What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Kno
 

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What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Know

<!-- begin content --> Submitted by Dmitri Davydov on Sun, 2008-06-01 20:49.
Posted in: Statistics And Other Lies
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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I am not an expert or a scholar or an activist. I am more of an eye-witness. I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and I have tried to put my observations into a concise message. I will leave it up to you to decide just how urgent a message it is.

My talk tonight is about the lack of collapse-preparedness here in the United States. I will compare it with the situation in the Soviet Union, prior to its collapse. The rhetorical device I am going to use is the "Collapse Gap" � to go along with the Nuclear Gap, and the Space Gap, and various other superpower gaps that were fashionable during the Cold War.

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Slide [2] The subject of economic collapse is generally a sad one. But I am an optimistic, cheerful sort of person, and I believe that, with a bit of preparation, such events can be taken in stride. As you can probably surmise, I am actually rather keen on observing economic collapses. Perhaps when I am really old, all collapses will start looking the same to me, but I am not at that point yet.

And this next one certainly has me intrigued. From what I've seen and read, it seems that there is a fair chance that the U.S. economy will collapse sometime within the foreseeable future. It also would seem that we won't be particularly well-prepared for it. As things stand, the U.S. economy is poised to perform something like a disappearing act. And so I am eager to put my observations of the Soviet collapse to good use.

Re: What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Kno
 

Excellent set of slides and commentary. I enjoyed reading that.

Re: What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Kno
 

Interesting to see a communist spin on the collapse of the pseudo-capitalist US. He has some good observations, but I don't agree with a number of points he made.

Re: What If US Collapses? Soviet Collapse Lessons Every American Needs To Kno
 

I've read several of his comparisons. The fact that Russians mostly stayed in their same apartments and were not evicted does seem like a big help in the crisis. We are going to have a lot of tent cities, or I fear we may.

Though my take on FDR is that he was installed to get the US through the depression without a communist revolution, and pretty much a dictator, putting people to work on infrastructure projects is one thing he did that could help us through.

If we give up the empire due to bankruptcy, and bring the troops home from everywhere, I think we will have the resources and can do, to put in alternative energy, public transportation, and many other things we need to rebuild. We could get by on our own oil if we rationed while we built alternative power systems.

We would need an analog to victory gardens to produce enough food locally and ship much less. But we could cover huge parts of 'the great american desert' with solar collectors... probably only using government owned land. And that could power public and much smaller private transportation. If city, non freeway speed limits were 15mph people would feel safe bicycling or using golf carts. Oil is, IMO, too valuable to burn, but we would have to burn some as we made the changeover.

The internet could allow some suburbanites to work from home and videoconference for most meetings. Engineers, designers, many jobs are not site specific. A lot of education could be done that way as well. The teacher networked with her class and able to see how they are doing and video conference help here and there the way teachers walk down the desk rows now, stopping to help kids having trouble. But part of school is social, so maybe kids would be physically at school 1 day a week or something. Then fewer buildings could serve more students. Our town still has neighborhood elementary schools. They could handle k-12 if kids were rotating who was at home learning on computer and who was in the building.

But I do believe we can figure out solutions if we just get the crime family tapeworm that kills the host off humanity, stop killing each other in wars, and, in general, grow up..