Post-Communist USA

[Edi]

There is an interesting Salon article that explores the similarities between present-day US and what happened in the post-communist East European countries when everything went up for grabs. I had never though of this from that angle, but now that I have, the comparison is striking, apt and not really surprising.

Excerpt:

On the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall's fall I think back to the electrified atmosphere on the streets of Berlin. I was there, watching throngs of East Germans swarm through border crossings. A Fulbright scholar and social anthropologist based in Warsaw in November 1989, I drove with a friend through gas-rationed Poland and East Germany to bear witness. Back then many of the excited East Germans I interviewed -- even some border guards -- looked to the United States as a beacon of democracy.

Flash forward 20 years and many of the hopes of those who were present at the breaching of the Wall have not been realized. In much of the former Soviet bloc the intervening decades have been distinguished not only by young democracies, but also by corruption and shady insider dealing. But for Americans what may be more disheartening is that the roles of East and West have been, to some extent, reversed. Ironically, instead of the ex-Eastern Bloc looking to the U.S. as a model, the U.S. seems to be modeling its behavior on post-communist Eastern Europe. And nothing less than America's public interest is at stake.

The way that government and business now interlock in the U.S., notably in the wake of Wall Street's meltdown, is beginning to resemble the tangle of self-interested government-business "clans" and other such informal networks that emerged during the East's transition to a market economy in the 1990s. I have come to this conclusion after spending the better part of three decades studying communist and post-communist societies -- observing first how people circumvented the communist system, and when it was coming undone, how players positioned themselves to wield power and influence and thereby helped create the emerging order. This century, as I've turned much of my energy homeward, my prior experience has -- to my surprise -- proved ideal preparation for looking into similar issues in the United States.

It goes on in quite some detail on the specifics and I recommend reading the whole thing.

[aerius]

This topic has actually come up a few times in conversations with my friends, several of us have noted that the US is a lot like one of those corrupt emerging countries in Asia or the Eastern Europe in how The Powers That Be behind the scenes have completely bought out the government. Those countries have oligarchs of various sorts who use the government to rape the country, the US has the Goldman-Sachs mafia which does pretty much the same thing, and they have the co-operation of all the media companies as well. The main financial & business channel in the US (CNBC) is owned by GE, which is now more of a financial company than a manufacturer, and which gets free bailouts from the government via TARP and other government programs. Nope, no conflict of interest there, we can trust CNBC to report the truth.

The laws just don't matter in the US anymore if you're a big player. The SEC will assrape someone for doing a $100 insider trade, but if Bank of America wants to do a completely illegal merger with Merril (they violated shitloads of shareholder disclosure rules) it's all good. Any of the big banks can get exemptions from capital requirements, reserve requirements, and limits on the percentage of America's deposits they can hold. My wife's noted that if you listed all the shit that's happened in the US in the last couple years but left out the name of the country, most people would think you're talking about some Banana Republic or 3rd world shithole.