Charlie Rose

Mirror  09/30/2011 02:20 PM Report

RE IMF ASSISTANCE: Summers makes a point that the IMF had a policy that the loans extended to Russian companies and government were not to go outside Russia's borders. In fact, the exact opposite happened: all that money ended up in the Swiss & British Isles bank accounts of the handful of people who later came to affectionately call themselves "the oligarchs".

therev  09/29/2011 09:35 PM Report

I am very disappointed, that although it is a widely known fact, none of your guests credited Reverend Sun Myung Moon with having any part in bringing about the demise of communism and the fall of the Soviet Union. No mention of the Washington Times editorial support of anti-communist activities, or of the educational programs that were attended by tens of thousands of political, religious, and business leaders. Also no mention of his personal meeting with Gorbachev in 1990 during which he encouraged Gorbachev to allow cultural exchange between the west and the Soviet Union. All of this is historical fact.

doodahdiddy  09/29/2011 04:01 PM Report

who me? No I didn't say that. It was somebody else. It was George Carlin, he said it. Not me, I would never

Mirror  09/29/2011 01:58 PM Report

you are uninformed, dodah. and it is pointless to try to prove an uninformed wrong.

poisoning and killing is all done by the mob who call themselves the oligarchs.

doodah  09/29/2011 12:19 PM Report

@ Mirror 09/28/2011 06:04 PM

Putin wins the elections because he poisons and kills his critics; How can he lose?!

At this point, the only good thing about Putin, is he's white. He's the 'White Nigger' of the 'Free World'.

Mirror  09/28/2011 06:04 PM Report

Georgia was the first one to attack. Go to the NYT archives and read them.

As to Putin, he is pretty straightforward, a bit too straightforward. His image problem is appearing to fit an image of a bad guy from James Bond. The reality is: he turned Russia around from being a near failed state into something that actually functions. Authoritarian or not, a failed state was worse of an option. The oil prices helped but Nigeria, too, is rich in oil, and it is a failed state. So was Russia in the 90s. The reason he will be re-elected is because he made a country the size of an ocean work. When did it work before? Never. It is an ordinary country now. Thank god.

Also, it is the one country that is in the black. Not too many can say that. Small economy, yes, but not collapsing.

tabs  09/28/2011 03:39 PM Report

With regards to Mr Putin. One should consider him to be the Great White in the tank. Can one imagine Mr Putin smiling while sitting and waving his little Russian flag at the Summer Olympics in Beijing fully knowing all the while that Russian tanks were about to invade Georgia. In other words one should never underestimate Mr Putins Machiavellian duplicity.

tabs  09/28/2011 03:26 PM Report

Mr Summers once again proved ones previous comments about his mental acuity with his "1960 econ text book" comments about how the Soviets would overtake the USA economically. One should not be surprised at the failure of the American educational system if this is what passes for good at such prestigious institutions of higher learning as Harvard.

tabs  09/28/2011 02:51 PM Report

Not one of these 4 distinguished gentlemen grasped it. They hinted at it and danced around it, but none put it together. Mr Hadley came the closest with his "generational" comments. The Soviet Union collapsed shortly after the generation that was brought up under Stalin exited the stage. Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko. Stalin and Hitler were aberration of the 20TH century. Stalin ruled with an iron fist which established the tone/manner in which the Soviet Union would be ruled.Once that generation which was schooled and ruled under those rules died so did the Soviet Union. It was a dysfunctional system which in the long run was unsustainable.

Mirror  09/28/2011 02:06 PM Report

RE IMAGINARY VS REAL: Russia's "might" as a military power was largely a reflection of American fears and Russia's propaganda. in reality, it was a house cards, a fraud. Even the surface to air missile Igla used in an attempt to assassinate Wolfowitz during his visit in Iraq unfortunately and pathetically dropped half way to its target (pity!). But whatever arsenal was and is there, in Russia, as dysfunctional as it is, but enough for some dirty bomb, unsecured, is of more danger now than in the Cold War (Cuban crisis notwithstanding). Our lack of understanding of danger might have to do with our sense of narrative. The story of that danger appears to have ended in a literary sense of the word. The world though has its own logic and its own arc of a story. I wonder what that is.

Mirror  09/28/2011 01:50 PM Report

RE IMF ASSISTANCE: Summers makes a point that the IMF had a policy that the loans extended to Russian companies and government were not to go outside Russia's borders. In fact, the exact opposite happened: all that money ended up in the Swiss & British Isles bank accounts of the handful of people who later came to affectionately call themselves "the oligarchs".

Mirror  09/28/2011 01:35 PM Report

RE GEORGIA: The New York Times had a big exposé on the conflict between Russia & Georgia and created an exact timeline. There is no doubt that Georgia was the first one to open hostilities. It is odd that the claim that it was otherwise goes unchallenged.

REMant  09/28/2011 11:52 AM Report

Well, I didn't agree with much of this, starting with the questions. The Soviet Union broke up IMHO mainly for ethnic reasons, not economics or ideology though they undoubtedly played a part in making the former possible. The important point tho is that it broke up, not that it collapsed, and communists are still very much with us in all the various pieces. It could hardly have been any other way. Yeltsin was an idiot. Aside from nationalist issues, communism didn't work primarily because the ppl didn't work and it is still not clear they will, which I'm sure is why Mr Putin remains as important as he is.

The reason Eastern Europe has done relatively better is simply due to the ethic of their ppl, which 50 years of repression did little to efface, and the same is true of the Chinese and Vietnamese. It is not a question of some notion of the efficacy of capitalism vs central planning, but what it takes to obtain a virtuous ppl. This is the question that occupied Marx, Engels and Lenin, no less than their Enlightenment, Reformation and ancient predecessors. I doubt Putin thinks any differently. Many Western economies are little more free than the socialist ones, nor any less profligate. Freedom follows virtue, not vice versa, and the latter is rapidly disappearing here.

Reagan took credit, of course, for the strategy of beggaring the Soviets, I believe after the fact, and probably to justify the amount he spent on armaments, which, it can be seen, if one is really objective about this, also beggared ourselves, and has, by jacking up commodity prices, helped Russia today.

Putin's remark about the dissolution of the USSR then makes a lot of sense, and surely Chinese continuity has been instrumental there. Had it collapsed in the Cultural Revolution, we might instead being seeing a repeat of the first decades of the last century. Nixon's opening to China was far more perspicacious than anything Reagan did.

Medvedev's policies certainly don't look much different from his mentor's at this moment. Russia still thinks, and I think rightly so, of strategic balance with us, much as Britain did with Germany, and I expect them to continue support for those they have historically. I think they will do well economically in coming decades on the strength of their resources, especially with the decline of the dollar and Euro. But the global economy depends on the ability of the West to adjust to the emergence of the third world's reserve armies, not anyone's uniformed army, and that should have been already apparent to the Clinton admin. As much as I like Brzezinski, but I don't think I'd care to have any of these gentlemen on my security team.