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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (130901)	1/29/2001 1:55:51 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571928

Ted, You have got to be kidding? The reason they gave up on Eastern European was all about $$$, not fear. They couldn't make "the mortage payments" each month. Near the end they couldn't afford to pay the troops stationed in Europe. That's just not correct. The growth in the communist block slowed down in the 80s, but there was not really anything out of ordinary that happened. Money doesn't matter internally, only externally, none of the countries (probably with exception of Poland) had any problems servicing their external debt. Internally, things were better than ever before in absolute terms, and only looked somewhat bad relative to prosperous West. To deal with that, they had their propaganda that did all that was possible to keep secret the fact that the West was actually more prosperous than the East, and good percentage of people actually believed it. Anyway, as far as the financial situation is concerned, it's nothing that Stalin would not have been able to handle before breakfast. You may recall early Soviet Union handled the need for cash. They exported all the food harvested in Ukraine to the West for quick cash, leaving millions to die of starvation. Lenin and Stalin had no problem with this course of action, but the modern communist leaders did, which is one of the reasons of collapse of communism, and my original premise. As far as troops, they mostly conscripts, and they don't get paid beyond what can buy you some beers and packs of cigarettes. There was no payment that Russia had to make to any countries where Russian troops were stationed, and I would not be surprised if the occupied countries were even subsidizing Russian troops. I actually lived a little over 5 miles from a Russian military base, and a few times we (as kids and teenagers) started a conversation with the soldiers, generally when the truck with troops stopped by a restaurant, which meant that something happened with their rations, and they needed to buy some necesities (cigarettes). Anyway, I guess the officer would be the one to leave the truck to actually buy stuff, and for a moment these conscripts were be left unsupervised, so they could talk to us. I genuinely felt sorry for those guys - the soldiers. I and my friends were puzzled how it was that these losers were actually occupying us. For them, going to Czechoslovakia was like for me going to USA. These soldiers had actually thrill out of talking to us teenagers, and they tried to find out what it was like on the outside of the base where they were locked in all the time. Reagan didn't have the intelligence to act his way out of paper bag. Sorry about thinking I was having intelligent conversation here. I won't make that mistake again. What makes you think he could devise a fairly complicated test to figure out where the Russians' resolve was? He did. Or someone in the administration did. To coin a Scumbria phrase, Reagan was a moron! One only has to read his rediculous letters to Nancy Reagan to know that. Before calling someone a moron, I would generally try to be sure I was way smarter than the person I call a moron. What makes you and Scumbria think that you have what it takes to shine their shoes, not to mention calling them morons? Joe