The last economic minister of the USSR said in an interview in the late 90s that the low price of oil through most of the 80s was a contributing factor too. About the only thing the Soviets had to trade for hard currency was oil and with the low prices combined with the poor state of the Soviet oil fields, they were starved for cash by the late 80s.
I think it was several factors coming together at once, some were mistakes like Chernobyl, others deliberate acts of statecraft.
Once the primaries start, things will probably settle quickly, or we'll be sure there will be no clear winner before the convention. Super Tuesday this week has some of the biggest delegate states in the mix which will pretty much determine how the primaries are going to shake out. If there is a big winner on Super Tuesday, the primaries will be over except the shouting. If Super Tuesday produces a split, then there could be a brokered convention.
I can't tell whether you actually are trolling or not, but some of your behavior is consistent with trolling. However, it's also possible you are just doing some projection. You said earlier that every Democratic candidate except Bernie Sanders is racist, or possibly that he's the only one who is near the front of the pack who isn't. There are a number of candidates who are non-white and Kamala Harris who is 1/2 African American and 1/2 South Asian Indian is polling around 4th place right now. The other non-white candidates are further down the list though, so maybe you just meant those among the front runners, though I would put Harris among the 2nd tier (with only Biden 1st tier) in the polling.
As for your comments claiming @ggr does not see other races as equals, how do you know ggr is white? I've been reading their posts here as long as I've been here and I don't know what their ethnicity is, nor their gender. I saw absolutely nothing in ggr's post, or really in any other in this thread except for possibly your posts that raises any question about the equality of ethnic groups.
I use the term "ethnic groups" instead of "races" because there is only one race: human. All the divisions that humans call races boils down to some rather minor variations in looks sometimes and always on ethnic differences. If you go back several decades you'll find people of different European ethnicities calling each other different races. Europeans today still make comments about different European ethnic groups being potentially racist.
My father grew up in Muskegon, MI, born in 1920. The town was made up of different European ethnicities for the most part. Non-whites were uncommon until WW II. He thought it was nuts when he was a kid, but he saw lots of "racial" discrimination between people who were ethnically Swedish or Norwegian or German or Polish. I saw the remnants of the same cultures in Milwaukee, WI in the mid-90s when I spent a summer there. People weren't discriminating anymore, but they were still aware of each other's cultural backgrounds.
In Canada being French Canadians or English Canadian is a major divide. In many parts of South Asia, the religion you belong to puts you into one camp or the other. In Africa various tribes from the pre-colonial period are still important badges of identity and people kill each other over them.
Humans are, unfortunately tribal, though some are more tribal than others. Having participated on this thread for a while, I have not seen any ethnic tribalism, though there has been some political tribalism from time to time.
The issues surrounding African-Americans seems to be your #1 issue. I don't fault you for it, but it hasn't been a primary topic of conversation on this thread. There are a lot of problems in the world that are all competing for top status. Among them are environmental and climate, the broken political system in the United States and a number of other countries, the situation in the Middle East which appears to be spinning out of control in real time, problems between other nations around the world, the border crisis caused by political will, etc.
There are 50 fires burning at once, all are serious, but which one needs attention first? Each of us would probably come up with a different priority list.
But just a word of advice, if someone is white, or may appear to be white on a forum, and they don't bend over backwards to be woke about African-American issues does not mean they are racist. In every issue, there is a broad spectrum of activism and focus. There are people who are rabidly for x, those rabidly opposed, and then usually a large number in the middle who are silent. Some really don't care, but most lean one way or the other, but have other things that they put their energy into. People who try to put their all into every cause end up putting virtually nothing into all of them because they are spread too thin.
