Krasnaya Zvezda

So Pooty-Poot sort of overcommitted on where to put his energy eggs, which seemed to be the impending case about three months ago. Not that Russia had many other options, mind you -- an impossibly corrupt government, tragically shortened life expectancy, and a looming demographic inability to keep populating its vast interior may sideline Russia for some time to come, if not permanently.

Still, some of this reads like a Yakov Smirnoff routine.

That Russia’s largest state-run energy company needs a bailout so soon after oil hit record highs last summer is a telling postscript to a turbulent period. Once the emblem of the pride and the menace of a resurgent Russia, Gazprom has become a symbol of this oil state’s rapid economic decline.

During the boom times, Gazprom and the other Russian state energy company, Rosneft, became vehicles for carrying out creeping renationalization.

As oil prices rose, so did their stocks. But rather than investing sufficiently in drilling and exploration, Russia’s president at the time, Vladimir V. Putin, used them to pursue his agenda of regaining public control over the oil fields, and much of private industry beyond.

....

A deputy chief executive of Gazprom, Aleksandr I. Medvedev, predicted the company would achieve a market capitalization of $1 trillion by 2014. Instead, its share price has fallen 76 percent since the beginning of the year and its market cap is now about $85 billion.

By comparison, Exxon’s share price Monday of $78.02 is down 18 percent since January. The company’s market capitalization is $393 billion. And the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index stocks is down more than 40 percent for the year.

So, an underperforming industry with an overabundance of government connections is using its place at the table in a rather unseemly fashion? The hell you say.

The primary difference between nationalizing the industry, and merely allowing the industry's interests to determine national policies, is which pockets the money ends up in. The rest is merely the debauched, unsustainable brand of rentier sham-capitalism we have decided to endorse, literally paying people to steal from us, charge us to get back what's ours, and refuse to tell us what they're doing with the money they stole.

Say what you want about Chàvez and Morales, they aren't stealing from the poor to line the pockets of the rich.