🚀 go-pugleaf

Olin Murrell wrote:

> Davie wrote:
> [snipped]
> >
> >      The real question is not whether a terrorist will use a nuclear
> > weapon, but only when.
>
> I hate to tell you this, but suitcase sized nukes have been available
> since at least the mid 80's. The only REAL danger in this particular
> story is that in all likelihood, the bombs are not really missing. The
> former Soviet Military that had control of them probably sold them, and
> knows exactly where they are.
>
> That, and the Russian experiment with capitalism has failed to the point
> that Yeltsin is reinstituting government controls of their economy.
> Sigh. For years, all we heard was that all Russia needed was a dose of
> free market economics and all would be right with the world. We forgot
> they've NEVER had a free market, and had no clue how to respond to
> rising prices, market pressure, OR how to effectively fight market
> corruption. As a result, the corruption that has existed there since the
> early days of the Czars, AND the Communists, just went apeshit when the
> controls were removed.
>
> Don't take this as a defense of Communism. It's most assuredly not that,
> but rather an indictment of the notion that the Russians could somehow
> magically reform themselves overnight with little, or no help, save a
> few venture capitalists and some missionaries and teachers.
>
> What I really fear is that current generations have lived with the
> Russian Bear as an enemy for so long, that some of us cannot bear (pun
> intended) the thought of them no longer being the great Commie menace.
> They are surely headed back down the road to Communism, and if the old
> bosses regain power, there will be a bloodbath the likes of which we
> have not yet seen.
>

All good points.  But I will hope that you'll recognize that quite a bit
of  Russia's present economic woes result from the fact that when the old
Soviet State went down the tubes, many of the already-corrupt _apparat_
looted State resources, and sold it on the Black Market (which they'd been
doing for years anyway but not on so grand a scale) and where there had
formerly been a sort of understanding between the Internal Security forces
and the Mafia, now there was not only collaboration, but a mutual
absorption. In short, much of the KGB and the Mafia combines to loot the
State resources and concentrate capital into criminal enterprises, which is
where an immense segment of the Russian economy remains today -
concentrated into the hands of capitalists who, oddly, tended to formerly
be the enforcers of the failed Communist (or more properly,
State-Capitalist) regime.

So in many respects, it seems that the Free Market Economy was doomed to
failure, caught between the isolations and suspicions of potential Western
trading partners and their international financial structure, and the
lootings of internal resourcs and assets by fomer State officials. It
should also be noted that the former State, or at least a huge chunk o the
higher-ups, seem to have effectively diverted State assets into an offshore
criminal enterprise, as sort of government-in-exile with astounding cash
resourcs, which it has been playing into megascale profits through
international criminal adventurism on a scale which would have,   were they
still linked to the geographical territory of Russia, most-likely have
cause international military incidents up to and including limited nuclear
exchange. However, presently, this government-in-exile is highly mobile,
extremely diversified, engaged in banking-fraud, money-laundering,
transcontinental transshipment of contraband, and is in short making money
much faster than they ever could when they were pretending to put on a face
of being a responsible and ideologically-motivated government. Russia
itself (the geo-political state, not the government) has been left with a
deteriorating infrastructure, a completely-noncompetitive manufacturing
sector, and in fact with almost no resources other than those which are
purely linked to the territory which could not be carried away with the
servants of the departing regime! All they really have left is their vast
mineral and petrochemical resources, and they have hardly the technical
infrastructure (they do have the knowledge and personnel, but no sufficient
industry) to get at these resources, much less market them competitively
abroad.

So it has not been a case that the Russians cannot or will not change -
instead, the case is that they were robbed and abandoned by their former
criminal overseers, and we of the West have done _almost  nothing_ to aid
them in their plight., other than to offer our assistance in assuring that
the victim of this robbery won't pick up a weapons and go around robbing
people in order to offset their present misery and starvation and their
presently-bleak future.

> --
> Olin Murrell
> Austin, Texas
> http://www.realtime.com/~olin