More dots to connect

Some dots come from memories 50 or more years old, others from more recent events. Collectively they make a sad, grim picture. In the late 60s a wise and thoughtful Arab from the Emirates expressed outrage at the way Americans were squandering oil from his region: burning many tons night after night to propel B52 bombers half way across the world to destroy phantom "communist" enemies, actually rural subsistence farmers in Laos and Cambodia; he was as outraged by this as by the way "his" oil was helping to generate electricity used to illuminate enormous advertising signs in Las Vegas. Speaking on the BBC he foretold the collapse of the American economy because actions like these were unsustainable. (I met him when he recruited me to write for his Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, a brilliant engineer and polymath). My next dot is the cost of all the wars the USA has fought since the end of the world war in 1945. I heard a respected economist offer the estimate that the unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone have cost $86billion and counting (as well as 5-6 thousand American lives, 10-20 times as many lives of the local people, 50-60 times as many permanently maimed). All the money is borrowed too. Big wars like the war in Vietnam probably cost more, "little" wars and covert wars in several Central American countries (Honduras, Nicuagua, Grenada) and non-wars just confrontations and interference in local affairs, don't come cheap either. Most of the bribes, slippery deals and shady tricks were paid with borrowed money. Meantime, the industrial and intellectual base of the USA were under attack by naked greed. Stockholders, investors, demanded profits and higher dividends every quarter, and the easiest way to achieve this was to outsource American industries to countries without irritating labour and environmental laws, let the plants at home rust away, and American workers take lower paying part-time jobs flipping hamburgers or working in call centres. Investors were happy, for a while anyway. Then investment advisers, investment banks, real estate speculators, and dishonest brokers got even greedier. Bernard Madoff, a revered investment counselor couldn't possibly be dishonest, but he was, and many fortunes were wiped out when his Ponzi scheme collapsed. Then the housing bubble burst, and several million people were not just bankrupt, they were homeless too. Greed elected to public office anyone who promised lower taxes, no matter how that was achieved. One easy target was schools and school teachers; so the incubators of the future leaders and innovators were smashed too. Greed and indolence (watching others work and play rather than working and playing) led to a nation of obese people. There's more, much more. More Americans believe the creation myths in the bible than believe the scientific evidence of evolutionary biology. More believe the government they elect is their enemy than believe it is elected to do their bidding (the evidence that elected officials answer to lobbyists and special interests rather than to the people who elected them supports this cynical view of government and governance). A little of this litany of wrong-doing and mindless nation-destruction was apparent to Wendy and me when we lived in Vermont in 1964-65 and it's gotten much worse since then. We wanted no part of it, so we went to live in Scotland instead. But the Brits, even the Scots, have their own problems, living on borrowed money and rapidly shrinking capital from the vanished Empire. Greed became rampant there too in Thatcher's time. The nation's network of rail and road and telecommunications were "sold" to friends of the governing party who looted them and invested nothing in infrastructure or maintenance. What distresses me most about all this is the abject failure of any national leader anywhere to show evidence of thinking and planning further ahead than the beginning of the next election campaign, and in this respect, the present government in Canada may be among the worst offenders in the world. Be sure their sins will find them out.