Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

[Glenn Black]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

Is it true arrogance, or are they fearful of admitting the truth, stampeding the sheeple, and making it worse?

Or are they posturing with arrogance to buy time, similar to a talking head on live TV entering mindless chatter and babble while the camera crew and technicians troubleshoot and fix the teleprompter? Anything is better than dead air.

[Spartacus]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

the only way to be really "free" ?

???

http://www.trackerschool.com/

Wrongo, bucko. There are NO PRIVATE PROPERTY RIGHTS enshrined in the Canadian constitution. And although some still live under the delusion that property rights are enshrined in the US constitution, I think we can safely say that recent US Supreme Court decisions regarding eminent domain put paid to that.

If the idea of massive taxpayer funded mass transit and railway infrastructure ever takes off, just watch how often eminent domain is used in the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave"...

[Supercilious]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

My bill on a suburban house was $7500 USD. This is a nice house, but not a mcmansion. 2000SF track house. between all the stuff i have to pay to live ,I still worry about having enough cash. If i find myself unemployed, i will have no health insurance. replacing that will cost me 10K if no one gets seriously ill, then we have to eat, and heat our house and maybe drive. A few years of big inflation and that pile of cash you have may not be so big, being chipped away at 30 - 40k a year from the expense side, and lets say 10% a year on the inflation side. I suppose once your pile of cash is gone, you can drop your health insurance, because you can just show up at the hospital and get your care for free. If I move to a trailer in the sun belt, I can get my property taxes almost to 0, and not have to have a 3K a year home energy bill. If i get rid of my two 10 year old cars, I can save on that too. So if push came to shove, my existence level might be 10K per year. If i can bike to walmart I think I can take home 10K for a full years work. I dont mean to be mean, but dont be neive either.

I thinks this is the best description of the situation:







We are all hamsters...

[petertribo]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

Hello Hamsters:

In some jurisdictions, property tax can be assessed on not only the land, buildings but also what is INSIDE the house. That is the case where I live. Like a $1,000,000 fine for selling tomatoes they do not assess that inside property now but they may in the future. How? The RFID chip. In the future if all manufacturers put this on major items, then they can read your house and get the value.

Their objective is to get all property eventually into their System and get the vig out of it. Get ready for those RFID COP shows on TV. National heroes.

Here's some interesting tax law from ARK:

The State of Arkansas does not have a property tax. However, Arkansas cities and counties do collect taxes on real property, personal property, and the average fair market value of a merchants' stocks and/or manufacturers' inventories. In Arkansas this is the principal source of revenue for funding local public schools.

This is how the total tax is calculated. Add the fair market value of real property, personal property and inventory, then multipy it by 20% (assessment) times the total millage rate. The table below shows the average millage rates in Fayetteville. Individual tax districts will have slight variations.

Looks like ARK will be RFID heaven for the manufacturers of readers and collection systems. Heavy penalties soon to come for destroying RFID chips?

http://fayetteville.com/business_environment/taxes

[rjwjr]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

I thinks this is the best description of the situation:







We are all hamsters...

Help, I can't stop staring at it! Let me off! Let me off!

[c1ue]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

My new garage is now completed, and the roof replacement on my house comes next. So let the stinkers in Washington or Ottawa, in the IMF or wherever, de-value the dollar or the beaver buck. Let them raise interest rates and de-value real estate even more, but I can still live in my house. No-one can take my house from me, no-matter what real estate is worth and no-matter what paper money is worth.

When all of the cash earning zero interest will be out of my brokerage account, all of the happenings around me will become irrelevant and just entertainment..... And let the brokerage firms and banks worry about finding new suckers for their zero interest money market and zero interest savings accounts. ;)

Property taxes and eminent domain aren't the only way.

If there is still a mortgage on the house, another way is to call the loan.

Most people can't repay the lump sum on their outstanding mortgage.

One common bank behavior in the Great Depression was to foreclose only on those properties with equity; said property could then be sold for a profit to help out the bank's balance sheet.

[don]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

One hour audio

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/52976

"The Collapse Gap" with Dmitry Orlov, author of "Reinventing Collapse - The Soviet Example and American Prospects". Dmitry Orlov's repeated travels to Russia throughout the early nineties allowed him to observe the aftermath of the Soviet collapse first-hand. Being both a Russian and an American, Dmitry was able to appreciate both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers. Eventually he came to the conclusion that the United States is going the way of the Soviet Union. His emphasis is on all the things that can still be made to work, and he advocates simply ignoring all that will fall by the wayside.

[dummass]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

Wow, after listening to Dmity Orlov, I feel like an optimist. :eek:

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Ex-IMF Official Echoes Dmitri Orlov: US Now Like Soviet Union, Argentina

One hour audio

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/52976

"The Collapse Gap" with Dmitry Orlov, author of "Reinventing Collapse - The Soviet Example and American Prospects".

Charles Hugh Smith (we met him earlier this week annoying EJ on the thread The kind of BS we have to put up with) has an interesting review of Orlov's book on Amazon. This review reads:

Dmitri Orlov has written an entertaining and thought-provoking comparison of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the post-oil end-game here in the U.S. By his own account, "entertaining and thought-provoking" were his goals for the book, and he has succeeded very admirably. I can recommend the book wholeheartedly, even as I respectfully disagree with some of his conclusions.

1. The collapse of the USSR was a political act; the USA is facing a resource-depletion-financial crisis. Now a financial collapse (K-Wave "winter," or the repudiation of all debts, public and private) certainly could lead to political collapse, but that is by no means set in stone.

The cultural and structural differences between the USSR and the USA are significant, and if Orlov had been an anthropologist his book might have drawn somewhat different distinctions. His primary thesis is that the Soviet Union was actually better prepared to weather collapse than the U.S., but I think he missed this critical difference: Russia and the other constituent states of the former USSR were resource-rich. Once they got their politcal house in order, they had immense resources to aid their financial recovery.

2. The Soviet Union was not a nation of immigrants; the U.S. is and has been since its inception. Even the Native Americans came from somewhere else, albeit a long time ago (though 12,000 years is merely a blink in geological time). Now on the surface immigration is driven by a number of things: hunger, poverty, desire for religious freedom, etc. But fundamentally it is a form of natural selection. Among any group of people, there wil be some who look around at the poverty, corruption, hopelessness and lack of opportunity for non-elite people and decide the best way to change their lives is to leave.

3. Religion plays a unique and powerful role in the U.S. in ways which it did not in the USSR. A quick glance at Russian art suggests the central role of the Church in Russian culture. But if Orlov were African-American, I believe his dismissal of religion might not have been so quick and assured.

Rather than the non-factor Orlov expects, I would reckon religious institutions will play critical roles in organizing people for their own betterment. People didn't come here to ignore their religion, they came here to practice it, and that goes for every religion. It's been said that the black church is the only institution owned lock, stock and barrel by the African-American community, and it will not be a non-factor in that community but a central institution of stability, hope and communal services.

4. Wandering around as a homeless migrant is not a good survival strategy. Orlov suggests at the end of his book that wandering between two or three sources of resources would be a good strategy. My own view is that freeloading is frowned upon in the U.S. and your best bet to is either stay put (yes, even in ghettos and urban neighborhoods) or move to a place where you have some roots (where you grew up is always a good place to start) or where there is some commonality: a church you belong to, an ecosystem you love and will nurture, etc.

5. The U.S. is on par with Sadr City, Iraq in terms of firepower in the hands of citizens. As the most heavily armed society in the developed world, the U.S. can easily go the way of well-armed criminal gangs controlling urban zones or well-armed militia sprouting up to take out the criminals. There is historical precedents for either scenario. A third scenario (common in the 3rd World) is for wealthy enclaves to hire private forces to protect the enclave.

While I can't predict which will play out in various circumstances, we should be aware that the U.S. has millions of military veterans and millions of weapons. The USSR had the vets but not the weapons in private hands. People will eventually choose to support an alternative to anarchy or criminal/mob rule, unless the criminal gang is the only alternative to something worse (i.e. the Sadr City scenario). Or people will pay extra to maintain a top-notch police force and let go of the other city services, performing them communally via volunteer labor.

My point is simply that a heavily armed culture with tens of millions of firearm-trained vets is not going to follow the route of a society without those two elements.

6. Orlov underestimates the power of the Web/Internet. Orlov is extending his experience in a pre-Internet Russia, in which you had to stand outside in the cold in order to hitch a ride. Assuming the Internet backbone will be maintained--and why wouldn't it be placed ahead of every other use except hospitals and the public safety centers?--then virtually everyone will be able to arrange barters of almost unimaginable range via the Web.

Despite these points (which are all debatable, of course), it's a very worthy exercise to read his work and make your own analysis.