New York back to the 70's?

[vinoveri]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

correct, the left dominates public culture, the right economics. have you ever considered that social liberalism and fiscal conservatism might be an accurate reflection of the values of the american public?

Why does the left dominate public culture? Is there a gene responsible for "progressivism"? Could it have something to do with the control of the academies, i.e., the literature, economics, political theory, identify politics, the vacuous and empty philosophy, the Darwinian/Freudian/Marxian worldview -which encompasses way more than economics and goes toward the most fundamental questions - what is man, what is his end, etc, questions to which this errant worldview dismisses as irrelevant. Culture is on the wane because man has lost himself in the apparent chaos of his own modernist world view, and this world view is learned by the masses by being promulgated by the bullhorn of the "educated" classes.
Values of the masses after all are molded and shaped especially in this day. When falsehoods and specious theories are taught and wisdom of the ages is ignored for generations, we do indeed get a population preferring these to what they never knew. And the crap that is taught today is not "liberalism" in any traditional understanding of that word

[Raz]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

correct, the left dominates public culture, the right economics. have you ever considered that social liberalism and fiscal conservatism might be an accurate reflection of the values of the american public?



p.s. i will also note that there has been no response to my post addressing the so-called soviet threat, and thus saying that there was NOT an existential threat to the u.s. in the 1970's: neither from the rag tag "revolutionaries" within, nor from the u.s.s.r. in fact the cold-war division of power into 2 opposing camps, frozen in place by an existential threat [not to their gov'ts, to their EXISTENCE], was far more stable than what we've been living with since.

I'm trying to find the time to reply to your assertions about the Soviets.
I have been VERY busy in the markets this morning and will likely be even busier this afternoon.

I do NOT agree with your assertions and will tell you why, but it will take a little time.
Like you, jk, I don't talk to hear my head rattle and need time to gather my thoughts together with the vast knowledge I've attained
by reading everything I could get my hands on about Russia and the Soviet Union for almost forty years.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

correct, the left dominates public culture, the right economics. have you ever considered that social liberalism and fiscal conservatism might be an accurate reflection of the values of the american public?

I would personally place myself in the category of fiscal(and geopolitical) conservative and social liberal.

And while I think your point is quite valid, wouldn't you agree that it's probably an extreme/magnified(rather than entirely accurate) reflection of the American public?

I'd agree in the "mean" sense, but what about the "mode"?

p.s. i will also note that there has been no response to my post addressing the so-called soviet threat, and thus saying that there was NOT an existential threat to the u.s. in the 1970's: neither from the rag tag "revolutionaries" within, nor from the u.s.s.r. in fact the cold-war division of power into 2 opposing camps, frozen in place by an existential threat [not to their gov'ts, to their EXISTENCE], was far more stable than what we've been living with since.

I actually wrote (and thought I posted) a long response to the existential threat, but it must have timed out on the wifi.

In brief( ):

Are you actually looking at it from a late 1960's, 1970's lens or from the lens of 2015 in retrospect?

There's a substantial difference in my opinion.

But from the lens of 2015 there are still some glaring examples of assertive efforts by the Soviet Union and it's eastern communist allies of convenience to undermine and even destroy US/western networks.

One just has to look at the month of January 1968 to see a highly coordinated effort on the part of the Soviet Union and it's proxy allies.

Blue House Raid that nearly succeeded in assassinating the South Korean President

Pueblo Incident which provided the Soviets with the crypto puzzle pieces, which when combined with the just initiated Walker Spy ring, that provided the Soviets with some considerable information dominance akin to WWII Enigma.

Tet Offensive

-----

From a 1970's lens take all of the above(bar the catastrophic, but unknown Walker spy ring scandal) and add to it:

This continued on in the form of Soviet proxies fighting aggressively around the world, most notably in the 1970's with the fall of South Vietnam, the horrors of ultra radical Cambodia, Communist insurgency in corrupt ally the Philippines, in Africa in the form of massive support for ZIPRA(1 of 3 sides in the Rhodesian Bush War), flip-flopping on the Ogaden War, overwhelming support for the massive Cuban incursion into Southwest Africa(over 250,000 Cubans serving there in direct combat operations over the course of a decade+), culminating with significant Soviet meddling/disruption in Iran, and direct Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979.

And that's on top of the oil crisis and the beginning of the long-slow decline of traditional American manufacturing(the seeds of the future tech boom wouldn't bloom for another decade).

The 1970's, from a 1970's lens….was clearly one of a declining US/Western network in terms of influence/control for a period.

Add to that, Soviet support directly and via proxy for non-kinetic operations to undermine the US

"Polonium poisoning" may be a bit harsh as I don't think an external power has the ability to develop that much influence and control over a country as powerful as the US in a mere couple of decades, maybe the flu or mononucleosis might be a bit more accurate.

The KGB didn't brainwash high profile useful idiots like Jane Fonda and Bert Schneider, nor;all the terrorists, bombers, murderers committing political violence during the period(although some did receive direct, albeit limited, training from Soviet proxies)……most would fall into the "useful idiot" a term most often attributed to Lenin, and leveraged aggressively throughout Soviet foreign policy history.

So while I'd agree it's easy in 2015 to make an assertion that the Soviet Union's collapse was inevitable and they didn't represent an existential threat to the US back in 1970, I strongly believe the reality is far different when you look through the late 1960s/1970's lens.

There's an irony in how some folks believe that the Soviet Union's collapse was easy to predict while concurrently pointing out the resilience of more recent totalitarian states that the US is attempting to undermine. A disconnect exists there.

Even if you could put together a superb doctoral thesis on WHY that's not the reality, what were the perceptions of the day?

Personally, I think if iTulip existed in the 1970's and it focused on a 25-50 year time horizon(as so few people, especially governments, tend to do), the group would come to a similar-ish conclusion(on relative economics and wealth, if not geopolitics….the track record here isn't that flash) on the relative state of the US and Soviet Union.

But geopolitical momentum(which the US lost and the Soviets gained) in the clash between the two major networks in the 1970's is the awkward fart in the room when Monday morning quarterbacking the 1970's I reckon.

[jk]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

the reason "team b" was assembled was that the right wing was unhappy that the cia estimate AT THAT TIME of soviet capability wasn't all that scary. turns out that the official estimate was the correct one. so this is not "monday morning quarterbacking." it's saying that the system worked, but some people didn't want to believe the result.

and yes, there were skirmishes around the edges, but the cold war system was fundamentally stable, especially AFTER the cuban missile crisis.

[Forrest]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

Anyway, it's hardly worth mussing one's hair over considering nothing has changed or will change in how business is done. The owners of the country want it this way so that's the way it's going to be. The rest is up to God.

+ 1

[Forrest]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

correct, the left dominates public culture, the right economics. have you ever considered that social liberalism and fiscal conservatism might be an accurate reflection of the values of the american public?

Probably...but also socially a bit too left, and fiscally not enough so...we actually need slightly more center of center.

p.s. i will also note that there has been no response to my post addressing the so-called soviet threat, and thus saying that there was NOT an existential threat to the u.s. in the 1970's: neither from the rag tag "revolutionaries" within, nor from the u.s.s.r. in fact the cold-war division of power into 2 opposing camps, frozen in place by an existential threat [not to their gov'ts, to their EXISTENCE], was far more stable than what we've been living with since.

Yes...all that stable angst perpetuating the Defense end of the economy, except that we still keep getting into wars elsewhere, rather than defending what we had...and that has not changed.

[lektrode]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

....Yes...all that stable angst perpetuating the Defense end of the economy, except that we still keep getting into wars elsewhere, rather than defending what we had...and that has not changed.

nears eye can tell - the only thing thats changed?

is that the social+welfare+edu+activist industrial-complex has grown to almost the stature of the .mil's complex

and with their near absolute control over most of the op/ed depts of the lamerstream media
(proven in 2008+12)
it wont be long before The US is spending just as much - if not more - on the welfare industrial complex

[Raz]

Re: Soviet Threat

as many did at the time,

i think you greatly overestimate the u.s.s.r in the 1970's. kennedy had run in 1960 criticizing a "missile gap," which in office he discovered did not exist. brezhnev and his cohort's overthrow of the somewhat unpredictable khrushchev in 1964 marked the beginning of a long period of stagnation, economic, social, you name it. the brezhnev cohort had been junior officials who rose rapidly during stalin's rule because virtually everyone more senior to them was executed. molotov, krushchev, malenkov were the most senior people to survive stalin, but khrushchev soon emerged as sole leader. his "secret speech" to the party congress in 1956 denouncing stalin represented an important break with ruling by terror, but khrushchev's erratic behavior produced enough uncertainty for the brezhnev cohort for them to overthrow his rule. notably, khrushchev was not executed but allowed to retire peacefully to his dacha. the killing had ended.

Hindsight is always 20/20, jk. It's very easy to look back at one's life and clearly see mistakes, but the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon didn't know what we now know and they didn't have the luxury of hoping that Soviet intentions had changed. As a matter of fact it was Kennan's appraisal of the Soviet Communist regime that they were absolutely determined to foster and support "national liberation" as far as they could in the late 1940s, and increasingly so as they recovered from their industrial losses of the Great Patriotic War. George Kennan, as a matter of fact, believed that the Soviets would wage war on every level - political, economic and militarily - but only up to the point where they were confronted with forces sufficient to defeat them; they would then back off, but only temporarily, until they believed the preponderance of force was in their favor.

The Korean war was funded and planned by the Soviets who provided arms, munitions, training and even Soviet officers to lead (from the rear) during the initial phase with North Korean forces. Read Alien Wars by Oleg Sarin and Lev Dvoretsky and see just what level of military aggression the Soviets planned and executed for forty years.
Vietnam, however, was different and an example of the arrogant mindset of LBJ and complete lack of imagination and historical background on the Viet Minh who had been fighting France and Japan for almost thirty years!

I'm inserting a hyperlink to Kennan's "Long Telegram" of February 1946 because my file is too large to upload. https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q...g+telegram+pdf Please read pages 13-14 and you will see why the FBI and other law enforcement would look for Soviet involvement or at least instigation in some of the violent acts perpetrated in the United States and Western Europe during the 1970s. Perhaps they found some, perhaps they didn't, but they clearly walked roughshod over the constitutional rights of American citizens and numerous crimes were committed by more than one level of government during the 1960s and 1970s. I never disputed this - only the idea that the Feds and states were itching for any excuse to murder American citizens. I actually fear the present conditions more than those of the 1970s as the structures in place for a police state far exceed those of that time.

the soviet economy began stagnating ever more clearly during brezhnev's tenu

re. with the exception of a few technical areas, the only thing that they could produce that was close to world class was weaponry, with a few niche areas of special competence such as, iirc, metallurgy.

Indeed it did. One good read about the Soviet economy of the late 1960s through the early 1980s is the Age of Delirium by David Satter. His description of the workday in a soviet pipe factory is incredible: by lunchtime about a third of the workers were drunk, yet bonuses were given for meeting production quotas even though about half of the pipe was unusable and worthless. It is one of the best books about the everyday work and life of the Russian people during the late seventies and early eighties.

george kennan in his famous long telegram was ultimately proved right: the soviet union did not need to be defeated,

it would eventually collapse of its own accord if contained and left to deal with the contradictions and inefficiencies of a "planned" economy. (my favorite story: the nail factory with its production set in tonnage produced only railroad spikes. when the next plan specified the number of nails, it produced only brads.)

"Eventually" doesn't mean much had Soviet forces overrun all of Europe outside the British Isles.

sorry for this long ramble by way of background, but

by the 1970's the ussr was in no way, shape or form an existential threat to the u.s. except in the case of a spasm of nuclear war. that is a big exception, except that i think both sides got very scared and very serious post the cuban missile crisis. khrushchev's decision to place soviet nuclear missiles in cuba was a direct response to the soviets' discovery that the u.s. ALREADY had nuclear missiles based on their border, in turkey. those missiles were quietly removed as part of the quid pro quo which ended the cuban crisis. thereafter more formal and more elaborate security measures were put in place, including the famous hotline. (the cuban crisis scare, in the meantime, probably hastened khrushchev's departure from power one year later.)

You are projecting our beliefs about an "unwinnable war" onto the Soviets who did NOT share that view concerning a war in Central Europe. Perhaps they did if it involved a full-scale thermonuclear exchange between our two countries, but otherwise they did not. The Soviets were certainly angered by the placement of IRBMs in Turkey, but so what? We based far more theater nukes in Germany and Italy, not all of them low-yield tacticals, and the Soviet Union was within range of most of them (certainly bombers carrying SRAMs with yields in the Megaton range) as well as aircraft of the Sixth Fleet carrying nuclear bombs targeting bases in the southern USSR.
Khrushchev was of course giving us a taste of our own medicine (he had only a few nuclear armed ICBMs in 1962) so he could hit us with the IRBMs he had in substantial numbers, but the Bay of Pigs invasion crafted by the Dulles boys likely had as much or more to do with it.

the "team b" assessment of soviet strength in the late 1970's stirred up a lot of political movement on the right, but it is important to remember that team b was wrong. the u.s.s.r. was a potemkin village writ large.

Well, if I overestimated the Soviet threat in the late 1970s I had a lot of company. Please peruse the attached documents, especially "The Cold War Offset Strategy" and the others from the CBO, NIE, and the OTA during the 1970s. They show the Warsaw Pact as having a HUGE overbalance of conventional and nuclear forces immediately available with no need of reinforcement - meaning that telltale signs of preparation for an invasion of Western Europe might not present themselves before it would be launched. This was a period of great danger for NATO and was a quantum leap not only in Soviet ground forces, but a change in Soviet tactics as well. Richard Pipes, being Polish, had an inborn antipathy to all things Russian, but some of the criticism leveled against him has been shown to be wrong once we had access to the Soviet archives.

It wasn't only the "right" that was alarmed: so was Harold Brown, probably one of the very best if not the best Secretary of Defense the United States ever had. Dr. Brown correctly allocated funds and priorities away from manned bombers like the B-1 and invested in superior armor (M-1 Abrams), anti-tank weaponry (Apache, more Warthogs, Hellfire missiles, etc.) stealth aircraft, cruise missiles and an accelerated Trident D-4 procurement. Reagan was wrong to bring back the B-1 Lancer and the MX was more show than practical because the Soviet ICBMs were liquid fueled and we would have almost certainly detected what would have been necessary preparation for an all-out attack on North America. But the threat to Europe was very real. And those charged with the defense of the United States and our allies had to concentrate first upon Soviet capabilities, not Soviet intentions.

p.s. re

the "massive superiority" of soviet forces in central and eastern europe, those forces served much more effectively as control over the satellite states, than as a threat to western europe. there was no way the soviets would have made it through the fulda gap. the essence of that fact lay in the u.s. refusal to renounce first use of nuclear weapons. it was clear that if western conventional forces were inadequate, tactical nukes were on order. since it was clear, pace herman kahn, that this would escalate to global destruction, it wasn't going to happen. both sides got a glimpse into the abyss in 1963 and, as samuel johnson said, there's nothing that concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging in the morning.

The Soviets managed the satellite states just fine for more than twenty years with large numbers of tanks and motorized infantry and only a slight advantage in numbers of tactical aircraft specifically arrayed against NATO. But the situation had RADICALLY changed after 1975. Massive increases in soviet infantry anti-tank weapons, strike aircraft and conversion of motorized infantry to mechanized infantry had nothing whatsoever to do with holding down the Czechs and Poles.
The Soviets could have broken through the Fulda Gap by the late 70s - early 80s - unless we were prepared to immediately go nuclear - and we faced more problems than that, like the North German Plain.
Had we not addressed that military situation, and considering the political upheaval in Germany, Belgium and Italy, at a minimum the "Finlandization" of Western Europe would have almost certainly taken place.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

the reason "team b" was assembled was that the right wing was unhappy that the cia estimate AT THAT TIME of soviet capability wasn't all that scary. turns out that the official estimate was the correct one. so this is not "monday morning quarterbacking." it's saying that the system worked, but some people didn't want to believe the result.

and yes, there were skirmishes around the edges, but the cold war system was fundamentally stable, especially AFTER the cuban missile crisis.

By "Cold War system" are you also including the considerable resources expended by both sides in the cold war to directly undermine the opposing system?

I'm not talking about the hundreds of thousands of advisors and direct combat personnel deployed by each respective system to gain influence and control in strategic points in the developing world, I'm talking about the considerable resources expended to directly undermine each other's respective system.

In retrospect, it can be discounted. At the time, not so much.

While the considerable and direct effort made by the US led western network can try and take a lot of credit for the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union as a result of covert support for things like Poland's Solidarity it's debatable how much credit is due. What's not debatable is the effort and intent.

That goes both ways.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

nears eye can tell - the only thing thats changed?

is that the social+welfare+edu+activist industrial-complex has grown to almost the stature of the .mil's complex

and with their near absolute control over most of the op/ed depts of the lamerstream media
(proven in 2008+12)
it wont be long before The US is spending just as much - if not more - on the welfare industrial complex

I've never really looked at it that way.

My personal feeling is that the old term "military industrial complex" is facing obsolescence as I think it fails to adequately describe what it has morphed into.

Something like "oligarch keretsu"(for the aforementioned mil-ind complex) and "poverty keretsu" but with a bit of Saachi & Saachi kick. Keretsu is a bit too Japanese fearing late 80's early 90's.

When I think of the word "complex" I think of Baader Meinhoff Complex. A pretty decent(and recent) film made about Baader Meinhoff and Red Army Faction.

[jk]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

don't collapse decades in describing the evolution of the cold war. the theater intermediate range missiles [ss20 and pershing] were much later [2 decades if i'm not mistaken] developments than the jupiters in turkey which inflamed khrushchev to the decision to place missiles in cuba.

and again, "team A" - that branch of the gov't tasked with evaluating the threat AT THAT TIME, were right AT THAT TIME! some people didn't like that assessment, though, for a variety of reasons both political and economic. there is no hindsight involved in saying that the official assessments were that the ussr was not an existential threat to the u.s. yes, there were proxy wars fought along the periphery, but the never a central, existential threat.

and the european theater was clearly a stalemate.


from the wikipedia article on the fulda gap:

The concept of a major tank battle along the Fulda Gap was a predominant element of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) war planning during the Cold War, and weapons such as nuclear tube and missile artillery, the nuclear recoilless gun/tactical launcher Davy Crockett, Special Atomic Demolition Munitions, theAH-64 Apache attack helicopter, and A-10 ground attack aircraft were developed with such an eventuality in mind.


note the multiple mentions of tactical nukes. i won't repeat the argument i made above about the significance of that. i'm not saying that there was no reason for the u.s. military build-up; that shadow-boxing was the central feature of the cold-war.

so i'd say there was no existential threat to the u.s., and i'd say the u.s. government knew that at the time.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

don't collapse decades in describing the evolution of the cold war.

weapons such as nuclear tube and missile artillery, the nuclear recoilless gun/tactical launcher Davy Crockett, Special Atomic Demolition Munitions,

decades between above and below here too ;)

as well as the far bigger gap of nuclear versus conventional deterrent

theAH-64 Apache attack helicopter, and A-10 ground attack aircraft



so i'd say there was no existential threat to the u.s., and i'd say the u.s. government knew that at the time.

Looks like a situation of "agree to disagree".

Where I will concede is that the disruptive threats to the state of the late 60's/70s in the US would likely have not been perceived as serious as those facing Western Europe(which stretched WELL into the 80's).

Maybe it's a question of relative political participation/action between the US and Western Europe that seems to exist to this day.

Coups on the periphery of Western Europe(Portugal and Turkey), Aldo Moro kidnapped and executed, Olof Palme assassinated, and broader/deeper clustered attacks of political violence.

The velocity and magnification of instantaneous internet news today makes one wonder if what happened in the late 60's/70's in the US and 70's/80's in Western Europe repeated today, it would be FAR more exciting than the current level of "excitement" we've experienced in the last decade plus.

Hopefully events in France don't represent a data point in a return to another period of political(as well as ideological) violence, but I reckon that's what we may be seeing.

Not in an existential sense from a western short attention perspective, but maybe more along the lines of very long term financial and ideological "terraforming".

[jk]

Re: New York back to the 70's?

Looks like a situation of "agree to disagree".

Coups on the periphery of Western Europe(Portugal and Turkey), Aldo Moro kidnapped and executed, Olof Palme assassinated, and broader/deeper clustered attacks of political violence.
.

thos coups were right wing and military. hardly relevant to the question of "an existential threat" to the u.s. and yes, there was banditry and terror by left-spouting groups in europe, by the political system and governance was never in doubt. a policing problem, not an "existential" problem, for democratically elected governments.