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12-16-05,10:34am
Wages, pensions, public health, education are all
devastated
George Bush preached "democracy" to China last month, just
as his father and Ronald Reagan preached "democracy" to the
Soviet Union in the 1980s. By democracy, Bush and Reagan
mean capitalist democracy, where everyone is formally
equal, while the class of exploiters enforces its narrow
interests. Workers' democracy involves informed
participation. It is open and honest about class interests
and it represents the interests of the overwhelming
majority.
Not surprisingly, Bush was silent about the disastrous
economic and social impact of capitalist restoration in the
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Less than 2 percent lived
in poverty in the Soviet Union. But within five years of
counter-revolution, one-half to two-thirds had fallen below
the poverty line!
Inflation ran so high that wages, pensions and savings were
effectively cut 90 percent in five years, and 30 percent
more in the next five. Resources devoted to education,
science and public health have dropped as much as 90
percent. These and similar facts can be found in economic
journals and technical publications of imperialist think
tanks, but are not intended for mass consumption.
Investment for production quickly fell more than 80 percent
in the Russian Federation. In the Ukraine, the fall was
over 84 percent. "Factories' machinery on average is 16
years old in the Russian Federation," the Economist
reported in 2001, "roughly three times the figure in the
West." Productive investment today is mainly devoted to oil
and gas. The revenues are used for the enrichment of a tiny
few and to service debts to Wall Street, not to meet the
needs of the masses.
While some claim that conditions have stabilized or turned
around, the World Bank itself has refuted this: growth is
narrow and traceable to oil and gas, which now claim a
quarter of the Russian Federation's GDP. Unemployment, that
deadly curse of capitalism, has exploded. Tens of millions
have been left to fend for themselves. A financial
oligarchy and endemic corruption have taken hold.
The code of silence extends to daily life. A rare insight
is found in "Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global
Public Health," a book by Laurie Garrett. Despite her own
anticommunism, Garrett's picture of life before and after
counter-revolution is devastating to capitalism.
Garrett reports that by 1995, average caloric consumption
of mothers and children had fallen 30 percent in Georgia,
21 percent in the Russian Federation, and 23 percent in the
Ukraine. "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the
World Health Organization," she writes, "considered the
shocking deficiencies in micronutrients, such as iodine,
potassium, calcium and iron to be so severe in much of the
former USSR that the agencies were blaming it for declining
IQs, anemia, stunted growth and other developmental
deficiencies seen on a mass scale in the region. When
these regions were all part of the USSR and Soviet bloc,
such things as iodine and iron supplements were universally
available. ... After 1991, however, impoverished Georgia
struggled to find cash reserves to purchase iodized salt."
"Russian children bore the brunt of it all," Garrett
continues, "turning into a massive, orphaned subpopulation
that lived by its wits on the streets of the snowy nation.
The Russian Association of Child Psychiatrists estimated in
November 1998 that the number of abandoned and orphaned
children had suddenly doubled, to two million children
[from the previous year, and] up from essentially zero in
1990. And the annual suicide rate among these cast-off
youngsters was an astonishing 10 percent."
It was predictable that capitalist restoration would turn
the former Soviet Union into another Wall Street garbage
dump and cesspool of unemployment and misery. Why? Because
world capitalism's problems with "overproduction" (economic
imbalances) were already so severe in the 1980s. These
problems have since grown. Global unemployment, a social
indicator of "overproduction," has exploded since the fall
of the Berlin Wall; the number of "unemployed and
underemployed" worldwide has doubled, and now exceeds 1
billion.
Spending on education in the former Soviet Union collapsed after capitalist restoration. How can you have democracy without literacy? How can you have democracy without full and prompt information? These are questions that Geo...(http://www.pww.org/)
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