Increasing number of Eastern Europeans believe that under the Communists it was better
( "Rebelion", Spain)

The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago marked the rise to power of democratic regimes in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. After two decades of East Europeans continue to support democracy, but with much less enthusiasm than in 1991.
These are some of the results of the study "The long-awaited end of communism, but with reservations", conducted by Pew Research Center in Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Russia, Bulgaria and Ukraine.


In general, all of the above countries, support the transition from socialism to democracy had declined, particularly in the Ukraine (from 72% in 1991 to 30% currently) in Bulgaria (from 76 to 52%), Lithuania (from 75 to 55% ) and Hungary (from 74 to 56%). In contrast, 85% of East Germans ( Majority of Eastern Germans Feel Life Better under Communism http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,634122,00.html), 80% of Czechs and Slovaks 71% expressed satisfaction with provedennnymi transformations.
With regard to the transition to capitalism, then traced the same trend. The most striking voices in support of this process declined in Hungary (from 80 to 46%), Lithuania (from 76 to 50%), Bulgaria (s73 to 53%) and Ukraine (from 52 to 36%). In other countries, the support of more than 60%, and among the inhabitants of the former GDR it reaches 82%.


On the other hand, the study also noted a growing nationalist sentiment among the citizens of Russia. Thus 58% agreed with the statement that "a great pity that the Soviet Union no longer exists", and 54% supported the slogan "Russia for the Russian" (in 1991 there were 26%), and 47% "consider it quite natural, that Russia should be an empire "(Twenty years ago there were 37%). Another of the key questions of the questionnaire developed by the American center, was an East European evaluation of its current life. The number of satisfied not exceeded 50%.

+1 good analysis

I wonder if the West Germans or Japanese would be more than 50% content under communism... something tells me NOT.

Its not the fittest that survive... but the most adaptable.

So very sad but so very true. This is disgusting to say the very least.

So very sad but so very true. This is disgusting to say the very least.[/quote]
Alternate interpretation is that fewer Chinese (like Japanese) are criminals.

Alternate interpretation is that fewer Chinese (like Japanese) are criminals.[/quote]

Yes, I admit that is possible. But such a huge difference.....wow.....

Farewell, liberal Latvia
November 5, 2009, Ernest Buivid (Latvia)
or Where has the "invisible hand of the market" naive country, everything is done completely market-based fashion


Early September, "Day of Knowledge", the picture on television news: In the empty school porch, clean, newly painted (on the day of knowledge) sad student (former) lay flowers at a grave, "Farewell to school!". This is not goodbye graduates, they are still students, it's goodbye to the school, which they did not have time to finish - it was closed. Closed not one, fifty schools were closed. No money for education - education funding reduced by 40%.

Another picture - crowd of doctors with various witty posters, picket - closed hospital. Closing no one, closed a dozen - no money for health care, a reduction of 40%, and the funding of hospitals has been reduced by 70%.

Call on the radio - call the rural pensioner - where we now receive a pension? Closed down the post office. Not pay off. Closing no one, closed 70 offices across the country. Not needed, does not pay. Therefore, all post offices in the state a year ago laid over 10 million lats (14.3 million euros) in new capital of the Postal Bank. It is, instead of mail. Real policy - what a sick and illiterate people mail? In medicine there is no money.

Being shut down theaters - the new Minister of Culture said that the 8 theaters for LR too much - in theaters, too, no money. The Ministry of Culture now has money only for construction of libraries. Besides - without books. In the book, too, no money - funding for school libraries reduced four times. Who will go to the National Library (if it is built)? After all, if a person is a child learns to read books, they do not need him all his life.

And the government compiled a list of public functions, they proved to be 1000, and collects offers - from which functions can still refuse. Why? To budget became friends. And the extra functions can be privatized. Already have a wish - to assay supervision.

Very interesting! "STATE - The main political organization of society, is carrying out its governance, the protection of its economic and social structure." This is in the dictionary. And why should the state, if you delete (privatize) its function? Moreover, the major - education, health, social protection? Only wages and collecting rollback higher officials and the president of the UN guided tours - to say there a few common phrases on duty?

"Milestones"

What is happening in Latvia?


We are simply going through the next stage of our "development", which is very neatly and logically extends the already completed stages, which began with the acquisition of a second independence. Thing of the past today's Latvia. Not viable.

After gaining independence (it received from the hands of Yeltsin), along with her LR has a great heritage of Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, which for the time, which is now called the occupation of Latvia, managed to build 350 large industrial businesses and created a huge infrastructure. Companies have worked and earned money in the budget, which was two and a half times the present that we have a whole year trying to reduce. That budget cut was not required - its surplus (excess of income over expenditure) amounted to 5,8%. This is money for development. It is with free education, healthcare and housing. This data for 1988, then began meetings and work abandoned.

Instead, take up the reform of the inheritance.

The first phase - privatization. Hatched foreign consultants (our, runaway with the Germans in 1944) explained naive, that state-owned enterprises - not very effectively, the only way - to privatize them. So they did. Enterprises got a variety of clever guys who came to power, the Popular Front, but what to do with them, they did not know the company stopped.

Five years of living that would sell equipment facing enterprises - mostly in the scrap metal, or the Poles, who equip their business equipment for 5% of its value. Now the Poles, we bring products - 30% cheaper than ours. Already dead - could not withstand the competition.

As a result of this "reform" manufacturing plants have disappeared as a class, turning in real estate. Of the 350 intact units, which can be counted on the fingers. Production volumes decreased from 40% of GDP to 10%. The first phase was successfully completed.

The second stage of reform - real estate speculation. The whole country was filled with real estate, but what to do with it, it was not known. Because there was a tax on commercial property in 4% of cadastral value, which excluded the possibility of not working to keep property - in order to "twist" it to market - tax ate the whole effect. Real estate could only exist while working. Very good principle, but the speculators are not suitable, and industrialists have already disappeared.

In Latvia, all in the hands of a few clever kids (small country, only 2,2 million inhabitants) - had a new "reform". Reduced property tax from 4% to 1%. Everything was great - the tax is less than inflation, real estate became a place to store money in order to save them from rising inflation. This place is expensive, real estate became more expensive - 66% per year. Fantastic "broth". She "sucked" into itself all the means of the national economy, making everything else in the desert. After all, real estate speculation is not a perpetual motion machine, it must be constantly nurtured, attracting funds from outside. And that party no longer exist - production, which creates new values, has died. Latvia to import and sell foreign goods. Aliens and earn.

The third stage of "reform." This is today. The government calls it "structural reforms". All the available money has already been "engulfed" property and depreciate. Devalued simply because money is no longer available. There is nowhere to "attract", but from investments in real estate has already lost 80%. While. But the process continues.

What does the government? Latvian ship sinks, the government throws overboard all strange to him the property and passengers. Teachers - overboard! Medics - overboard! Police - overboard! Hospitals - overboard! Post offices - overboard! Seniors - overboard. Theaters - overboard! All over the side, just by surviving.

This is reminiscent of old film "The Red Tent," about how the Arctic has crashed airship "Italia" General Nobile. He was holed and lost height. All overboard! "As a result, when he fell, they did not have nothing - no food, no drinking, no fuel. Only a small red tent on the ice. More than half have died, the rest of the half and then I found the icebreaker "Krasin". He came from Leningrad to the Arctic - not very familiar path. Long to wait.

What's next?

Then the final - a debt pit. Heritage walk, to earn not learned, live in debt.

This year, by September, has already taken loans from international organizations 3 billion euros, and all collected during this time the core budget revenues amounted to 2.6826 billion euros (- only 90% of the borrowed!) We borrow more than we earn!! This is a disaster. Latvia lives through international funds.

What could make our government?

For 8 months of hard "work" (discussion!) The government cut the budget of 500 million lats (714.3 million lats). But what makes this economy, if at the time of the life of a government to borrow 2100 million lats - in 4,2 times more? Is this economy or not it (only 23% of the incurred debt) - does not change anything, just talk.

Discussions are continuing about the economy - writes the budget for 2010. Again, be cut by 500 million lats gather for kopecks on the benefits, medicines, theaters, sports centers. Been reduced and canceled their pension indexation, reduced benefits for children, the government abolished the payment operations in the hospitals ... Even the Commission on the calculation of losses from "occupation", "our holy, all that is required 200 thousand lats, was closed. But - that all this will, if the borrowing plan the government intends this year to borrow another 1100 million euros, and the next - again 3 billion? Again, as early as 6.4 times more than save (on paper)?

This is completely hopeless financial disaster. After all, if we are on the government's life requires twice as much now earn, and we are entering a debt, then to get out of this we must:

- To earn twice as much just to live for their money, and

- Plus a similar amount to earn for the impact of those debts (with interest).

At four times the need to work and earn. What does this mean? The fact that Latvia, the poorest country in the EU, should at once reach the level of Italy. Utopia.

Where and who can do this? After all, we have 200 thousand and 160 thousand unemployed people have left - almost half of those workers who earned taxes. For the rest - it is to budget, for which the taxes are paid by the budget of what we earn. All. Arrived. Further, the system that says - "Let's give the people - freedom of speech, the rest take away his" no longer go. It is necessary to change the system. Rotten, its already in 1934 changed the president Ulmanis, but advisors from across the ocean all restored, and again we repeated the whole way collapse and came to the same accident.

Our rulers every day appear on television, but did not say. Do not know. Just paint. Again, you want Ulmanis. Who is for it will take?

Otherwise, we will only have the red tent. Out of humanitarian assistance.

The Collapse of the Baltic Tigers
http://www.workers.org/2009/world/latvia_0305/

The inhabitants of Latvia sharply increased interest in Russia's citizenship.

In ravaged crisis in Latvia is a new trend. Residents of our country are increasingly thinking about how to connect his life with its eastern neighbor - Russia Federation. To just sign up for a consultation, it is necessary to waiting in a long queue. Moreover, among applicants for the Russia's citizenship many young people.

I know all of that evgeny. In decades to come, all ex-communist states will rue the day they jettisoned collectivisation and I include the Chinese in there but facts are facts. You lost the Cold War by either doing back room deals with capital (Mao) or rushing feverishly into the arms of captal (USSR)...all for what? The right to sit at a computer all day long viewing pornography, for Soviet women to have the freedom to be prostitutes, to have your culture debased by a commercialised popular culture and its obsessive and infantile grandstanding. THE GREAT SOCIETY YOUR FOREFATHERS FOUGHT HARD FOR, you handed to capital for a few trinkets and the flattery of being admitted into the the association of "civilised" nations, a civilisation based on lies, confusion, deceit and barbarism as we see now. They talk about Soviet cruelty yet blithely murder and destroy. They have excuses for everything, even selling their children to the war machine. There are no morals in capitalism. It is the paradigm of the mechanised monkey. On the brink of the collapse of private greed, you turned away from the collective. I don't think you people quite understand what you have squandered, what the world has lost in the fall of the Soviet Union. And it's gone!

What do you mean Russia "Lost A cold war"?
today Russian fleet can destroy NATO's group in 20 minutes
and NATO's fleet can destroy Russia.
We just stop this madness.

USSR, Not Russia. Remember, Russia was a state within the Union of Soviets. In successfully breaking up the Soviet system into disparate semi-capitalist oligarchies, America and the Anglosphere won THAT conflict. There will be a return to collectrivisation in the future but it will not be one led by the USSR. So to that extent, the former states of the USSR including Russia are now marginal players in the world. The conflict these days is between a polarised international labour and capitalism. In the past, it was a conflict between international labour LED by the USSR and capital.

See my point?

Gazprom not doing as well as before:



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8349884.stm

Does this mean we will all go down with Russia?

Russia 'went down' in the 90's. The US will leave Afghanistan
before Russia goes down again.

Gazprom should stop subsidizing its customers. Natural gas should have a higher price than oil on a btu for btu basis, instead it is being sold for less than half. Also, declining profits is not the same thing as losses in spite of what the Wall Street drones think. Compared to 1998 this recession has been a walk in the park for Russia. Just look at the shortfall in government revenues and bank support activity in the US, it is much higher as a fraction of GDP. The US ILO unemployment rate is also higher.

America’s Imperial Economy: What The Republicans Are Too Squeamish To Admit
By Mark Ames

In the great debate about the stimulus package — which, underneath all the cant is really nothing more than a debate about how America’s scarce wealth should be divided – one of the right wing’s favorite mantras was their claim that the New Deal did nothing to end the Depression. Instead, they argue, it was World War Two that ended the Depression.

So far, the liberals’ counterargument is to throw out a bunch of statistics arguing that the New Deal did work. Both sides take their argument to the real of hypothetical realities: either the ’30s could have been worse without the New Deal (liberals argue) or the 30s would have been better off without the New Deal (right-wingers argue). But let’s stop and consider the Republican right wing’s argument about World War Two’s effect on its own merits: if it really was the war that pulled America out of the Depression, that is hardly an argument in favor of endless tax cuts and small government. The wartime economy was the very opposite of the Adam Smith model of free trade and minimal government interference — it was, instead, New Deal economics to the tenth power, in which the government managed and controlled just about every single facet of the citizenry’s lives. And then of course there’s the war’s outcome: America emerged victorious and largely unscathed with comparatively little cost in lives compared to the war’s other major participants, while all of America’s global competitors essentially committed mass suicide and were left prostrate at our militarized feet.

The Republican right unintentionally raised a very serious issue, but no one seems to want to call them on it, not even their own supporters. The can of worms they’ve opened leads to this: what if America’s booms and busts are tied not to monetary policy, taxation levels or government regulation, but rather to our success or failure as an imperialist war machine? What if our wealth is a consequence of our ability to plunder the world’s wealth, often by default thanks to our competitors’ suicidal behavior?

Consider this very simple, surface chronology of the past 100 years (and why not stick with the surface — after all economics, despite all of its complex statistical mathematics, has turned out to be little more than glorified astrology):

1914-1918: World War I. America ends up on the winning side at comparative little cost in American lives, no destruction to the homeland or to our economy. Whereas America’s European competitors commit mass suicide both demographically and economically. This is followed by:

1920-1929: One of the greatest boom decades in American history. No great wars, no new mass suicide by competitors. That is, nothing new to plunder. This leads to:

1929-1939: The Great Depression. No new wars, no new imperial expansion, and with it, feeble economic expansion. This is followed by:

1939-1945: World War II. America ends up on the winning side at comparative little cost in American lives, no damage to the American homeland. America’s European and Asian competitors commit mass suicide both demographically and economically. Global markets (minus Communist world) are America’s for the taking. Which leads to:

1945-1960: American economic boom. America’s economy makes up half of the world’s GDP in 1950, and rides its biggest sustained boom in U.S. history, including an unprecedented rise in living standards.

1945-1960: French and British empires, already weakened competitors of America’s empire, decline and collapse for good, allowing the American empire to expand further by filling the vacuum. America fights Korean War 1950-52; wisely halts it to a draw after just 2 years, meaning little net gain or loss. Communist empire expands — communist countries by nature are uncompetitive against the U.S. economically, except inasmuch as they deny markets to U.S. goods and keep the empire in check. This leads to:

1960-1970: The American economic boom, still riding off the momentum of the World War II wealth transfer, gradually begins to sputter as the decade wears on. This economic decline accelerates in tandem with:

1963-1975: America loses its first war ever in Vietnam. With its first imperial defeat, the American empire is in retreat. Once-compliant countries from Latin America to the Middle East assert themselves; Third World becomes increasingly either socialist or “non-aligned”; America plunders less and less of the world’s wealth. This leads to:

1970s: Economic stagnation, decline in standard of living. This eventually leads to the election of an avowed American imperialist, Ronald Reagan, which is followed by:

1981-1989: American economy ramped up for Cold War against “Evil Empire.” Reagan racks up massive debt and pours enormous state funds into “winning” the Cold War against the “evil empire.” Militarizes the economy and the culture. Imperial decline halted. Latin America reabsorbed into soft American empire, while many Arab states also become more compliant, especially following the bombing of Libya. Fund war against Soviets in Afghanistan, letting them bleed, without any damage to American homeland. This leads to:

1980s: American economy begins to grow again, though still not as fast as in the 60s or 50s, the period after victory in World War II.

1989-1991: American victory in the “Cold War”: the Communist empire collapses. American empire absorbs these new markets without firing a shot or suffering damage in the homefront, opening up massive new opportunities for wealth plunder. America’s biggest economic competitor, Japan, essentially collapses. In 1991, America wins Gulf War 1, its first big war victory since Vietnam. American empire, without rivals, suddenly resurgent again. This leads to:

1990s: Economic boom, which accelerates towards the end of the decade, reaching levels of growth not seen since the 50s and 60s.

2001: Brief recession which many say will spell doom to America’s booming economy. But then:

2001-2: America wins war against Afghanistan, leading to world recognizing for the first time that America is not only an empire, but a “hyperpower.” Economy quickly turns around and begins to boom again, until:

2003-8: America loses only its second war in its history against Iraq. The victory in Afghanistan slowly unwinds and starts morphing into another defeat. That’s two war losses in one decade. Which leads to:

2007-present: The new Great Depression.

So if you follow the Republican right-wing’s own logic, the question isn’t whether or not we should raise or lower taxes, or whether we should fund programs that teach kids about STDs. America’s economic booms and busts have nothing to do with Adam Smith’s three-pointed-hat Calvinist fantasies and everything to do with whether we win or lose wars, and, more importantly, if our competitors commit mass suicide in these wars, allowing us to ride in at the end, after our competitors have bankrupted and bled themselves to death, as we did in World Wars I and II, and again in the Cold War. The more we behave like sly jackals feeding on the steaming, nutrition-rich corpses of other peoples’ collapsed empires, the stronger our economy, and the better we live (the more we can cut our taxes or increase our social spending or both, depending on the amount we’ve plundered). But if we start a war, fight it by ourselves, and lose — as the idiots did in Iraq and in Vietnam and now in Afghanistan — then prepare for the Big Decline. University of Chicago professor Robert Pape recently characterized America’s imperial collapse as: “one of the largest relative declines in modern history. Indeed, in size, it is clearly surpassed by only one other great-power decline, the unexpected internal collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.”

It also raises the question of what the hell we’re doing ramping up the war in Afghanistan, just as it’s become clear that we’ve lost. It’s the graveyard of empires; what is Obama planning there, two consecutive losses? Has any nation ever screwed up that badly? Moreover, wars are only good for the American economy when there’s something to plunder at the end of it all. What’s there to plunder from Afghanistan, assuming we even win: dirt? Opium? (Well, OK, I’m all for the opium, but even I know that won’t create a nation of happy nuclear families; happy junkies, yes, but not wealthy new homeowners.)

http://exiledonline.com/americas-imperial-economy-what-the-republicans-are-too-squeamish-to-admit/all/1/

With the advent of nuclear weapons is hard to make new war! It remains only for the little things heat up the situation in Chechnya, Ingushetia, yes disburse adventurers Saakashvili and Yushchenko. But this thinks not gonna help to the American economy.