Posted on 02/14/2014 8:40:52 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
Coming soon to USA!
Bump.
This probably is just a meat store or something, I think bread and produce were sold at different stores in Russia in those days. They literally had to stand in line at different stores all day to get food, if there was food to sell.
Like Venezuela today, their economic laws made it impossible to fulfil the wants and sometimes needs of the people.
Isn't that more fair than the outcomes produced by the US system and it's flawed Constitution? I mean, didn't Barry say so in 2001?
But it will be worth it, comrade. We will have no more income inequality, and with affordable health care we will each have the right to see the doctor every five years.
That is what Obama wants for America equality, while he has Hip Hop Wednesday Nights. Hope they get the gout.
Yes, indeed, yell it from the mountain tops...thank you President Reagan and Lady Thatcher.
We had lots of empty shelves and spaces in the supermarkets after Nixon’s price controls, but of course it was never this bad.
Still I can recall some of the shelves being completely empty in certain sections.
Price controls result in shortages. That’s an economic reality. Doesn’t matter where you are.
I remember when the boat people first came to the US, soon followed by the Ukraine Christians, and how much fun they had just staring at all the choices of bottled water thet faced them at the local grocery store. Freedom of choice just never seemed to be something they were used to. Our country is now so screwed.
Actually, Moscow had better grocery stores, buses, subways, roads, more cars, better everything than the hinterland. It was worse in Gorky or Leningrad. But our capital city will never become a parasitic growth engorging itself on tax money while the rest of the country decays.
I was in Moscow for a few days back in the late 70s.
There was the meat store (hanging on hooks behind the butcher’s counter), the fish store (laying on trays of ice), the cabbage/beets/potato store, and the bread/tea store.
That’s it.
Oh, there was a specialty store for the ultra-rich (or tourists like me).
On a 4-foot tall Greek-style pillar was a SINGLE CAN OF TOMATO JUICE.
My English uncle was a Marxist labor union leader in the UK. In the 1970s, he sent my cousins to a Polish Young Pioneers camp for the summer.
My Polish father, who left Poland after the war, would never enter a room with him. I never saw my father speak to him.
Looking back, I think he was afraid he might kill him.
But here is a Russian supermarket today
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzmZxiIv8mA
Looks like Walmart. Once you realize he is quoting prices for kilos and liters, it is similar to here, except their produce is cheaper. Under $4/gallon milk; under $5 pound of cheese, under .20/pound of onions (IIRC), etc.
There is something like WIC, too: basic foods at very low prices for the low income.
There are different brands, so there is choice. There is price promotion and sales.
It is empty, but the presenter explains this is early Monday morning and most shopping is done on the weekends. Also, they got permission to film. There were more cars in the lot than people in the store, so they may have cleared aisles for the video. Before we call censorship, most American stores prohibit cameras because comparison shoppers from competitors are a problem. Although, who could stop you from using a cellphone for photos?
My take: they have come up to Western standards in many ways. The youth, like the presenter, did not experience the Communists .
Thank-you JPII, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Just think how much easier it would have been for them back then if YouTube videos of Soviet stores had been available to the general public back then!
I have to disagree. Since the turn of the 20th Century, the biggest problem facing US agriculture is too much food. Even at the height of the Dust Bowl, when tens of thousands of farms from Texas to Canada were wiped out, there was still so much food that it was not worth it to ship to the cities. So overabundance and hunger at the same time.
Since “Evil Ol’ Frank” Roosevelt, US agriculture has been effectively “fascist nationalized”, but slowly that system is breaking down. Its evolving replacement is state management, which is where things are moving right now.
What this means is that when conservatives are in power, they will likely make food stamps block grants to states, and the states will then support their own agribusiness with bonuses of crop surpluses to the food stamp recipients, as well as trade between states of surpluses.
So if stores are empty, it will be because of disruption among the *processed* foods manufacturers. This would be due to either a stock market collapse, or some inhibition to the major trucking companies and railroads.
They may not have had youtube but they did have audio tapes that they copied and passed on. The more famous ones were speeches given by JPII and Ronald Reagan, and especially when Reagan called the Soviet Union "the Evil Empire." That description of communism was said to have reverberated all through Eastern Europe. It inspired them to proper action. And Karl Rove thinks that we don't need Ronald Reagan anymore.
Yes - but I’m speaking of what Reagan could have done inside America. Here we didn’t, and don’t, have actual, physical censorship. But what we do have is something powerfully insidious - we have “objective” journalism which is nothing more than a monopoly on so-called “mainstream” opinion. We’re allowed to speak our opinions, mostly, but we are ruled primarily by an Establishment of demagogues in a cabal known as the Associated Press.Adam Smith’s writing is astonishingly on point:People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)When you consider that the AP newswire is a virtual meeting of all major journalism institutions, it should be easy to predict that journalists would conspire against the public.The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.So we are “led and directed” by people who do nothing, and are not by training or experience qualified to do anything, other than cheap-shot criticism and second guessing to puff up their own importance. All because the electorate is dominated by a "natural disposition to believe.”The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors . . .
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
It’s a nice fantasy to think that YouTube would have brought the journalism cabal to heel during the Reagan Administration - but in reality it is hard to overstate the ability of that cabal to change the subject.
Yes - but I’m speaking of what Reagan could have done inside America. Here we didn’t, and don’t, have actual, physical censorship. But what we do have is something powerfully insidious - we have “objective” journalism which is nothing more than a monopoly on so-called “mainstream” opinion. We’re allowed to speak our opinions, mostly, but we are ruled primarily by an Establishment of demagogues in a cabal known as the Associated Press.Adam Smith’s writing is astonishingly on point:People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Wealth of Nations (Book I, Ch 10)When you consider that the AP newswire is a virtual meeting of all major journalism institutions, it should be easy to predict that journalists would conspire against the public.The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.So we are “led and directed” by people who do nothing, and are not by training or experience qualified to do anything, other than cheap-shot criticism and second guessing to puff up their own importance. All because the electorate is dominated by a "natural disposition to believe.”The man whom we believe is necessarily, in the things concerning which we believe him, our leader and director, and we look up to him with a certain degree of esteem and respect. But as from admiring other people we come to wish to be admired ourselves; so from being led and directed by other people we learn to wish to become ourselves leaders and directors . . .
The desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires. - Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
It’s a nice fantasy to think that YouTube would have brought the journalism cabal to heel during the Reagan Administration - but in reality it is hard to overstate the ability of that cabal to change the subject.
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