the sense that it destroys and destroys those forms of property, on a solid basis and continuous reproduction of which the political system rests in the same form

By the end of the 1990s, our society began to recover a little from shock therapy and market "reforms." The opposition began to hear calls to revise the results of the "special operation" of Gaidar and Chubais called "privatization and corporatization", as well as to take urgent measures to restore order in the economy. Including in the field of monetary relations. The practice of blatant usury encouraged by the Central Bank and the government has come under particular criticism.

I remember that back in the late 1990s, on the initiative of the deputy MI Glushchenko (LDPR faction), the State Duma began preparing a bill called "On the introduction of Article 158-1" Usury "into the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. The document was short and offered the following definition of usury:

… charging interest on a given loan of money, credit or property in an amount in excess of three percent of the amount of the loan, loan, appraised property, or withholding a one-time fee from the amount received or other remuneration from the amount received from the amount of more than three percent, or setting a penalty and penalty for delay payment of a loan, credit or other hidden form of payment.

And depending on the circumstances, such types of punishment were established as imprisonment (up to two years), correctional labor, and confiscation of property.

The bill was blocked for three years. And at the beginning of 2003 it was finally brought up for discussion. Strong pressure was exerted on the deputies. It is noteworthy that 142 deputies voted for the law, and 293 abstained, or 65% of all “people's deputies”. The initiative was finally buried.

Later (since 2012), a group of deputies from different factions began to try to amend the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, namely to define usury and establish a ban on usury in loan and loan transactions. Less than five years later, in the middle of 2017, in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, in article 809 "Interest on a loan agreement", for the first time, a mention of usury appeared.

This article has been supplemented by a fifth clause, which states the following:

President's visit

So, in November 1963, Kennedy arrived in Texas. This trip was planned as part of the preparatory campaign for the 1964 presidential election. The head of state himself noted that it is very important for him to win in Texas and Florida. In addition, Vice President Lyndon Johnson was a local and the travel to the state was emphasized.

But the representatives of the special services were afraid of the visit. Literally a month before the president's arrival, Adlai Stevenson, the US representative to the UN, was attacked in Dallas. Earlier, during one of Lyndon Johnson's performances here, he was booed by a crowd of … housewives. On the eve of the President's arrival, leaflets with the image of Kennedy and the inscription "Wanted for Betrayal" were posted around the city. The situation was tense, and troubles awaited. True, they thought that demonstrators with placards would take to the streets or throw rotten eggs at the president, no more.

Local authorities were more pessimistic. In his book The Assassination of President Kennedy, William Manchester, a historian and journalist who chronicled the assassination attempt at the request of the President's family, writes: “Federal Judge Sarah T. Hughes feared incidents, Attorney Burfoot Sanders, senior Justice Department official in this part of Texas and the vice president’s spokesman in Dallas told Johnson’s political adviser Cliff Carter that given the city’s political atmosphere, the trip seemed "inappropriate." The city officials had trembling knees from the very beginning of this trip. The wave of local hostility towards the federal government had reached a critical point, and they knew it."

But the pre-election campaign was approaching, and they did not change the presidential travel plan. On November 21, a presidential plane landed at the airport of San Antonio (Texas' second most populous city). Kennedy attended Air Force Medical School, went to Houston, spoke at the university there, and attended a Democratic Party banquet.

The next day, the President went to Dallas. With a difference of 5 minutes, the vice president's plane arrived at Dallas Love Field airport, and then Kennedy's. At about 11:50 am, the motorcade of the first persons moved towards the city. The Kennedys were in the fourth limousine. In the same car with the President and the First Lady were US Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife, agent William Greer was driving.

Three shots

It was originally planned that the motorcade would travel in a straight line on Main Street - there was no need to slow down on it. But for some reason, the route was changed, and the cars drove along Elm Street, where cars had to slow down. In addition, on Elm Street, the motorcade was closer to the educational store, from where the shooting was carried out.

Shots rang out at 12:30. Eyewitnesses took them either for the claps of a cracker, or for the sound of the exhaust, even the special agents did not immediately find their bearings. There were three shots in total (although even this is controversial), the first was Kennedy wounded in the back, the second bullet hit the head, and this wound became fatal. Six minutes later, the motorcade arrived at the nearest hospital, at 12:40 the president died.

The prescribed forensic medical research, which had to be done on the spot, was not carried out. Kennedy's body was immediately sent to Washington.

Workers at the training store told police that the shots were fired from their building. Based on a series of testimonies, an hour later, Police Officer Tippit attempted to detain warehouse worker Lee Harvey Oswald. He had a pistol with which he shot Tippit. As a result, Oswald was still captured, but two days later he also died. He was shot by a certain Jack Ruby while the suspect was being taken out of the police station. Thus, he wanted to "justify" his hometown.

So, by November 24, the president was assassinated, and so was the prime suspect. Nevertheless, in accordance with the decree of the new President Lyndon Johnson, a commission was formed, headed by the Chief Justice of the United States of America Earl Warren. There were seven people in total. For a long time, they studied the testimony of witnesses, documents, and in the end they concluded that a lone killer had attempted to assassinate the president. Jack Ruby, in their opinion, also acted alone and had exclusively personal motives for the murder.

Under suspicion

To understand what happened next, you need to travel to New Orleans, the hometown of Lee Harvey Oswald, where he last visited in 1963. On the evening of November 22, an altercation broke out at a local bar between Guy Banister and Jack Martin. Banister ran a small detective agency here, Martin worked for him. The reason for the quarrel had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination, it was a purely industrial conflict. In the heat of the argument, Banister pulled out his pistol and hit Martin in the head with it several times. He shouted: "Will you kill me the way you killed Kennedy?"

The phrase aroused suspicion. Martin, who was admitted to the hospital, was interrogated, and he said that his boss Banister knew a certain David Ferry, who, in turn, knew Lee Harvey Oswald quite well. Further, the victim claimed that Ferry convinced Oswald to attack the president using hypnosis. Martin was considered not entirely normal, but in connection with the assassination of the president, the FBI worked out every version. Ferry was also interrogated, but the case did not receive any further progress in 1963.

… Three years have passed

Ironically, Martin's testimony was not forgotten, and in 1966 New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison reopened the investigation. He collected testimony that confirmed that the Kennedy assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving former civil aviation pilot David Ferry and businessman Clay Shaw. Of course, a few years after the murder, some of this testimony was not entirely reliable, but still Garrison continued to work.

He was hooked on the fact that a certain Clay Bertrand appeared in the report of the Warren Commission. Who he is is unknown, but immediately after the murder, he called New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews and offered to defend Oswald. Andrews, however, remembered the events of that evening very poorly: he had pneumonia, a high temperature and he took a lot of drugs. However, Garrison believed that Clay Shaw and Clay Bertrand were one and the same person (later Andrews admitted that he generally gave false testimony regarding Bertrand's call).

Shaw, meanwhile, was a famous and respected figure in New Orleans. A war veteran, he ran a successful trade business in the city, participated in the public life of the city, wrote plays that were staged throughout the country. Garrison believed that Shaw was part of a group of arms dealers who were aiming to bring down the Fidel Castro regime. Kennedy's rapprochement with the USSR and the lack of a consistent policy against Cuba, according to his version, became the reason for the assassination of the president.

In February 1967, the details of this case appeared in the New Orleans States Item, it is possible that the investigators themselves organized the "leak" of information. A few days later, David Ferry, who was considered the main link between Oswald and the organizers of the assassination attempt, was found dead at his home. The man died of a cerebral hemorrhage, but the strange thing was that he left two notes of confused and confused content. If Ferry had committed suicide, then the notes could be considered dying, but his death did not look like a suicide.

Despite shaky evidence and evidence against Shaw, the case was brought to trial, and hearings began in 1969. Garrison believed that Oswald, Shaw, and Ferry had conspired in June 1963, that there were several who shot the president, and that the bullet that killed him was not the one fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. Witnesses were summoned to the trial, but the arguments presented did not convince the jury. It took them less than an hour to reach a verdict: Clay Shaw was acquitted. And his case remained in history as the only one brought to trial in connection with the Kennedy assassination.

Elena Minushkina