https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/10/01/the-mad-propaganda-push-to-normalize-war-profiteering-in-ukraine/
The Mad Propaganda Push To Normalize War Profiteering In Ukraine
There’s been an astonishingly brazen propaganda push to normalize war profiteering in Ukraine as Kyiv coordinates with the arms industry and western governments to convert the war-ravaged nation into a major domestic weapons manufacturer, thereby turning Ukrainians into proxies of the military industrial complex as well as the Pentagon.
At an event in Kyiv which hosted 250 “defense” industry corporations from 30 different countries on Friday, President Zelensky gave a speech urging war profiteers to open factories in Ukraine to cut out the middleman of securing and delivering so many weapons from abroad. This is an investment that the arms industry would ostensibly have plenty of time to set up, given that western officials are now going out of their way to communicate to the public that this war will stretch on for many more years to come.
Zelensky’s speech twice made use of the phrase “defense-industrial complex”, and used the phrase “arsenal of the free world” no fewer than three times.
“Ukraine is developing a special economic regime for the defense-industrial complex,” Zelensky said. “To give all the opportunities to realize their potential to every company that works for the sake of defense — in Ukraine and with Ukraine or that wants to come to Ukraine.”
“Right now, the most powerful military-industrial complexes are being determined, as are their priorities and the global standard of defense. All of this is being determined in Ukraine,” Zelensky tweeted with photos from the event.
This move has been accompanied in recent weeks by some of the most appalling mass media headlines that I have ever seen, all geared toward normalizing the military industrial complex in the eyes of the public.
In an amazingly awful Wall Street Journal op-ed titled titled “In Defense of the Defense Industry” and subtitled “Populists of the right and left attack U.S. companies that make weapons. Who do they think protects us?”, Future of Capitalism’s Ira Stoll argues that the military industrial complex is actually a wonderful thing we should all love and support.
“The weapons industry protects America and its allies, keeping us safe from ruthless enemies who would otherwise exterminate or enslave us,” Stoll writes. “Raytheon helps make weapons systems that defend Israeli civilians against attacks from Iran-backed terrorist groups. These include the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, SkyHunter interceptor systems and Tamir missiles. Raytheon also produces the Javelin antitank missile that Ukraine has used against Russian armor and the early-warning radars that would detect incoming missiles aimed at the U.S.”
Stoll does not name the alternate universe he is describing in which the US military is used to keep Americans safe rather than to advance imperial interests abroad.
Another recent Wall Street Journal article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair” and subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield” glorifies the way war machinery is being field tested on human bodies to the benefit of war profiteers.
“The Panzerhaubitze howitzer is part of an arsenal of weapons being put to the test in Ukraine in what has become the world’s largest arms fair,” writes WSJ’s Alistair MacDonald. “Companies that make the weapons being used in Ukraine have won orders and resurrected production lines. The deployment of billions of dollars worth of equipment in a major land war has also given manufacturers and militaries a unique opportunity to analyze the battlefield performance of weapons, and learn how best to use them.”
A Reuters article from two weeks ago titled “At London arms fair, global war fears are good for business” gushes over how much money is being raked in by arms manufacturers as a result of this war, with one unnamed arms industry executive telling Reuters, “War is good for business.”
Just the other day CNN anchor Erin Burnett followed up some clips of “far right lawmakers” voicing their opposition to funding for the Ukraine proxy war by pausing to explain to her audience that this funding is actually good for Americans, because it goes straight into the US arms industry.
“It’s worthwhile with all of this gaining some steam in public perception to be clear on some facts,” Burnett said. “First and foremost, the vast majority of this money is going to American companies and jobs, right, because those are the people that are making the Abrams tanks, the ammo and everything else. And you take Lockheed Martin, which makes the HIMARS, that have been core to Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the company announced it’s going to increase its workforce in Camden, Arkansas, by 20 percent, just because of this new demand.”
“That money is going to America,” Burnett added.
All this propaganda energy is going into normalizing the act of war profiteering because if you let the idea stand on its own, it would make people scream in horror. The fact that a deliberately-provoked war is being used as a giant field demo to show prospective buyers and investors how effective various weapons systems can be at ripping apart human bodies in order to profit from all this death and destruction is more nightmarish than anything any dystopian novelist has ever come up with.
Ukraine is a giant advertisement for weapons of mass slaughter, and the cost of that corporate ad is not money but human blood. If you look right at this thing it absolutely chills you to the bone. Which is why so much effort is being poured into making sure people don’t look at it.
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https://ourfiniteworld.com/2023/09/25/can-india-come-out-ahead-in-an-energy-squeeze/
Can India come out ahead in an energy squeeze
I was recently asked to be a keynote speaker for World Management Conference (WMC 2023) in Patna, India. The academic group that asked me to speak was particularly concerned about Complexity and Sustainability. A PDF copy of the presentation is available at this link.
The primary things I pointed out to the group were the following:
- The slower the growth, the more sustainable an economy is over the moderately long term.
- Energy consumption and the use of complexity tend to rise together.
- Too much complexity can lead to collapse.
- In general, the most “efficient” economies can be expected to do best.
- Over the long term, all economies will collapse.
- There have been shifts in which economies get a major share of available energy supplies. Shifting patterns are likely again in the future.
- India may come out ahead in an energy squeeze because its warm climate and conservative culture allow its energy consumption per capita to remain low.
A great deal of my presentation was simply a restatement of the words on the slides, in a slightly different way. So, my comments on the slides will be quite brief.
Of course, after complexity solves problems, population continues to grow, creating a similar problem all over again. This likely leads to the need for even more complexity.
My crude drawing represents the difference between slow growth in population and fast growth in population. Rapid growth is difficult to sustain for very long because arable land and fresh water don’t grow.
There is a similar problem if fossil fuel energy is being used. If growth in consumption is very fast (for example, China’s growth pattern starting in 2002), it becomes impossible to keep up the pattern. There can be two different problems: (a) Running short of fuels, leading to the need for higher-cost extraction and/or imports, and (b) Overpromising in the financial markets, leading to debt defaults and stock market crashes. China seems to be encountering both difficulties, even though its population is falling, rather than growing.
Organizing workers to plant and harvest crops represented a major step up in complexity, relative to hunting and gathering.
A metal tool, such as the one shown on Slide 5, greatly helped the productivity of farmers compared to using a sharpened rock or a piece of wood as a tool, or using only bare hands.
Of course, this list of uses is very incomplete. For example, both coal and natural gas are burned to create electricity.
As an example of a) above, a metal shovel allows more food to be grown. Food is, of course, an energy product that humans eat. Another example would be better drilling approaches that allow more oil to be extracted from a well.
Regarding b), greater complexity makes cars more fuel-efficient cars, making the cars less expensive to operate. This makes them more affordable, so more people can afford to buy them. This is known as Jevons’ Paradox. Although the devices look more efficient, the fact that more people can afford them allows the total amount of fuel used to increase.
Item c) relates to adding “buying power.” If more people can afford goods because of more government spending or more government debt, the added buying power keeps the demand, and thus the prices, of energy products up higher than they otherwise would be. The higher prices motivate businesses to extract harder-to-access energy resources that might not be profitable to extract if the prices were lower.
We extract the least expensive to extract oil, coal, or natural gas first. Even if our techniques get better, at some point, the price of fossil fuels used in growing and transporting of food becomes unreasonably high. Poor people, especially in low-income countries, have a hard time affording an adequate diet.
Slide 14 shows a chart I put together to try to explain the physics-based way economies are built. In a way, they are built in layers, with new businesses being added at the top, over old businesses, and new laws being added to old sets of laws. New human customers are added, too, and some die or move away.
Every action that contributes to GDP requires energy of some kind. It could be human energy powered by food, or human energy plus fossil fuel powered energy. Moving a truck or train requires energy. Even moving electrons, as in heating food or transferring electrons within transmission lines, takes energy.
One thing that keeps the system in balance is the fact that many of the consumers are also employees. If wages are not high enough (particularly for the poorer members of the economy), it becomes increasingly difficult for them to afford the basic goods and services that they need for living. Of course, changing interest rates or the availability of credit also affects the affordability of goods and services.
Early in the life of the economy, both energy consumption and complexity rise, as depicted in The Energy-Complexity Spiral by Joseph Tainter, illustrated on Slide 12,
At some stage, the economy reaches a point of too much wage and wealth disparity. Poor people cannot afford the necessities of life. Riots by poor people become common, as they did about 2018 and 2019, indirectly because of low wages and low benefit levels. Governments find ways to make goods more affordable, as many did in 2020 (partly by ramping up money supply and partly by limiting travel, thereby reducing oil demand and thus oil prices).
As the economy tries to bounce back, inflation and broken supply lines can become problems, as they did in 2021. More fighting tends to take place, as it did with the Ukraine conflict beginning in 2022. In some ways, the economy begins to sound like the book Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, with a great deal of censorship of opinions not conforming to government-sponsored views.
If the problem really is a resource problem that cannot be fixed with more complexity, the high level of wage disparity will ultimately lead to the population falling because poor people cannot afford necessities. Large cities are particularly prone to collapse. GDP can be expected to fall at the same time.
Politicians cannot admit that such a problem might be lying ahead because they want to be reelected. Educators want students to think that high-paying jobs for people with advanced education will continue to be available in the future. Businesses want people to believe that the cars and homes that they are purchasing will be worthwhile investments for many years in the future. Mainstream media has no choice but to tell the stories governments and businesses want told. Governments offer research grants on projects associated with the favored technologies, giving financial incentives to publish academic papers supporting the chosen narrative.
The whole process is assisted by the fact that academic areas within universities each seem to exist within their own ivory towers. Researchers within economics departments don’t understand that there is a physics reason for the world’s high energy consumption; “scientific modelers” don’t understand the limits of a finite world. Scientific modelers assume that growth can happen indefinitely, while both history and physics indicate that this is impossible.
The chart shown on Slide 19 is a repeat of Figure 1, shown at the beginning of this post. In this chart, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an organization of 37 rich countries of the world, including the US, Canada, most of the countries of Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. Its energy consumption clearly has been squeezed down since 2002, when China’s energy consumption started rising after it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001.
As mentioned on Slide 18, the share of world energy consumption of Russia (+ closely affiliated countries) has been squeezed back for a very long time. This may be part of the reason why Russia seems to be so unhappy.
India’s share of world energy consumption is small, but it has been growing.
The share of energy consumption by countries in the Rest of the World has also been growing. This group would include OPEC countries, plus the many poor countries around the world.
In item 4 on Slide 20, regarding vehicles being small, I mean that motorcycles, 3-wheeled auto rickshaws, and mini trucks are used to a much greater extent in India than in the richer countries of the world.
It might be mentioned that China’s per-capita energy consumption is now almost as high as that of Europe. At the time it joined the WTO in 2001, China’s energy consumption per capita was only about 25% of high as that of Europe. China would now seem to be in danger of having its share of world energy consumption squeezed back because it is itself becoming relatively rich.
The chart shows that India’s oil consumption has been rising, while its oil production has been trending downward for about a decade. Imports make up the difference. In an oil-constrained world, the question is whether oil imports will really continue to be available at an affordable price. Diesel and jet fuel are in particularly short supply.
India, like pretty much everywhere else in the world, gets the vast majority of its energy supply from fossil fuels. Using the Energy Institute’s (EI’s) way of counting, about 88% of India’s energy consumption in 2022 came from fossil fuels.
It is confusing to know how to count wind and solar because their electricity is not available when needed. If they are given credit as if they provide dispatchable electricity (which is EI’s approach), then their combined percentage is 6%. If wind and solar are counted as only replacing fuel, then their combined share of energy supply is about 2% or 3% in 2022. The International Energy Agency (IEA) uses the approach providing the lower indications, as do many researchers.
When an economy starts shrinking, as shown in Slide 15, there is a problem with supply lines breaking in an overly complex society. Much of the world experienced some broken supply lines in 2020 and 2021. We can expect more broken supply lines again in future years.
Supply lines are likely to get shorter because of the shortages of diesel and of jet fuel. In particular, fewer goods and services are likely to be shipped across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. More trade will be regional in nature. For example, India will probably have a larger share of its total trade with other countries of Southeast Asia than now.
We can expect more fighting among countries because the world will basically be in a situation of “not enough to go around.” India would do well to stay out of these wars.
Intermittency of electrical supply will likely become more of a problem in the future. Replacement parts after storms will be more difficult to obtain.
It is tempting for high energy economies to forget the importance of traditions and religion. Religions help bind groups together. Their laws and traditions give people a way to live with one another, without having a huge army of police being hired to keep order.
As economies become richer, the belief tends to become: The government can save us from all problems. We no longer need our traditional beliefs. All we need to do is focus on more even distribution of goods and services.
Unfortunately, the economy doesn’t work this way. Governments can print money, but they can’t print additional food and water. With broken supply lines, essential commodities such as fertilizer become unavailable. Population must drop for the economies to get back in balance. This is the reason that wars become more frequent, as complexity limits are hit.
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