Letter From Sofia: Old Tanks and Modern Mayhem
This guy – Conn Hallinan – is always worth reading…one of the finest political minds around, and he writes well to boot!
Letter From Sofia: Old Tanks & Modern Mayhem
Dispatches From The edge
Oct. 15, 2013
Sofia, Bulgaria
The military museum in this sprawling capitol city consists of a tiny building and a huge outdoor display of weapons that look as if they had been wheeled in fresh from the battlefields and parked, higgledy piggledy: mountain howitzers that shelled Turks in 1912 rub hubs with Cold War era Russian artillery. MIGs, dusty and weather beaten, crowd a sinister looking Luna-M “Frog” tactical nuclear missile. Two old enemies, a sleek German Mark IV Panzer and its dumpy, but more lethal adversary, a Russian T-34, squat shoulder to shoulder.
Poor Bulgaria. The Russians won’t be back, but once again the Germans are headed their way, only this time armed with nothing more than a change of currency and the policies of austerity that go along with it. The devastation those will inflict, however…
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View from the Left Bank: Rob Prince's Blog 
Rob – a good read, but next time you send one from someone else would you identify the author more than “this guy” — John
One of the principal take-aways one gleans from repeatedly visiting Paul Krugman is that, in treating economic malaise, stimulus is essential and austerity is to be eschewed. His advocacy of this formula is so persistent and intense that buying into Krugman’s philosophy has the effect of one viewing the disciples of economic strait-jacketing, be they the Merkels or the Paul Ryan’s or the 1980s Japanese, as callow simpletons whose misguided blundering is a major cause of the lamentable ever-widening abyss between the haves and have nots. Hallinan’s article on Bulgaria is certainly illustrative of one of the economic scenarios addressed by Krugman whose weekly class in the N.Y. Times I encourage the readership to attend.
Gene Fitzpatrick