I Miss the Soviet Union

I miss the Soviet Union.  Ever since I was a young boy I have enjoyed listening to short wave radio.  As a teenager I was even an amateur radio operator ... WA6KJV.  I let my license expire when I was in the Air Force during the Vietnamese War.  I remember listening to Radio Moscow.  I was inspired by the universal employment, health care and housing that the commentators described in programs such as "What is Communism?"  Everyone in the USSR could have a education.  Many women were doctors.  I still listen to short wave international broadcasters occasionally and I can still send and receive Morse code.  However the alternative is no longer there.  In its place is a rather bland "Voice of Russia."  The Voice of America signals used to plow through the short waves like huge sailing ships.  The Voice of American theme music, "Hail Columbia the Gem of the Ocean", was breaking ashore over short waves twenty-four hours a day. It's no longer dominant as VOA's signals are delivered in sanitised form by satellite these days.  The world was more black and white in those days.  But what does all of this have to do with my having a feeling of nostalgia regarding the Soviet Union?  When the Soviet Union collapsed, the world capitalist system was free to move ahead on steroids.  Even Communist China began following a path of hyper capitalism, thus demonstrating that democracy and capitalism are not the synonymous.  Capitalism does not necessarily promote democracy.  In the US it has evolved into an oligarchical state controlled economy with a concentration of wealth that is staggering. 

Even as a young man I knew that there was great inequality in the world.  I understood also from an early age that my life was far easier than that of children born in less developed parts of the world.   I came to understand that there was the "Free World" and the "Communist World."  The developing world was designated the "Third World", being neither free nor communist.  Gradually I became awakened to my own predisposed beliefs about race and culture here in the US.  I can only describe the evolution of my thinking as the development of "class consciousness." 

In the US we have have had Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  I believe these were possible only because there was an alternative to capitalism behind the so called "Iron Curtain" that Winston Churchill described in his famous speech when he was visiting the United States following the end of World  War II.  That communist option evaporated almost without warning when the Soviet Empire collapsed.  Shortly thereafter, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain and President Ronald Reagan began implementing neoliberal economic policies.  Margaret Thatcher described neoliberalism, the economic belief that everything public should be privatised, as "TINA", there is no alternative.  Indeed, with the demise of the "Evil Empire" there was no longer any viable alternative to unbridled, deregulated capitalism.  Thus we see today the actual discussions between American political parities regarding the gutting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  I thought I would never live to see the day when such thinking would be implemented as public policy.  Raising the debt ceiling of the US Treasury had been transformed into a contrived crisis that is being used to eliminate our social services network.  Welcome America to the third world.