I haven't said anything about it because I'm simply unimpressed. Capitalism is doomed to encounter such problems. As long as we use capitalism, these situations will keep happening.

Ohhh they were going to have one, on monday i think it was... Bush called the press and told them he was going to take and talk about the fiancial crisis, then he decieded that when they were all there that he wasnt going to say anything and tell them nevermind... >_>

(i cant find the artcile right now, but it was from one of the major papers. maybe i will find it tommorrow...)

We may indeed be on the brink of financial disaster in America. This is definitely a very serious situation. We could be looking at another depression which means massive unemployment, massive home foreclosures, bank closures, inflation, and poverty.

However, if the worse case scenario does actually happen, ( and there's still the chance it might not ) it won't be the end of the world. We will find a way to take care of each other, help one another, and we'll survive. Eventually the financial markets will recover and the economy will be back to normal in a matter of a few years. So, don't fret, try not to worry because if it happens, we will all pull through it okay.

I'll be 57 next week and if there's one thing I've learned in 57 years it's that life is sometimes tough, but it always gets better.

Always!

Rick

Oh dear, what is the world coming to?  I just agreed with Luminon.  Mind you, only with the little section I quoted.  The rest I differ from.

Out of curiosity, do you subscribe to the dollar diplomacy interpretation or the post-revisionist interpretation? (I think it is safe to say you do not subscribe to the Orthodox interpretation).

Bull.

Forget Stalinist policy for the moment (Stalin was not interested in Communism at any rate - he was just intelligent enough to recognize it as a system that would allow him to consolidate the power he wanted): let's look at communism as a general concept.

All citizenry are o be paid equally. This is regardless of work ethic, innovation, talent, etc. The arbitration of this system centrally consolidates all of it's decisions to one governing body.

It is instantly, by virtue of it's own rules, corrupt. If there are no checks and balances (which there necessarily are not; communism and transparency are mutually exclusive), the government is effectively a dictatorship destined to become a police state (and that's exactly what we see happen to every country that has adopted communism) and unable to spark igenuity - people must be punitively forced to work hard and invent, because there is otherwise no incentive to do so.

This is a gross oversimplification of the foreign policies of Western nations. In fact, I'd say we've been far too lax in most areas (See: African Genocides, esp. Rwanda).

EDIT: 'Ever wonder why the rebels are dirt poor?' deserves special highlight, because while it's a common conception, it's hilariously wrong. Osama Bin Laden would be an excellent example to use here, as would blood diamond-funded guerillas, the old Viet Cong, racial cleansers in African countries, etc.

...And the notion that we should somehow 'need' to go through desperate times in order to appreciate them in fallacious. Moreover, the scope of your generalization is absurd (apparently nobody in Western civilization has gone through times of tremendous need. Huh).

It is my sincere wish that civilization, whatever it's faults, does not suddenly come grinding to a sputtering halt. It's the only shot we have of preserving the planet long enough to voyage off from it.

Vexxing: You must think modern science & technology are a pretty big waste, then, given that you have zero appreciation for what's cradled their existence for so long?

I'll tell you.

The Orthodox view is that the primary responsibility for the cold war lay in the hands of the USSR. Stalin's search for security was responsible for the initial tension between the superpowers. After the Red Army crossed the Oder-Neisse line, Stalin pursued a buffer-state policy commonly called "Salami tactics". Stalin was especially anxious that Poland be firmly in Russian hands, and that there should be a reasonable excuse for the Red Army to stay after the war. Stalin was concerned about encirclement by the Capitalist powers, and after suffering two eastward invasions, wanted to keep a hold on the satellite states. For this reason, he ordered the Red Army to hold at the Vistula in late 1944, so that Bor-Komorowski's men could be crushed by the Nazis and the Polish would be significantly weakened. Stalin's principle goal was to form a buffer ring of satellites around the USSR's western borders.

When you have the time, read Kennan's Long telegram. It is about 8,000 words (this isn't very long, but is very long for a telegram). It essentially outlines the Orthodox view and dictated America's foreign policy for about 25 years after the end of the war. Churchill's famous Sinews of Peace speech ("from Stettin, in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent" ) also outlines the Orthodox view.

The "dollar diplomacy" view states that primary responsibility lies in American hands. Kennan's Long telegram essentially laid out the path for Truman to take. Although it was Eisenhower who laid out the domino theory, Truman essentially understood that communism would spread across the world unless contained. This is essentially the contents of the Long Telegram. Kennan argued that the best way to block the spread of communism would be to inject American money and goods into nations which were in danger of being "lost" to the other sphere of influence. Hence was born the Marshall plan and the Truman doctrine. As long as the Americans poured money into war-ravaged countries to help them on their feet, those countries would not "go Red". Additionally, the Americans would prop up foreign dictators on the far right, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. They would do everything in their power to undermine the spread of communism in non-communist nations.

Another important part of the dollar diplomacy view is the "deterrent" interpretation of the use of nuclear weapons. At Potsdam, Stalin promised to open an Eastern front against the Japanese, and in August, just as the Americans were amassing aircraft carriers off Kyushu, Stalin invaded Manchuria, poised to take Hokkaido. The Americans were terrified. If the Red Army established so much as a beach-head on Hokkaido, the island would legitamitely belong to Stalin. The Allies could not afford to open a second cold front in Asia. They needed Japan to serve as a bulwark against Asian communism. They had no choice but to force Stalin to call off the invasion by employing nuclear weaponry.

The post-revisionist view takes into account the context of the scholarship of the other two. Much of the orthodox scholarship was done in the 40s and 50s, when the Americans needed to justify a massive military-industrial complex and the injection of such large amounts of money into foreign economies. However, we should be careful. This does not mean that the scholarship of the Orthodox historians is invalid, as they do make very good points. Stalin was certainly pursuing a "satellite" form of buffering, and it was clear that although at the Yalta conference he had promised free elections in Eastern European countries, that Moscow had systematically undermined every other party there was, and opposition leaders and anti-communist political leaders mysteriously disappeared. Additionally, no political arguing could change the fact that the Red Army controlled all of Eastern and most of Central Europe.

The dollar diplomacy view was developed during the Vietnam war when many historians were very critical of America's policies, especially since Vietnam marks the epitome of awfulness that resulted from the "Dollar diplomacy" policy (a combination of pouring of money into south Vietnam combined with the propping up of the hated Ng Diem). Although the Vietnam policy is a disastrous example of dollar diplomacy, it is very hard to argue that the Truman doctrine was primarily responsible for the cold war, and most historians would agree with that. Again, however, we should be careful. The dollar diplomacy camp makes some very good points as well. The Americans were clearly pursuing this dollar diplomacy policy, and were clearly not afraid to do highly unethical things to carry out this policy.

The post-revisionist view does not ascribe blame for the cold war to one side. It is clear that the Russians were pursuing a policy of satellite control just as the Americans were pursuing that of dollar diplomacy. However, it is hard to argue that either side was "responsible" for the cold war. the cold war was the inevitable result of the end of the Grand Alliance. Even members of OKH (Oberkommando Heer, the Wehrmacht High Command) realized this as early as 1944, and tried to have Hitler assassinated and bring Germany into an alliance with the Western powers against the Red Army).

One debate that still goes on is the degree to which the "Comintern theory" is correct. Cominterm was Communist International. It was an organization under the control of Moscow which was dedicated to spreading communism around the world. One group states that Cominterm and Moscow were purusing an agenda of worldwide socialist revolution as outlined by Trotsky. Socialist revolts in Latin America and Southeast Asia were due to instigations of Comintern. The other group says that communism sprang up in these places independant of Cominterm and that Moscow was not as important as it likes to think. This group tends to point to China as the prime example, insofar as Mao engineered a revolution largely independant of the USSR, and it was well known that the two nations did not exactly see eye to eye. The first theory, that Cominterm was working to establish communism everywhere, was essentially the basis of American foreign policy, as outlined in the Long telegram.

That's perhaps a bit too simple, but for all intents and purposes, yes. That's what I'm saying.

Capitalism breeds ingenuity by rewarding it. If we take a jaunt through history, we see that huge advances in technology are often married to cultures that contain strong elements of democracy and capitalism (and it's easy to intuitively reason why this would be so). The Soviet Union would be an obvious contemporary anomaly, but only because Stalin kick-started a ruthlessly efficient campaign to feed every resource at his disposal into his military-industrial complex.

...While we're kicking this ball around (and I ask this as serious question, rather than a rhetorical one): Do you have your own ideas of how a system could be better managed? I wonder if it wouldn't be an interesting idea to start-up a thread where everyone here simply tries to collaborate to build 'the perfect civilization' (or as close to it as we can get. And dibs on drafting-up our military hardwre! )

The Soviets had a large scientific and space program, but to a large degree they mangled science. This was perhaps inevitable as they were under the control of a totalitarian system, the same way that the psuedoscience of Aryan superiority developed in Nazi Germany. Stalin relaxed Soviet dogma on Relativity (felt to be contradictory to dialectical materialism) because he wanted to develop the atomic bomb, but Stalinist hacks managed to totally mangle genetics and evolutionary biology, leading to the famous disaster of Lysenkoism.

DG,

Is there a school of thought that incorporates all of those pieces? You have carefully laid out one instance of outside influence at a time, but I think the combination of all. Post Stalin, it was all us though.

Luminon,

The threads about utopia(or similar prophecies) are attacked like a piece of prime rib at a starving rednecks funeral.

Kevin,

Capitalism also hinders science by placing monetary restrictions on the quality of materials used. I call your attention to the LHC. Many of the European scientists during the post-alignment conference discussed the contributions or lack thereof from the contributors. Not to mention the fact that the SSC was cancelled due to being over 'budget' 15 years ago.

Scientists are only scientists for the money??? Ummmm. deludedgod, do you work on proteins for the paycheck or for the fun?

Such a sustainable society is not any form of oligarchy. For example, we today have a plutocracy, which we wrongly call democracy.
It's not a secret how to build a P.S.S., it's rather simple and it involves a lot of ordinary work. The only problem is, that the governing structures were always too strong and prevented the most of changes which could be good for all people. Now is the unique chance to change that, this or next financial crisis might be strong enough to shake them off the throne and give a room to new solutions for the good of all. There are people waiting for a media attention. They will not solve this crisis - they will help us deal with the consequences and build a more just world order.

Who I mean by "governments" and "them"? The same people, who can tell a nation to go and kill some of another nation, and those, who wants them there.

By your explanations, that label does seem to fit my take on that era of history.

Thank you. I will add your name to the list of other scientists that do their work for other purposes than making money.

I would ascribe altruism as the reason, but everyone of you that I know get a special thrill equating to orgasm when you discover something or complete your research. lol.

Y'know. Another thing about AIG that I forgot pissed me off.

Former ceo Martin Sullivan got $47,000,000 in severance pay this year.

Says the bottom of the stock market.

Stock markets are rising. Central banks poured 247 milliards of dollars into this system and it seems to work for now. Bush and Henry Paulson wants to create a a fund with 500 milliards of dollars, which will "once for all" solve such a kind of threat. This fund will buy bad mortgages of private corporations.

This probably means, that the corpse, known as global financial system, will vegetate a year or two longer, which is what we expected. But the message is clear - Houston, we've got a problem.
What do they want to do next, sell the whole financial system to itself? Because this patching up a money hole with even more money is like trying to extinguish a fire with banknotes.
Sooner or later, there will be just enough of milliards of dollars to buy the bad mortgages, but not enough of value in them for a real trading. Too much money in the market. I know, it's tempting to pull a half billion of dollars out of a magician's cylinder and save the day, but that's not gonna work forever, and soon, even homeless people will light up their cigarettes with dollar bills. Let's hope they leave some for a numismatic museums.

 

Luminon, the majority of the financial companies are fine and the system as a whole is not facing collapse.  The problems stem from a few (like Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, etc.) who mistook gambling for investing.  Even companies like AIG and Lehman Brothers still have worth.  Barclay's’ is scrambling to pick over the choicest pieces of the Lehman corpse, and those are some choice cuts.  It’s one division of the company that brought the whole institution down.  AIG’s insurance business is still seen as sound and a good investment.  The problem is that the company itself began gambling in the mortgage market with leveraged assets.  The company owes more than it can pay, but that doesn’t mean it is worthless.  The main problem right now is figuring out what everyone is worth.  If you’re a bank, how much mortgage related debt do you have and what is the likelihood that debt will go into default? 

The talk circulating of the government taking over a good portion of mortgage related debt from financial institutions is designed to get banks to start lending to each other again.  Not all of those loans are worthless, but no one really knows what percentage is good debt.  Remember, not every loan is going to go into default.  The system we have built does rely on the ability of banks to lend and borrow large sums of money, but no one is willing to take any of the risks right now because they don't know how to assess the risks of loans to other banks.  The government taking on the risk will allow for an easier assessment of the credit worthiness of various financial players and therefore allow for the confidence needed for more normal lending conditions.  There is already a structure in place for this due to the fall out from the S&L debacle awhile back.  (Talk about not learning from history.)

I'm not jumping with joy over the plan, but I haven't heard of any other plans to help stabilize the current system.  I think prosecutions for economic negligence and links to profits of institutions relieving themselves of mortgage debt should be part of the package, but I'm not counting on this government asking rich people to take responsibility for their behavior.  The idea of solely socializing risk and privatizing profit is a horrible idea.  We need to have more real regulation over the markets so that they are not gambling halls, but the entire economy is not on the brink of collapse.  You may very well have a solid argument in stating that deregulation could eventually cause total economic collapse, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Glad I can be of help and repay you (even if I still don't always understand what you are saying )  I'm assuming by preReagan you mean Carter.  That was before my time, but from the little I've studied it looks like he put long-term solutions in place.  Problem was, it didn't help until after th eelcetion.  Then Reagan and Bush I tanked everything.  I'm not a huge fan of Clinton, but he did clean up a fair deal of the mess.  Bush II, what an ass.

It is simple, campaign contributions.  Have you heard any of the news reports bemoaning the loss of campaign contributions by Wall Street firms?  Yeah, it's a big deal.  I think that MSNBC I was listening too, but I may be off on my source (it's all just background blabbering).  I haven't checked the list of Phil Gramm's campaign contributors, but that is something I would put bets on!

And, nobody talks about this, but there is an age issue here.  Some folks Buffett or Icahn keep working until old age, but a fair number of executives with talent take early retirement.  That leaves younger workers without much experience but a ton of ambition an opening. 

what you describe is not communism.  at best, it's defunct socialism, but i would call it stalinism.

a lot.  to spread communism was their official goal, but once stalin took over they basically became soviet diplomacy by other means:  not to spread communism, but to spread the influence of the soviet union, without pissing off the empire.  i mean, it was the comintern that forced the chinese communist party into an alliance with the nationalist, capitalist kuomintang, squashing the possibility of a communist revolution in china for about another decade and giving the japanese fascists a stronger foothold in china and manchukuo.

NEP?  NEP?  NEP?  the reintroduction of capitalist elements?  private businesses?  who were the "nepmen" stalin was so keen on eliminating?  heavy industry was centralized, as was transportation and other infrastructural elements, but it was a far cry from "total control over...the entire economic and political scene."

the mensheviks and SR's never were in power.  under kerensky, they were a bunch of lumps that pacified the workers and did nothing, which is why the petrograd workers were not satisfied with things.

that's just retarded. 

well, can you blame the sovnaRkom?  i mean, a civil war is a pretty piss-poor time to have public forums.  people called lincoln's policies "brutal" too.

marx was wrong?  show me the place where marx wrote about bullshit like "socialism in one country."  in fact, show me how the evolution of the soviet union fits into any of marx's schemes for socialist revolution.  if your prof was worth anything, i'm sure he told you that one of the biggest problems for lenin was trying to reconcile a socialist revolution in russia with the fact that russia met none of marx's conditions for a capitalist state ready for a socialist revolution.

central committee of what?  the RSDP?  shit, they weren't even running the show.  sovnarkom was, as well as trotsky in his armored train.  i guess they must not have spent too much time with the whores, since they won the war, with britain and france (at least) supporting the whites.

what genocide?  i'll willingly call stalin a dictator, a mass-murderer, and a dirty son of a bitch, but few of his crimes qualify with the definition of "genocide," and especially not "the largest in history."

change "marxist" to "stalinist" and we're in agreement.  otherwise, read up on "marxist" again.

the state did indeed control industry.  but the idea that the bolsheviks ever concealed this was going to happen is just plain wrong.  every major bolshevik writing, from lenin's what is to be done? to trotsky's terrorism and communism speaks clearly to a strong vanguard party and a centralized dictatorship of the proletariat which will preside over a planned economy.  obviously, at least the petrograd and moscow soviets went in for this.  the only promise i would ever suggest lenin rescinded on was the slogan "all power to the soviets."  but, to his credit, he seems to have believed in it before the october revolution and only reneged for practical reasons.

as for the central commitee, they were purely formal.  during lenin's time, sovnarkom was the real power.  i don't know what you mean by "rule by decree."  if you mean there were no plebiscites, you're right, but i don't recall the bolsheviks ever promising there would be.  but most major policies were voted on within the party or sovnarkom.  lenin, of course, tended to dominate but he was never an autocrat in the sense that stalin became.

yes, but the same petrograd soviet brought the bolsheviks to power too.  and let's not forget that the bolsheviks did try a coalition government with a few mensheviks and the "left" SR's but found this wasn't practicable in a time of civil war.

yes, atrocities were committed by the cheka, same as by the whites.  it's bound to happen in any civil war.  but if i'm a fan of soviet history, i'm at least as much of a fan of communist chinese history, and the idea that the atrocities committed by the cheka were like the cultural revolution "times 100" is, to be more polite this time, grossly hyperbolic.

and i'm saying we can't possibly know that because marx's conditions have never been met.  marx theorized that a long period of capitalist development was necessary to create the conditions for a socialist revolution.  he envisioned the revolution taking place in france, england, or germany.  both lenin and trotsky thought the bolshevik government was only buying time until the western european revolution came to their rescue.  a country without a developed industry, market economy, and infrastructure cannot sustain a socialist revolution.  russia had none of these, which is why there was such a huge push in industry, to try to "catch up."

well, admittedly this is where even marx got fuzzy.  still, it depends on what you mean by "dictatorship of the proletariat."  remember, it was lenin's idea, first formulated in what is to be done?, that a vanguard party was necessary.  marx never mentions this.  to the bolsheviks, dictatorship of the proletariat meant dictatorship of the party.  to marx, it seems dictatorship of the proletariat meant just that: the workers assuming direct control over the means of production and allocating resources accordingly, until classes as a whole (including the proletariat) are eliminated.  in a country which actually has the resources (which russia did not), there is no practical reason why this would not be possible.  i highly suggest reading trotsky's introduction to his selections from das kapital called the living thoughts of karl marx.  i'm sure you could find it at www.marxists.org.

Hilarious. You discount every single contemporary example of attempts to establish communist regime as 'not being TRUE communism' (Gee, what kind of fallacy would that be, again?) and then go even further to say that even Maxism isn't TRUE communism.

So, enlighten us, since you claim to know better than several decades worth of human endeavor: How does true, democratic, communism work? Presumably if you consider your own philosophy in economics to be Marx's better you have your own manifesto we could look at?

You are even more amusing to me than I am apparently amusing to you. You try and suggest that I'm guilty of a fallacy, but you are horribly mistaken to the point of self embarrassment. Communism is an economic policy that has never EVER been applied to a large society. Look it up, and try to prove me wrong. The USSR used some communist policies with their economics, yet still had more than enough seperation between rich and poor to prove it wasn't truly communist. China has the same problem today. In communism, everyone is equal. In China and the USSR, that was blatantly false. Therefore, it wasn't truly communism.

There is little point in discussing what I think is a superior political and economic system. In order to achieve it, capitalism would have to be slain. In order to slay capitalism, I would have to kill a good 6 billion people or introduce a change so revolutionary that there is no comparison in our history that I'm aware of. I'm not willing to do the former, and I have no idea how to accomplish the latter, so the point is moot. But if you really want to have something of an idea of my political stance, look into Socialist Democracy a bit. There are a few details I might change here and there, but the overall notion is closer to me than any other political perspective(ie: Liberal, Conservative, etc.)

There was never a shortage of good plans, just the practical realization lacked. Now the estabilishment is shaking at it's basis, and soon there will be nothing to keep us from fulfilling the plan of global justice - the sharing. Demand from your nearest congresman.