In Dark Nature, world naturalist Lyall Watson shows that animals aren’t always saints. But when it comes to evil swarms, humans remain incomparable, especially when they’re motivated by failing ideologies. These substitutes for instincts work tolerably well in the beginning, seeing as how enough grid points are covered and connected together in a workable fashion. But an ideology’s success can prove its undoing, especially when the top of the s-curve is being approached. Everyone in charge wants to push that flattening line out to infinity, and in doing so start fighting over the scraps instead of figuring out how to create a new s-curve of prosperity. One of the unfortunate legacies of the USA Keynesians is that they demonstrated that it was possible to fight a major war with resource shortages and still have a high-performance economy. The real economy of the USA was amazingly larger and more sophisticated coming out of WW II than it was going in. Add to that the incredible advances in basic research and the WW II economic stimulus lasted well into the late 1960s. (Those who blame inflation on guns and butter fail to realize that our country is still fighting the longest war in its history. Stiglitz has this covered, after seeing the light in his old age the way Reich and Krugman did, that neoliberalism is a cover name for a rotten system.) Which brings me to the unfortunate fact that war has historically been a colossal economic loser. It is said that Germany required 150 years to recover from the damage of the Thirty Years War. Historically, war as an economic winner has been mostly confined to the Keynesians. Their example is rare indeed, leading Kurt Vonnegut to call the DOD America’s biggest public works project. In these two articles, we get a glimpse of the economic damage the battles over eastern Ukraine have already cost. One is a basic toting up of the damages to the part of Ukraine that IMF was counting on as collateral for their loans. The other is about those cheapskates in Brussels who are tossing 125 million Euros at the 10 billion Euro calamity that EU agriculture is suffering—right at harvest time—from the loss of their Russian markets. The Eurocrats really do not give a crap—after all, its mostly peasants who are suffering and who ever cared about that class of people? Of course, none of this calculates the obvious economic losses from the destruction of valuable elements of the real economy, from the destruction of homes, to the medical costs of war wounds, to the long-term psychological trauma of having thousands of lives violently upended. Even (especially?) for the small agricultural producers, watching your crops rot because of the arrogance and stupidity of some geopolitical chess players will leave long-lasting emotional trauma. The neocons who dreamed up this mess in Ukraine have a lot to answer for. Unfortunately, those sorts of people never do.
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 22:26:10 +0000
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