You need to read his more comprehensive work on the USSR's collapseThanks for summing all Orlov's verbiage up! I could see he had written on the USSR collapse elsewhere, but was responding to what he said about the role of centralized control--not what he'd written elsewhere. Orlov is engaging, but I don't find him a clear enough thinker to want to read much more. But I'm in total agreement that Russia has a social system far more amenable to local community that does the US. However, I've seen community build quickly in US cities when it needs to. My neighborhood pushed well-armed gangs out in the 80s, for example. You just don't use guns to do it, or you lose. Gotta think permaculturally.
I don't think he gets it wrong. We already have close to a millionActually, it's two million. There's a ridiculous surplus of housing in the US.
empty homes, and the subprime mess is just getting started.
Banks are already letting people miss long strings of payments on sub-prime mortgages without foreclosure, since they know getting some eventual mortgage payment is better than millions of empty houses causing further drop in home prices as well as a surge in homelessness. In fact, it's homeowners who are now walking away from their houses into cheaper ones (Thursday's Wall St Journal, page 1), leaving the banks unhappily stuck with houses worth less than what is owed. Banks know that in wholesale foreclosure, they are the big losers.
Then why are they the ones who worked the hardest to stop the recent
bill in Congress to try to alleviate the problem? Not that I think that
bill made any sense -- the gov't can't come in and modify private
contracts, that would cause total chaos and flood the courts with lawsuits.
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