Blog 10 Global Birdseye 2

                                                         


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NO.10 Global Birdseye 2


     It should be clear that earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes, and other large-scale public disasters are stimulants for the economy. Money has to be collected, borrowed, or created, and then spent, creating jobs and profits.  

So let's have more disasters!. How about a war? A big one, Like World War II. It was the ultimate cause of the world's recovery from the Great Depression: ten years of depression - and then get a war going, and within a few months the economy was booming!

In Europe for five years or more men were killing each other with lots of collateral damage. In North America women were acting like men, working in factories and shipyards to produce uniforms, ammunition, airplanes, warships (A hit song of the time was "Rosie the Riveter"). Even schoolchildren were into it: students in high school shop classes made parts for model bombers and fighter planes -- the military needed the models for aircraft recognition classes! Really.                                                                                                          

And the law of money - "money goes where money is" - was in high gear, moving wealth from governments to industrial companies and from companies to their shareholders. Along the way workers were fully employed, and at good wages. These were good times -- if the casualty lists published each day in the newspaper didn't bother you.

So what about World War III? It has already begun, it seems to me. From all quarters of the globe we hear of people with guns and airplanes killing other people with guns and airplane. But it is a big subject, with lots of connected cogs to uncover. Better leave it for the next blog.

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Blog 9   Global Birdseye 1

As the law of money now operates not just locally and nationally, but on a vast global scale, here’s a thought or two about the econopolitical moon’s eye view, starting with.

The mini and the maxi.  I have just returned from New Zealand. Went to Christchurch again. What a change from 2013. Instead of an earthquake-devastated cityscape of damaged buildings and wreckage-cleared downtown blocks from the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes, the dominant feature in 2015 was a forest of cranes — rebuilding. There were jobs aplenty especially in the wreckage-removal, design, and reconstruction trades. 

But here’s a tourists-eye mini observation: accommodation has not kept up with the inflow of workers and money. So you have a classic local example of the law of supply and demand — lodgings, from hotels to backpackers hostels, fully occupied, and more expensive than in 2013. 

A macro economic feature demonstrated in Christchurch, on the other hand, I assume, is the great growth in the economy. Growth That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Growing the economy, yes. If I were a number-cruncher economist, rather than a mere historical observer, I could be producing statistics to prove how good the earthquake had been for the the city. 

And surely it would be tempting to conclude that the two or three hundred people who were unfortunate collateral damage of the earthquake are a small price to pay for the current prosperity of the survivors, and for the great new, earthquake-proof city which is being created.

Money is certainly moving, from the taxpayers (municipal and national) to the shareholders of the many companies engaged in the reconstruction.

Would you call that the movement of wealth from borrowers to lenders? Hey, that’s the law of money!. Money goes where money is.

Just a thought.

Well, I might add one more thought to anticipate the next blog. What other human activity is an even bigger and longer-lasting destroyer-creator than an earthquake, and transfers even more wealth? Look around the world, and see what you can see. Think “collateral damage.”

Till the next blog. Just breath deep of the good air around you. 

Blog 8 Canadians Are Using the F-word!

                                    

 

 Blog #8    Canadians Are Using the F-Word ! 

No, no, not that F-word! 

A recent article in the CCPA  MONITOR, by respected Editor Emeritus, Ed Finn, used a more daring F-word. Title: “Fascism spreading in the U.S.  Will it spill over into Canada?” (Nov 2014, pp 38-39)  Highly recommended reading.

The word fascism came from classical Latin, fasces, which meant a bundle of sticks that was carried before a magistrate as a symbol of power. But the 1930’s regime of Benito Mussolini in Italy put the word into the vocabulary of modern political scientists. 

Finn recalls his own occasional use of it in recent years, then paraphrases fourteen points defining a fascist regime from Laurence Britt, and concludes that “there is evidence of all of these traits thriving in the US, and it’s clear some of them - especially the glorification of the military, suppression of unions, disdain of intellectuals, and obsession with crime and punishment - have greatly increased in Canada, too.” I would have added fraudulent elections, or the attempt thereat, given a recent Canadian scandal about telephone calls directing electors to false polling centres. And maybe something about the use of government money for political propaganda..

I did use the word myself in a privately circulated piece in 2011 when the Conservative government in Canada got their majority. I concluded that future Canadian historians would probably call this period neo-Fascist.

I will take another tilt at this topic in the next blog. Hope you will forgive me for a temporary shift from money to politics, but they are as closely meshed as a set of bevel gears.