Date: Mon, 18 Jan 1999 22:44:32 -0500 From: jeff sommers <jsommers at lynx.dac.neu.edu> Organization: World HIstory Center X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.07 (Macintosh; I; PPC) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "lbo-talk at lists.panix.com" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Subject: Weimar Russia Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Dear Brad,
Pound for pound I will take an East European businessman or academic over his US counterpart any time. Generally, they work infinitely harder, are better educated, and more cosmopolitan than those sent from the US. These people are amazingly tough and work in conditions under which their US contemporaries could not even survive in let alone thrive. The East Europeans I've met suffer the advice of their US guests with a disciplined stiff upper lip; knowing that they must suffer fools heavily to get access to cash.
I have spent considerable time in Latvia. Many Latvian Americans have returned to gauge business possibilities and "help" Latvia out. Some of them were economists from Georgetown. Their neoliberal program inflicted such chaos by 1994 that they were termed the "Georgetown Gang" and given the boot (the economy improved after they left!). The problem with most of them is they believe whatever is profitable is intrinsically good. I know these people and many of them are fine folks, just a little constrained by a US education and social experience which can't get them beyond a world view that profit is inherently helpful to all. Some of them trade in colored metals, selling off resources for a fraction of their worth. Others are in offshore banking, assisting those that make money of damaging the economy through a haphazard selling off of its infrastructure to do so by getting the money out of the country without paying taxes, thereby hurting the nation twice. Others are more cynical. One is a Latvian American World Bank official I met a few times (I will leave names out), who just cynically laughed off any criticism of the neoliberal monetarist policies being pushed (although the World Bank has changed its tune since the collapse in Russia and I'm sure this fellow will adjust to the new doctrine easily). He prospered as Latvia collapsed through 1995, taking a beautiful well educated Latvian woman as wife, thus returning us to a time when social mobility for women could only be achieved through marrying "up." His fine work of peddling the ideology of global elites won him a promotion to Russia, working for the Yeltsin regime. Untold human tragedies followed in Russia.
The USSR a threat to the US? Dear Brad, you are far too smart to swallow this canard. The US had full nuclear superiority over the Soviets and they flaunted it. The Soviets were forced to catch up and had something like parity in numbers, but rarely in quality, by the mid 1970s and 1980s. The fact that the USSR collapsed and US military spending never dropped afterwards in real dollars beyond say that of the late Nixon years, reveals the obvious. The US military's job was world order (the US order) and assisting the economy through a military Keynesianism (so well displayed by Reagan). The Soviets may have been a threat to their own people during Stalin's rule, but they never had the capacity to hit the US. They were, however, convinced the US would attack them, and had good reason to suspect so.
In sum, Brad please stay in Berkeley and enjoy the world's surplus and please encourage your US business and academic contacts to do the same. They have been a blight on the regions visited leaving destruction in their wake. This is why Boris Kagarlitsky in his September 10th audience with the Banking Subcommittee to the US Congress implored them to leave Russia alone and not send it aid. The aid alone could help, but whatever possible benefit is outweighed many times by the undesired counsel attached ball and chain to it. Again, stay home!
Brad De Long wrote:
>I would love to spend $40 million a year sending 10,000 (or, allowing
for
bureaucratic inefficiency, 5,000) Russian-speaking Americans of Russian
>descent to Russia each year to be useful...
>
>After spending $4 trillion preparing to defend ourselves against the
>Russians over the past fifty years, the least we could do would be to
spend
>ten (or even one) percent of that on programs to make the Russians
>democratic, prosperous, and happy...
But who wants that? "We" spent $4 trillion to destroy and humiliate the USSR; the last 10 years have been an episode of riotous celebration of "our" success.
Doug