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Post by radovic on Oct 10, 2008 19:27:56 GMT -5
ticalosul i was little kid when communism fall so don't really have personal memories but i hear the opposite from older ppl. They often mention "kapun belüli munkanélküliség" "unemployment inside the gates". Due to the commie policy of full employment the commies created jobs for everybody (and not working was a crime!) but in practice this meant they employed 2 or 3 men for the job where 1 would be enough and it was very difficult, almost imossible to be fired. Of course this was cool, who wouldn't like it, but not too profitable. This encouraged lazyness, no doubt. And comrade Stalin sent ppl to the Gulag without reason too, including many faithfull communists and their families... Yugoslavia it was the opposite. After economic reforms in the eay 60s, Yugoslavia had the highest unemployment rate in all of Europe -- constantly at 15%.
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yeni
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Post by yeni on Oct 10, 2008 19:40:50 GMT -5
Wow i didn’t know this. You were always a heretic commie country ;D and what was the solution? I know you could travel more easily (here there were 2 passports, one red passoprt for commie countries and a blue passport for capitalist countries the later was much more difficult to obtain and i think u couldn't work with it) all the 15 % went to work abroad, or was there unemployment relief?
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Post by radovic on Oct 10, 2008 19:48:47 GMT -5
Wow i didn’t know this. You were always a heretic commie country ;D and what was the solution? I know you could travel more easily (here there were 2 passports, one red passoprt for commie countries and a blue passport for capitalist countries the later was much more difficult to obtain and i think u couldn't work with it) all the 15 % went to work abroad, or was there unemployment relief? In the 1960s the borders were also opened to work in the west. The 15% unemployment does not include people who went abroad. If we count the people who went to work in Iraq, Libya and the west the unemployment comes closer to 30%.
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Post by Dragos Voda on Oct 10, 2008 22:11:23 GMT -5
To be fair, the majority of people who work (in Capitalist countries) do so to feed their families and not for individual gain. I don't know, that's not what I'm seeing. Maybe you think differently because you live in Serbia. I live in Canada. I know a girl who married a Serb and moved to Serbia and she said the sense of community they have is much stronger than in Canada. Everybody knows each other and helps each other out.
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Post by Novus Dis on Oct 10, 2008 22:34:34 GMT -5
I don't know, that's not what I'm seeing. Maybe you think differently because you live in Serbia. I live in Canada. I know a girl who married a Serb and moved to Serbia and she said the sense of community they have is much stronger than in Canada. Everybody knows each other and helps each other out. I live in Australia and this has nothing to do with societal relations. Fact is that the majority of the population are lower class workers and that the majority of families are made up of lower class citizens. This is true in any country.
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Post by radovic on Oct 11, 2008 22:01:48 GMT -5
To be fair, the majority of people who work (in Capitalist countries) do so to feed their families and not for individual gain. I don't know, that's not what I'm seeing. Maybe you think differently because you live in Serbia. I live in Canada. I know a girl who married a Serb and moved to Serbia and she said the sense of community they have is much stronger than in Canada. Everybody knows each other and helps each other out. This is dependant on where you live in Canada. To me it seems ethnic communities have a sense of community from my experiences with Serbs, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese, Asians and Indians (by Indians I refer to people from the Indian subcontinent) -- they have a sense of community. It also depends where you live also, the eastern coast of Canada and the provicne of Quebec especially seem to have a sense of community (the last one especially since the majoirty view themnselves as an island of French in an Anglo-Saxon sea known as North America). It also seems that the further west you go in Canada there is less community among people. The lack of community in Canada could be due to several reasons: - The bulk of the population is of northern European extraction. Northern Europeans aren't known for community and they are geared towards individualism. - Canada is a vast underpopulated land and the temperatures is cold. To me it seems quite depressing. In Canada it is possible to drive a car for three hours cross country without passing a single village, town or settlement.
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Post by Novus Dis on Jan 24, 2009 2:37:27 GMT -5
Notice how Commie governments (in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc) are forced to allow the black market to flourish in order to "fill in the gaps" (i.e. stop mass starvation). Now can we please stop discussing this or should we discuss the practicality of reinstituting slavery as well?
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Bozur
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Post by Bozur on Jan 24, 2009 4:40:51 GMT -5
Trend (Especially now with market meltdowns on the global scale) appears to be towards nationalizations (and once banks are nationalized then system will surely turn socialist in the future) not opposite. Latin America is increasingly falling under socialist sphere right under the US nose (Bolivia, Equator, Venezuela are some examples). Europe is social democratic (thus closer to socialist) as is Japan, Canada and Australia. In fact only true bastion of Capitalism remains US but with Democrats now firmly in control who knows for how long. Sweden’s Fix for Banks: Nationalize Them
nytimes.com — The Swedes have a simple message to the Americans: Bite the bullet and nationalize. With Sweden’s banks effectively bankrupt in the early 1990s, a center-right government pulled off a rapid recovery that led to taxpayers making money in the long run. More… (Business & Finance)
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By CARTER DOUGHERTY Published: January 22, 2009
The Swedes have a simple message to the Americans: Bite the bullet and nationalize.
Officials in Washington are trying to figure out how to shore up American banks that once ruled the financial world but now seem to weaken by the day, despite receiving hundreds of billions of dollars in government aid.
With Sweden’s banks effectively bankrupt in the early 1990s, a center-right government pulled off a rapid recovery that led to taxpayers making money in the long run.
Former government officials in Sweden, many of whom come from the market-oriented end of the political spectrum, say the only way to solve the crisis in the United States is for the government to be prepared to temporarily take full ownership of the banks.
Sweden placed its banks with troubled assets into a so-called bad bank, where they could be held and then sold over time when market and economic conditions improved. In the meantime, it used taxpayer money to provide enough capital to allow banks to resume normal lending.
In the process, Sweden wiped out existing shareholders.
By contrast, the United States government, so far, has bailed out banks without receiving large equity stakes in return, said Bo Lundgren, Sweden’s minister of fiscal and financial affairs during the Swedish bank takeover.
“For me, that is a problem,” said Mr. Lundgren, who called himself more of a free marketer than some Republicans. “If you go in with capital, you should have full voting rights.”
To be sure, the United States has a much larger economy than Sweden’s, with a vast and international banking system. The toxic assets Sweden took from its banks improved when the economy improved, but Sweden was not confronted with a global recession.
Still, many analysts believe that Stockholm has lessons for Washington.
In effect, the Swedish state took on all the assets that were worthless or impossible to value at the time, and then managed them or sold them with the aim of getting as good a deal as possible for the taxpayer.
“We hired real estate people,” said Lars H. Thunell, the former chief executive of Securum, the institution that became Sweden’s repository of all the underwater assets. “We hired industrial M.& A. people. We needed to manage real assets.”
The United States has become embroiled in a debate about creating its own bad bank after months of decisions to recapitalize American banks without taking control of them.
For all the billions of dollars committed to the banks by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, American taxpayers have, in effect, used mostly loans to turn themselves into emergency creditors of the financial system.
For their part, bank shareholders have taken big hits as the stocks plummeted. But the government has largely avoided acquiring equity and diluting the value held by existing shareholders.
Former Swedish officials said that was a mistake, for political reasons if nothing else, because owners of bank stocks did so well in the boom years early in the decade.
Fears of bank nationalization are diverse — skeptics worry that nationalization would cost too much, the government would not run banks effectively or nationalization would be too complicated. Mr. Lundgren, the former minister of financial affairs, said the costs of nationalization have to be measured against the perils a hobbled banking system creates for an economy.
Moreover, he said the mere threat of nationalization nudged some Swedish bankers to find creative solutions to their problems in the 1990s.
SEB, the bank controlled by the Wallenbergs, the first family of Swedish business, engineered a private recapitalization to plug the hole in its balance sheet. Distressed assets were then placed in a bad bank of its own, freeing management to run the sound parts of the business.
Nordbanken, a Swedish bank that had expanded in the go-go years of the late 1980s, fell entirely under the control of the government because its losses were so great. It is now Nordea, a banking giant in the Baltic Sea region, and still partly government-owned.
Securum was capitalized with 24 billion kronor ($2.88 billion), a sum equal to the country’s military budget at the time. (The total United States military budget is less than the $700 billion allocated to TARP.)
A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland concluded that Securum eventually returned about 58 percent of that upfront cost to the Swedish treasury, though in depreciated krona.
That does not mean Sweden has escaped the current banking turmoil unscathed. As credit markets froze last fall, it created a financial stabilization package intended to ensure new lending from banks. Only Swedbank initially signed up for the plan. Other banks have moved to raise capital in the market.
To make Securum work in the 1990s, the Swedish state had to become a specialist in such diverse industries as chemicals, biotechnology, office supplies, aerospace industry services and, as would certainly be the case in the United States, real estate.
Chunks of real estate from Stockholm to London to Atlanta had been collateral for loans and occupied 70 percent of the portfolio of Securum.
“As a result of the bubble, a lot of Swedish real estate people thought they were the best in the world,” recalled Mr. Thunell, who now heads the International Finance Corporation, a part of the World Bank.
Securum owned the Australian Embassy building in Myanmar, as well as a guitar that was said to have belonged to John Lennon and a company that employed military advisers in Yemen.
Since the whole idea was to eventually put Securum out of business, managing it required a deft touch that rewarded financial success with incentives for employees but also stressed their work’s nature as a public trust.
“I think people felt a tremendous responsibility for the taxpayer,” Mr. Thunell said. “But it was extremely stimulating from an intellectual and business standpoint because you were doing completely new things.”
Securum hemorrhaged money in its first year in business, which was 1993, but recovered quickly, as savvy deal-making combined with a swift pickup in the Swedish economy created markets for what once seemed so worthless. Early on, Securum sold a chemical company it controlled, Nobel Industries, to Akzo of the Netherlands, to form the largest paint producer in the world. With 18.2 percent of the combined company, Securum later reaped a hefty profit when it sold out.
Property proved less nettlesome than feared as the Swedish economy recovered. Pandox, a Swedish hotel company, was privatized and finds itself today trolling for distressed assets in North America.
There is no guarantee the Obama administration will be so fortunate, with a global economy facing its most severe downturn in decades.
If there is any criticism of how Sweden handled the bad bank, it is that it might have managed an even better return if Securum had sat on its assets longer.
Swedish law envisioned a 15-year life span for Securum when it was created in 1993. It closed four years later. www.nytimes.com/
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highduke
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Post by highduke on Jan 24, 2009 11:05:49 GMT -5
i have read 50 books by marx, lenin, stalin, mao, trotsky, kardelj, che, khrushchev & a dozen minor marxists, so nobody can speak with this kind of authority: a planned economy inevitably leads to shortages & the leaders always enjoy a higher standard of living, while parroting 'equality' which demoralizes society as a whole. We need socialism in natural resources, fascism in local & municipal gov't & democracy at the federal level. Like in Russia.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Jan 24, 2009 12:10:50 GMT -5
Aside from nationalism and other minor differences are there any major difference between Socialism, Fascism and Nazism or are they all really branches of wider forms of Socialism (as not all socialist roads have to lead to communism)?
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highduke
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Post by highduke on Jan 24, 2009 12:51:11 GMT -5
Nazism & fascism are german & italian versions of governments that put national culture & identity ahead of commerce & ideology as was the case in pre-industrialized feudal societies, unlike democracy & communism. I use terms like fascism, communism & democracy in their 20th cent. context.
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Post by Alb_Korcar on Jan 24, 2009 15:22:52 GMT -5
I think Socialism has the potential to wrok...but that doesent mean that lazy bums should get an easy way out...and i dont think capitalism or classes should be completely abolished...just similar to what they have in Scandanavia
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highduke
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Post by highduke on Jan 24, 2009 16:58:53 GMT -5
Socialism, in its 21st cent. meaning & applied to Sweden specificaly & W. Europe & Canada in general, means lib. democratic capitalism co-existing with a welfare state, it inevitably encourages parasitism if it exists in all levels of gov't, nobody can name a single such state where immigrants, lowlifes & criminals doNt abuse social programs, where taxation, drug abuse & divorce are historicaly unparaleled: a failed cultureless society of failed cultureless people who dont breed
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Post by lvl100 on Jan 25, 2009 1:43:25 GMT -5
free markets for the greedy westies socialism for the more chilled and cool and spiritual easties! Yea sure , those spiritual easties were paying fortunes for buying from the black market , imperialist "blue jeans" or rock songs records before `89 Stalin sent people to Gulag for being lazy Stalin send also people for nothing or just for a few words in gulags. Its irrelevant if there were some lazy people too. i was little kid when communism fall so don't really have personal memories but i hear the opposite from older ppl. They often mention "kapun belüli munkanélküliség" "unemployment inside the gates". That`s true. And this was one of the socialist countries gone bankrupt. The productivity was absolutely terrible. Probablly the funniest example of artificial employment can be found in North Korea. Even in Pyongyang , the capital, they have almost no cars . But every intersection has a policeman ( actually women) to regulate the traffic Aside from nationalism and other minor differences are there any major difference between Socialism, Fascism and Nazism or are they all really branches of wider forms of Socialism (as not all socialist roads have to lead to communism)? Fascism is more like state-capitalism and it has nothing to do with socialism. Nationalist-socialist (aka nazism) its a dichotomy , and fascists are seen as the greatest evil by the Left
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Jan 25, 2009 11:13:24 GMT -5
Wasn't the very existence of Capitalism cause and still is cause for creation of Socialism so therefore would it not be logical to assume that as long as capitalism exists that once it would face unfavorable conditions that socialism will resurrect itself?
Perhaps Scandinavian model (half way between the two although closer to socialism) is the only one that can ensure that neither extreme appears (On one side raw exploitative capitalism and on the other side rigid state run economy) .
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highduke
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Post by highduke on Jan 25, 2009 12:21:25 GMT -5
Its not just the management of the economy that makes both systems odious but the effect that industrialized economy has on individuals who live in it, specificaly in cities, where most of the population resides. less industrialization, less cities, more villages & small towns, more of a farming-based economy & a clan & family oriented culture led by an aristocracy is the better way.
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highduke
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Post by highduke on Jan 25, 2009 12:22:52 GMT -5
PS your theory of capitalism turning into communism is becoming reality in the US
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Post by lvl100 on Jan 26, 2009 4:18:17 GMT -5
Wasn't the very existence of Capitalism cause and still is cause for creation of Socialism so therefore would it not be logical to assume that as long as capitalism exists that once it would face unfavorable conditions that socialism will resurrect itself? Thats exactly what Marx predicted . Socialism is the next step in human`s revolution ( feudalism -> capitalism -> socialism) But the idea failed mainly becouse of 2 reasons 1) the capitalism does not run on a very rigid setup as socialism does. Capitalism is extremely adaptable and versatile Even social-democracies are just inventions of capitalism, and they have nothing to do with real socialism 2) socialism is internationalist ( that why I said national-socialism its a dichotomy) In marxirst theory , in order that socialism and communism to succede they need to be embraced by the whole population of the Earth. Which on one hand makes sense, because you cant be a pure socialist society and made all your trading with capitalists . But on the other hand its kinda weird to expect the time when all the Earth will embrace the same paradigm. PS your theory of capitalism turning into communism is becoming reality in the US Its not communism socialism, its state-capitalism
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Post by Arthur Kane on Jan 27, 2009 15:33:16 GMT -5
Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism were originally presented as economic systems.
Capitalism : Private ( either individual or voluntary group) ownership of capital.
Socialism: State ownership of capital
Communism : No ownership of capital ( assumes post scarcity)
Most countries today have a 'mixed economy.' Technically they are socialist with aspects of pseudo-capitalism. The state, through taxation, ultimately owns all property but allows people to 'own' private property so long as they pay tribute ( taxes) to the state. A true capitalist society would be anarchistic.
Fascism is a type of socialism ( AAdmin was correct) which uses collective ideas such as race, nation, and state to extract loyalty from the population instead of Marxian socialism which relies more on collective concepts such as class. In fascism, private ownership is allowed so long as it does not oppose , and ultimately works for the benefit of , the state's agenda.
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Post by Emperor AAdmin on Jan 27, 2009 16:51:43 GMT -5
Fascism is a type of socialism ( AAdmin was correct) which uses collective ideas such as race, nation, and state to extract loyalty from the population instead of Marxian socialism which relies more on collective concepts such as class. In fascism, private ownership is allowed so long as it does not oppose , and ultimately works for the benefit of , the state's agenda. It does seem to be exacly that way while Nazism iz clearly a form of it (Hell, even the very name says it all -- National Socialism). It appears that socialism has been mutating over the past 100 years into many forms and probably more will come (each one tried to take over the world). there is even a movement call National Bolshevism lol en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bolshevik_Party
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