A journalistic blast from our 1969 past reappeared on the Web yesterday in a couple of places, most notably on the Ludwig von Mises site.

Entitled simply enough "The Great Depression," the article from happier days is an masterful dissection of how governmental folly–stretching from Grover Cleveland (the inflationist) to Herbert Hoover and FDR (the depressionists)–created and sustained the unnecessary economic coma known as, well, the title of the article.

The author was Hans F. Sennholz, the nation’s first doctoral candidate under Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. Not unlike his mentor, Sennholz shows off his monetarist passions in his article, altogether not a bad trait to have in these days of Keynsian Kool-Aid.

His conclusion is fascinating:

Social and economic decline is facilitated by moral decay. Surely, the Great Depression would be inconceivable without the growth of covetousness and envy of great personal wealth and income, the mounting desire for public assistance and favors. It would be inconceivable without an ominous decline of individual independence and self-reliance, and above all, the burning desire to be free from man’s bondage and to be responsible to God alone.  

Can it happen again? Inexorable economic law ascertains that it must happen again whenever we repeat the dreadful errors that generated the Great Depression.

Four decades later and we’ve answered his question–resoundingly.

The Yekaterinburg Turning Point

By Prof. Michael Hudson

URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13969

The city of Yakaterinburg, Russia’s largest east of the Urals, may become known not only as the death place of the tsars but of American hegemony too – and not only where US U-2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, but where the US-centered international financial order was brought to ground.

Challenging America will be the prime focus of extended meetings in Yekaterinburg, Russia (formerly Sverdlovsk) today and tomorrow (June 15-16) for Chinese President Hu Jintao, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and other top officials of the six-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance is comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrghyzstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. It will be joined on Tuesday by Brazil for trade discussions among the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).    

The attendees have assured American diplomats that dismantling the US financial and military empire is not their aim. They simply want to discuss mutual aid – but in a way that has no role for the United States, NATO or the US dollar as a vehicle for trade. US diplomats may well ask what this really means, if not a move to make US hegemony obsolete. That is what a multipolar world means, after all. For starters, in 2005 the SCO asked Washington to set a timeline to withdraw from its military bases in Central Asia. Two years later the SCO countries formally aligned themselves with the former CIS republics belonging to the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), established in 2002 as a counterweight to NATO.