pastProlog

Doozy admits the truth you won't see in the US corporate media. The Colombian bourgeoisie does not want peace. It's why they murdered Gaitán. It's why when the left unilaterally put down the gun in the mid 1980s and ran for office, they had right wing death squads, the AUC etc. kill off the candidates, campaign workers etc.

They want to run things with the army, with the US army and billions coming in from Plan Colombia etc. They don't want to let people vote or campaign, they'd prefer the FARC control a few departments in the south and they rule by force in the rest of the country.

Thanks for making things clear. You don't see this kind of clarity in the US, where liberals say FARC wants violence and other nonsense.

This all started when the right wing murdered Gaitán in 1948. Then the US began coming into Colombia heavily into the 1980s.

The left wanted to end the violence so founded UP in the 1980s and ceased violence. The landowners, AUC, CIA etc. murdered candidates, shot campaign workers, made it impossible to win electorally. They forced FARC back to the gun, they didn't want the left in elections.

For a long time FARC had nothing to do with cocaine, so who was sending it to the US in the 1970s? The AUC and right wing. Once the US began pouring billions into Colombia, the FARC could no longer prevent campesinos from growing coca in its areas.

It's funny too, as the US produces the deadly tobacco drug and distributes it to Colombians, but that is not a "drug" because the US doesn't want it to be. Yet Colombian campesinos who grew coca for centuries send coca to the US - then that is a drug and they are drug dealers. The AUC and Uribe and his father send coca north but the US government gives them a free pass.

>> Someone with so little exposure on US airwaves over the decades is not a celebrity.

> http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159008/ 165 credits as himself on different programs. 155 in the last 20 years.

Well this makes my point. Let me look at the earliest ten.

Third from bottom is UK. Fourth from the bottom is a Canadian documentary. Sixth and seventh from the bottom are Canadian. Eighth from bottom is Australian. Ninth from bottom is the UK. Tenth from bottom is UK.

Second and fifth from bottom appear to be musical programs, not sure of the country.

Which leaves the earliest, Chomsky's 1969 discussion with William F. Buckley. So 1969 to 1996 that's one credit.

If you look at the other credits, many of them are for non-American programs, or very independently made films (not on the US airwaves as I said).

More recent documentaries like "Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?" are made by Europeans.

Neil deGrasse Tyson has been on NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNN etc. much more than Chomsky has in the past decade. He is much more of a US celebrity.

> their topic of expertise

Who is the expert on how the pie should be divided up?

The subtitle is "Piecing together a celebrity scientist".

A celebrity?

I've seen him interviewed once on Charlie Rose.

In May 2002 CNN put him on with Bill Bennett.

In 1986 he debated Boston university president John Silber on local Boston TV.

How is he a celebrity?

He mentioned in a speech once how someone on NPR wanted to talk to him, and how the higher-ups at NPR canceled and then limited his appearance, as he was apparently banned.

He also was prevented by the IDF from attending a talk at Birzeit university in the West bank, something he said hadn't happened (being refused admittance to a country he was to give a unievrsity talk to) since he tried to enter Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Even The Nation has spiked positive reviews of his books.

Someone with so little exposure on US airwaves over the decades is not a celebrity.

Everett himself debunked Everett. Originally he said Piraha was recursive. Then he changed its mind and said it wasn't, thus, all of Chomsky's theories are wrong. He learned to speak Piraha training to be a Christian missionary, not as a linguist. His talk here was with a conservative author, not a linguist.

The big companies don't want decentralization, so the trend has been away from decentralization towards centralization:

* Usenet was a decentralized forum, like a decentralized HN in a sense. The first attack on it were the small-time commercial spammers. Then the government, RIAA/MPAA and last mile net duopoly (AT&T/Verizon) conspired to more-or-less sink it, which they did ( https://www.verizon.com/Support/Residential/internet/highspe... http://www.tomsguide.com/us/AT-T-Usenet-Access-Closed,news-4... http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Newzbin-Usenet-MPA-Copyright-Inf... )

* Newer peer-to-peer file sharing apps never had a chance. Napster, Gnutella and so forth, under attack by the RIAA/MPAA and government.

The trend is toward more centralization, not centralization. With a last-mile duopoly, antagonistic government and MPAA and RIAA beating war drums, decentralization has been under attack for years and the centralization forces have been winning. I see nothing in the visible horizon that sees things changing any time soon.

Comparing an 80 year old Palestinian in Nablus whose family has been in Nablus for centuries with a Mexican who moved to the US five years ago is silly. Also, there was a 2000 amnesty bill, so it is Mexicans who chose to move to the US within fifteen years in that category. Also, a Jew who moves into a settlement next to Nablus can vote.

You can say Palestine is another country - but then why are settlements and the IDF there? Why does Israel fight UN bills saying Palestine is a country?

> You could just as well ask why illegal/undocumented mexicans do not have representation in congress.

You're comparing a Mexican who made the decision to cross a border yesterday, or last year, or a decade ago, with say a Palestinian man born in Nablus 75 years ago, whose family has been in Nablus for centuries? With a West Bank settlement which seized land next door, the Jew from Brooklyn who just moved in yesterday, and who is in a West Bank settlement, the Jew can have a Knesset vote but the Palestinian can't because he's not a Jew. Comparing the Mexican to the Palestinian is a laugh.

Then you say Palestinians are separate so should not be in the Knesset. The West Bank settlements and IDF in the West Bank belie this. Israel voting in the UN to deny Palestinian statehood belies this.

Plenty of statements from Netanyahu and the ruling Likud are that the West Bank was annexed.

Also Israel used to "secretly" fund Hamas and Hezbollah as a bulwark against the PLO, PFLP, George Habash etc. That has come out over the years, it mainly came out in the US in the 1980s when Israel and the US were caught arming Hezbollah and Iran (Iran-Contra), but other dribs and drabs came out over the years. The PFLP and elements of Fatah and the PLO were always the main enemy, and Israel has always opposed the secular left vehemently and sometimes supported Hamas. So Israelis condemning Hamas carries little weight.

Also, Israel has a large and rapidly growing population of Jewish religious fundamentalists who control ALL marriages in Israel with a Jewish fundamentalist take, and in their communities those women have to cover their heads and shave off their hair, being gay is verboten etc. Israel has a large population of Jews like this.

If that is the case, why don't Palestinians have representatives in the Knesset?

Why do Israelis claim Israel is the "only democracy in the Middle East" if only Jews living in the West Bank can vote?

Israel can't claim it has autonomy over the West Bank and that Israel is also a democracy as well. It is one or the other.

In East Germany in 1949, you had a left coalition like in the 1948 Italian election. It gained 66% of the vote to the 34% of the opposition. In the 1947 Hungarian election, the communists got the most votes.

So how come we never hear that Eastern Europe became communist democratically? After all, they can point to election numbers as you do. Well, the Red Army occupied them some say. But the US armed forces occupied Italy - they still do. Well, the USSR, a foreign power meddled in the elections. The US and CIA admit how massively they meddled in Italy's 1948 (and subsequent) elections.

I can easily say that the non-communist and non-communist aligned parties in Eastern Europe "didn't even come close to winning" after World War II and the people of those countries democratically decided to become communist. After all, Hungary became communist after World War I without Russian intervention, a fact few in the West remember.

It's odd to see the US and CIA admitting after decades they interfered in and fixed the Italian 1948 elections, yet you still hold up the phony results, yet everyone can easily discount the elections in eastern Europe after World War II, where Russia simply did the same thing the US did.

I said they're still referred to as Indians because they're still referred to as Indians. The point is the very name shows the nature of the ingrained misconceptions about them - the idea that they're from India for one. Yes, I know they're not from India, you seem to have missed the point.

> All this complicated dance of indirect elections (that the current parties would like to remove) has been put in place after the WW2 to avoid too much power being in the hands of these high-profile figures or of a single party.

All of this was put in place after World War II to centralize power in the hands of the Christian Democrats, and force non-communist parties to go into coalition with them. As all prime ministers for a half century after WWII were either Christian Democrats or from those parties in coalition with them, it worked fairly well. Of course even this had bumps in the road so you have the 1948 elections which the communist/socialist coalition won but which was fixed the other way, a strategy of tension by P2 and the far right being blamed on the far left as the left makes electoral and other advances in the 1970s, plus you have Gladio and secret NATO armies in the wings in case the communists are actually elected into power. Of course being Italian, you know all of this.

There are two ways producing widgets can grow 10%.

The standard way is where production methods stay the same, and 10% more offices/factories are added and 10% more workers are added. The reason this would be done is because there was a 10% growth in demand for widgets. This would be due to a 10% growth in population that could afford widgets, or a 10% growth in income for consumers/workers that they decide to spend on widgets.

With population growth shrinking in the standard consumer societies, that aspect goes out. Insofar as income, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage today is below what it was 43 years ago - it has shrunk. So the demand is not really increasing. Since demand for widgets in general is not going up, companies are not desperate to employ the average worker, and thus wages are stagnant (or as I said, the average US inflation-adjusted hourly wage has shrunk over the past 43 years).

When were companies investing the capital necessary for automation, technological improvement etc.? From the 1940s to the 1960s. When demand was high due to increased population (baby boom). There was a baby boom because after a long depression, the economy started paying good wages to the average worker due to strong unions and government stimulus starting heavily during World War II. Money in workers/consumers pockets led to increased consumer demand.

Due to the highest unionization rate in American history after World War II you have high wages at these growing companies. How to lower costs? Invest in automation, invest in technological improvement.

Without high wages, and some of the other factors mentioned, the financial impetus to invest in technological improvement and automation fades. It's always there, but it ebbs in the absence of high demand, high wage employees.

Can Silicon Valley take care of its own long term needs?

Basic math and science research now is the soil Silicon Valley needs in the future. But government budgets are cut, and there's a philosophy that predominates that government is not the answer.

So Larry Page has Google do research and development. But there is the beginning of a stockholder rebellion. The trend is toward focus on short term ever-increasing stock returns each quarter. The powers-that-be want funding for basic math and science research trimmed down to nothing - both government and corporate.

Plus treaties like TPP are being pushed. If Silicon Valley profits on the increased spread of information, the TPP tries to tie down information in rules which seem out-of-date.

Also telcos (read AT&T and Verizon) are using their last-mile land/airwave monopoly power to redirect bad DNS calls to ads, hijack sessions and place cookies on them, they want to use their monopolies to charge upstreams fees etc.

Then there's the Eastern District of Texas patent racket.

An example of this discussed recently - in the years after World War II, the transistor was implemented and Moore's Law took effect. As everyone knows, that has slowed down in recent years and soon the current methods will hit a brick wall.

If you look at constant non-military R&D dollars coming from the federal budget, they are less this year than they were in 2003. The population is growing, the economy is growing and becoming more complex, but federal R&D dollars are shrinking.

Also, you talk as if wasting human capital was not an intention of our current mode of production and economic system. Look at this 1999 Businessweek article, "When is the jobless rate too low?" ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1999-10-31/when-is-th... ). The worry by the people controlling the economy starts when unemployment gets too low, not when it's too high. Of course, if it starts climbing up to 25% like it did in 1932 in the US, turmoil starts to take hold, so in that respect they're against high unemployment on the other end.

Why do you assume wasted human capital is the concern of those making the economic decisions? By the people making the economic decisions, I mean the people pressuring Larry Page to cut Alphabet/Google R&D, who pressured Facebook to go public, who beat the drums for years for Apple to have a special dividend etc. Wasted human capital, unemployment - the existence of a reserve army of labor is a cornerstone of the existing economic system.

This is a straw man argument like the article.

My last point is that the Catholic church was not able to change any texts (or creeds or customs) in the east. It just ignored them.

Somehow you read those words and somehow divined that somewhere between the lines I said that the Catholic church had a major influence on churches in the east. Then you say how misguided this view is.

Where did I say this? I said the Catholic church did not change eastern texts and ignored the east. You rearrange this to me saying the Catholic church had a major influence over the east, which is contrary to what I said. Then you say how misguided this view which you attribute to me, but which I said nowhere, is.

> The bible is critical of the establishment

He doesn't really give many examples.

One of the big ones is the prophet Elijah confronting the king of Israel, Ahab. At that time the kingdom of Judah incorporated Jerusalem and the central temple of Yahweh. Jerusalem was outside of Israel. Also, Israel had tensions with neighbors that bordered it, but not Judah. So Ahab married a Phoenician. Elijah condemned Ahab for allying in a political, cultural and religious sense toward Phoenicia in the north, as opposed to Judah and Jerusalem in the south.

This is only challenging the establishment in a sense. With Jerusalem under Roman occupation, Jesus with a weapon in hand thew money changers out of the temple in Jerusalem.

This is being critical of the establishment, but only to some respect. If the establishment drifts away from reverence toward the temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, there is much criticism. If it is reverent toward the temple, it is praised. Which one would expect from a religion with worship of Yahweh as its basis.

George W. Bush talked a lot about his relationship with this same god, and was praised by modern evangelicals. Obama has been attacked by Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Bill O'Reilly and many fundamentalist Christians as trying to replace Christianity with secular humanism. Google "Obama and secular humanism" if you want to see for yourself. This may be criticism of the establishment, but only to a respect. Its criticism of the establishment if it feels the establishment is being critical of Christianity.

> Biblical characters are deeply flawed

> Just look at king David. The king was confronted by a prophet for murder and adultery! Let this sink in. I cannot fathom how this story was not the first one to be wiped from public records or at least “smoothed over,” if not by David himself then by one of his descendants. If the Bible is in the service of the elite, how does this story benefit the elite?

Because it was written at a time that people would have known of these things. In Ronald Reagan's authorized biography, he initially did not want to mention he had been married and divorced. His biographer went to Nancy Reagan and told her how ridiculed he'd be if he did not at least mention his first marriage, and she persuaded him to include mention of it. It's the same thing - people would remember it.

Go to Youtube and look up "Trump anointed by God". You won't see one, but many fundamentalist Christians talking about Trump. How Trump cheated on his first wife, dumped her, married a younger woman, then dumped her and married a younger wife. How this goes against what they say. But it doesn't matter that he's "deeply flawed" because he has been divinely anointed or whatever.

It's the same thing then as now. Those videos could be shown 1000 years from now in the same sense. Everyone now knows what Trump has done, just like they knew way back then what David had done. It's the same thing.

> The Bible is heralded by a diverse group

His entire argument here makes even less sense than previous arguments.

> the Marxist mythological take on the Council of Nicaea, where supposedly the Catholic Church decided the books and the doctrines for the rest of Christians.

The council of Nicaea did decide the doctrines of all Christians who followed the council of Nicaea. There's a Nicene creed, most of which is a rebuke to various Christian ideas which were considered heretical, such as Arianism. It's true Christian groups exist which don't follow the Nicene creed, but the great masses of Christian churches founded from the year 325 on do follow the Nicene creed. OK, so perhaps there are some small churches in Uzbekistan and China that don't adhere to this creed. What he calls the "Marxist" attitude toward this is correct - most Christians follow the Nicene creed. The Catholic church does, Eastern Orthodox churches do, the Anglican church does, the Lutheran church does etc.

There were many Christian writings of that time. Some are considered canon, some are considered apocrypha. Which are considered which depends on the particular church.

Also, the first Christian gospel written was by Mark. It is the only gospel which does not mention at the end that Jesus was resurrected. In chapter 16 of Mark's gospel, the early versions of it don't mention that Jesus was resurrected. Later versions do have a resurrection mentioned. I won't go into it, you can read about Mark 16 elsewhere if you wish.

> What is it exactly that the Catholic Church changed? How did they manage to teleport all over Asia, collect all the books in languages they did not speak, and change them just right so that our copies today in our museums are in doctrinal matters practically identical? The charge that some group manipulated the text of the Bible for gain makes no sense.

Well I already mentioned Mark 16. When Shakespeare was 46 years old, the KJV was being translated. What is the 46th word of the KJV Psalm 46? Shake. What is the 46th word back in it? Spear. Coincidence, or a little joke done by translators? Who knows.

This argument is a straw man. I don't know of any Marxist texts which claim what he said. Perhaps some instructor he had had a vulgar Marxist take on it, or perhaps he remembers it wrong.

Of course the Catholic church couldn't teleport and change various texts. What it could do is decide what was canon and what was not. It could decide non-bible creeds like the Nicene creed (although that's not saying the creed is exclusively Catholic). It could decide that the gospel of Mark ends with a resurrection even if the original gospel Mark wrote didn't. The Catholic church didn't have to rewrite all documents everywhere, it just ignored the ones it didn't like and made canon what it did like.

The last claim is really a straw man claim. It muddles up a whole bunch of diverse things together, makes it into a straw man, then knocks it down.

> Even hunter-gatherers have chiefs and elders.

Hunter-gatherer bands do not have chiefs. Looking at the Wikipedia article for "Tribal chief" it says "Historically, tribal societies represent an intermediate stage between the band society of the Paleolithic stage and civilization with centralized, super-regional government based in cities." I couldn't put it better.

Even with regards to Indian chiefs, and it's not hard to see how there are misconceptions about them if they're still referred to as "Indians", modern anthropology acknowledges that European notions about Indian bands and tribes in the 15th and 16th century were often wrong. Europeans saw parallels of European society in the New World which weren't there (of course there were different kinds of societies in the Americas, from Montezuma's Aztec empire, to humter gatherer bands).

> what evidence

Archaeological evidence

Evidence from literate civilizations writing about their uncivilized neighbors, which goes back to the earliest known works

Evidence from writers encountering such societies up to the modern day, although they're almost extinct outside of the deep Amazon and the like.

Logical conclusions - without a food surplus, there is no class system and other results

> Similarly, the Soviet Union initially instructed the Chinese Communist Party to cooperate with the KMT in the 1920s, because they believed that full development of productive forces, under a capitalist regime, was a necessary precursor to communism. Not helpful, or merely good to have, but necessary according to Marx's dialectical philosophy.

Yes. The irony of course is that prior to Lenin arriving at the Finland Station and publishing the April Theses, Marxists in Europe, Marxists in Russia, and even the leading cadre of the Bolsheviks expected the same thing in Russia - that Lenin would support the provisional government formed by the February revolution. The Russians advised the Chinese CP not to do what they did. Of course, China had even less of a proletariat than Russia. When the KMT government fled to Taiwan in December 1949, only one ambassador left with them instead of remaining on the mainland - the Soviet Union's.

> Maybe Deng was disingenuous and tried to sneak capitalism in through the back door, or maybe he really did believe what he said. But you can't dismiss his views as being non-Marxist ipso facto, because they are clearly derived from Marx's theory of history and expressed via Marxist concepts.

Right. Lenin wrote a rebuttal to what he called infantile left wing communists in 1920, which was before the NEP when they really started saying capitalism had been restored in Russia. Stalin disbanded the Comintern and spoke of socialism in one country. Khrushchev was called a revisionist by Mao and Hoxha, and he switched a lot of capital production over to production of consumer goods. Actually people were probably right, because that really was the beginning of the end of the Russian (and Eastern European) economy which had been growing like gangbusters prior to that.

> embracing of capitalism

Zhao Ziyang embraced capitalism, and he was arrested after the June 4th incident. Capitalism run by the communist party of China?

Also, Mao and Zhou Enlai are who made peace with the USA, not Deng Xiaoping.

> Deng Xiaoping, whom Mao disgraced for his unorthodoxy

Mao and Deng had a falling out in the mid to late 1960s, but Mao empowered Deng again in 1974.

Deng Xiaoping called himself a communist, not a capitalist. He did say it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice. If China was a capitalist system, it would be more like Japan or South Korea or the US or Western Europe.

Deng said he was proceeding in a dialectic manner economically. If you don't know what that means, then you don't know what communism is, and you wouldn't be able to tell if Deng was a communist or not. Actually Mao was accused by people to his left of abandoning communism due to his interpretation of the theory of productive forces (as well as the role of peasantry and proletariat etc.) Deng just expanded on that.

Yes, the PRC has been run so incompetently by the standing committee of the Politburo of the CPC it has become by some measures the largest economy in the world.

How about when they were so eager to increase production that they failed to prevent wind erosion, causing massive crop failure, starvation, and I guess that means its OK to call it a genocide? Oh yaa, that was in the USA, 19 years before this happened. Where are the article on the Dust Bowl GENOCIDE ? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl )

I neglected to mention, FNB only serves food in Tompkins Square Park on Sunday.

In your situation, forget about a job that involves R machine learning, unless you already have an in. Get a job as a messenger, or supermarket stocker, or McDonalds burger flipper or something. Look for signs in stores that say help wanted, or find Manhattan messengering services you can work at.

Don't look for an apartment. Look for a room to rent.

There are different recycling days in New York, and some supermarkets have 24/7 recycling machines. You can take cans from people's blue recycle bins, put it in a container (the street collectors use a basket with wheels around here) and 20 of them means a dollar.

Also - on Staten Island is a place called Ganas. Some people work in their stores and live there. They own residential buildings, stores etc. Some people live there and work elsewhere. I don't know if they have space available, if you tell them you'd like to live there and work in their stores, and perhaps one of you eventually would get an outside job (or maybe both), it might work out. The inner circle of Ganas is slightly cultish, but lots of people come to New York, live there a few months, then go somewhere else, and had a good time of it. They don't push you too heavily to join their meditation circle or whatever it is. There used to be a Ganas splinter group with a building near Ganas with a building, I don't think they owned businesses though. The living is cheap, communal etc., but it's a roof and a job, and some of them have outside jobs.

The city places homeless people, but if you're a walkin you'll probably be sent to a homeless shelter with a lot of mentally ill and criminal people. People get their stuff stolen, sometimes worse. There is a curfew too, although if you have a legit job it might be extended.

I consulted at a Fortune 100 investment bank in New York City 15 years ago. It's difficult to hide that layoffs are coming - managers are pulled into meetings to rank their employees, they tell their friend, word gets around.

Someone set up a digital timebomb on the systems. They were one of the people let go, and a few weeks later, things crashed all over the place.

One amusing bit - a few months later, another digital time bomb went off. He had hidden another one that they had not found, even knowing of the first one.

Despite laying off about 10% of the staff, management had a good idea of who it was, but they had been clever so it was difficult to get evidence it was them.

> Lenin was pushing for dictatorship of the working class ... While one may say that whose ideologies are of different colors, structurally they are the same and thus produced similar results - totalitarian states.

Lenin was born into a "totalitarian" state - Czarist Russia. The czarist government murdered his brother, which probably was an impetus for him into anti-czarist politics.

I would suggest...

If you're homeless in NYC, there used to be a squatter scene in the Lower East Side. That's changed over the past decades, but ABC No Rio at 156 Rivington used to be a squat, and they have a calendar of open events on their web site. Bluestockings books on 172 Allen St., one block south of Houston Street is open all the time and is not really squatter-oriented, but has people and flyers associated with this scene. Food Not Bombs moved out of ABC No Rio to the Catholic Worker at 36 E. 1st street, they serve free food in Tompkins Square Park after 3:30PM.

Also, 2600 meetings happen on the first Friday of every month in the lobby of 153 E 53rd St, people start coming in at 5PM. They're technical people who might be sympathetic to someone in your situation.

If you look on Craigslist, there are a lot of (Microsoft) desktop support jobs. Some need an A+/MCSE, some don't. It sounds like you could handle things more complex, but if you're in dire need it's a paycheck. Also you have some experience doing that. Do that, learn that, try to save some money up.

In fact if you're homeless you should probably look for an easier to get job like a messenger's job first. Then I'd look for desktop support job. If I was homeless I would put aside learning ML in R until I was getting a steady paycheck and had a roof over my head.

If there was a "deliberate campaign of genocide by starvation" happening, I'm sure I could look in the New York Times archives of the period and read about that. If I consult the archives, the reporters going through the Ukraine said reports of that were false.

Also, all of Europe had a bad crop that year, I guess the Soviets were controlling the weather?

10000 years ago the entire world was not socialist but communist, and none of what you mentioned happened.

It was the formation of class societies of workers and parasites 10000 years ago which led to violence, suppression of the population etc.

> I'd skip an industrialization like that

That's how the British empire industrialized (in India, Ireland) etc.

The western countries bordering Ukraine had food shortages the same year the Ukraine did, no mention of that.

Also if you read New York Times during this period, the reporters travelling the Ukraine said there were no famine conditions - the Times said this, not Pravda.

You refer to a market in the US that sells radishes for dollars as "free", which presumably means the identical market selling radishes for rubles in the USSR is unfree, and I am the one playing around? I have trouble fathoming definitions so steeped in ideology, it reminds me of the US Congress cafeteria renaming French fries as Freedom fries when France chose not to join the US on some imperial venture.

That's a minor point as you answered the question, sort of. But not to satisfaction. A market in the US or USSR sells commodities at a set price. People buy goods or they don't. The markets operate exactly the same.

As you're attempting to make a rational argument unlike others, I will get to the point. The markets in the US and USSR were the same, despite you following some US ideological line and calling the US one a "free" one. It is production that was different, and control of production. Misdirecting the difference from control of production to "free" markets is just more misdirection and sophistry (which is widespread, not particularly pertaining to you).