THOM HARTMANN'S INDEPENDENT THINKER REVIEW OF THE MONTH FOR BUZZFLASH

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And these are just a few for-examples that Orlov documents of ways the USSR fell into a soft crash, and the USA will fall into a hard crash, more like the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. -- Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartman:

I read two books yesterday. The first was Joseph Tainter�s �The Collapse of Complex Societies,� a dense, profound, and insightful academic/archeological discussion of why civilizations have a stubborn habit of crashing. Following that, I read Dmitry Orlov�s �Reinventing Collapse,� about how the USSR collapsed and how the US is on the verge of doing the same � for many of the same reasons � any day now. What Tainter did for academics and archeology wonks (I confess I�m one), Orlov did for you, me, and Joe The Plumber.

�Reinventing Collapse� is a short 160 pages of story-rich and wonderfully readable book about how and why societies collapse. Orlov�s insights are necessary for all of us, and startling. His conclusions and suggestions seem at first overstated, but as somebody who was in Russia during its collapse, I think if anything they may be conservative.

For example, in the second week of June, 1996, I sat in the living room of a Russian family in Kaliningrad, watching TV. The man on television, a politician by the name of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, was waving his hands about like a demagogue, alternating between pointing at the screen and pounding the table with his fist. The wife of the family, Olga, a German married to a Russian, broke into laughter while her husband blinked, unsure what was so funny.

It was Russia�s first democratic election in its 1000-year history. My Russian being limited to a few words and phrases, I hadn�t been able to follow what Zhirinovsky was saying, so I asked Olga.

�He just said that if we voted for him,� she told me in German, �then he�d send me a turkey and a liter of vodka.�

The TV screen flashed to a couple of news anchors, a man and a woman, who had an earnest conversation about where Zhirinovsky was going to get all those turkeys and all that vodka. They seemed to agree that the latter wouldn�t be as much of a problem as the former.

�This is the first election most Russians, including my husband, have ever seen,� Olga, who had grown up in West Germany, said. �They don�t understand how outrageous it is for a politician to make such a promise.�

The Soviet Union had collapsed five years earlier, in 1991, and just then in 1996 Russia was just beginning to put itself back together. (My diary from that trip is in my book �The Prophet�s Way.�)

As fascinating as it was to me to watch Russia collapse and begin the long, painful climb back up (I helped start a social welfare organization there � info at Salem international.org and add english/en_worldwide/en_russia.htm � that is today doing well and thriving), Dmitry Orlov lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union with a much more keen observer�s eye. He�d grown up in the USSR as a child, left as a refugee, returned during and after the crash as an adult and businessman.

Accidentally, he writes in �Reinventing Collapse,� the former USSR hit a �soft crash� because of things like centralized planning, housing, agriculture, and transportation.

The government built all the housing, so they always built it near public transport lines.

All housing in the USSR was free � a right of citizenship � so nobody paid rent, mortgages, or property taxes; the result was that when the government collapsed and the currency inflated itself to meaninglessness nobody went homeless for lack of the ability to pay rent or property taxes.

The transportation and food systems were government jobs, and controlled systems used by their own workers, so even as the government collapsed the workers continued to show up for work � they wanted their own families and communities to have food and transportation, and hoped some day they�d get a paycheck.

And these are just a few for-examples that Orlov documents of ways the USSR fell into a soft crash, and the USA will fall into a hard crash, more like the Weimar Republic of the 1920s.

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