> Quick question for the wonks --
>
> Was the Depression in the 1930s caused by Republican domestic policies
> throughout the 1920s? Or was there a global reason for the crash?
My claim to wonkitude is questionable, but I've always thought of the 1930s as the epicenter of two crashes. The first was the crash and burn of liberal-era capitalism, and the second was the crash and burn of the British Empire. Monopoly capitalism had outgrown the economic and political framework of the liberal state, but the new forms of state-monopoly organization weren't yet in place. Result: carnage and mayhem, until the US took over.
That's why I think it's unlikely the self-evident demise of the US Empire will trigger anything similar. This time around, the global semi-peripheries -- places like Russia and China -- have constructed mighty developmental states, immune to the toxic background radiation of neoliberalism. And the state continues to grow like mad in the new metropoles, everywhere from the Bank of China to the Japanese postal savings bank, to the continent-sized infrastructures of the European Union.
-- DRR