There SHOULD be conscience, principles, virtues, and values tempering HOW we earn / produce money and apportion its spending, but nature has no rules and languages within which we culturally define and suspend ourselves may offer or encourage awful options for channeling behavior.
(Perhaps BackChannels and its editor should take a break right about here — and both may but will forge on another moment).
Who is to say that states from Angola to Burma to Moscow to Tehran should not be feudal or medieval in character?
Should there not be dictators — or other singular powerful personalities — who build worlds around themselves and produce spectacles — in Syria, an entire theater of politics and war — for others?
The “responsive and responsible” governments of democratic open societies (of the west — but, really, anywhere similar ideals and related practices prevail), don’t just obtain money and spend it capriciously or selfishly, and while they certainly produce in their constituencies people who would do that, they may also demand greater virtue on the part of their own business and political elites.
In the modern atmosphere, economic development and urban and rural planning PLUS the integration of public and private interests in development becomes so common and transparent as to become invisible to most people most of the time.
The modern Everyman need not worry about roads and sewers, water pipes, electrical supply, and communications infrastructure and all other such basic building blocks because all contribute some (and many do work in related industries) all of the time.
Boom-and-bust has always been the rule for mining towns and “petro states” but more responsible spending around them may also ease conditions when prices fall or the lode done run out.
The modern communities of Democratic open societies get a very different effect from that kind of broadened cooperation and inclusion.
Posted to YouTube October 20, 2014.
Result: no “ghost towns” — real ones or sets — that aren’t productive.
“My Ecuador” is likely to remain virtual and experienced through Windows.
However, for my correspondent, Ecuador is home, and when he writes in relation to, ” . . . the soldiers try to occupy the strategic places, highways, bridges, airports, refineries, power generation stations, generating dams . . .” and says “we will close the office now and . . . try to buy food in the supermarket, store, and black market . . . .” I’m inclined to believe him.
As has happened in other spaces in relation to the post-Soviet neo-feudalism, reliance on oil revenues and the tumble in wellhead rates has turned out a big kick in the seat of the pants.
It appears that what has brought Ecuadorans out into the streets en masse is not primal hunger and resentment of the capitalist yankee running dog pig — China’s deep into the state these days — but the fearsome will to bequeath hard-earned private gains to progeny without fear of plundering by the state!
According to my source, some military appears to have mobilized, but the arguments and resolution of economic issues to come may play behind the increasingly pale phantom of the bankrupt Soviet, the revanche neo-feudalism in place in Moscow today, and the teetering of the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Clearly, the authoritarian experiments dressed up in socialist talk have failed their states.
The shame is the same: some affected states, Ecuador among them, are simply rich in cultural charm, labor, and natural resources but burdened by leadership that fails to grow the kind of internal economy that might make short work of living comfortably on the land while producing the craft-for-export industries certain to at least help fill in the shortfalls from the gross export of mineral wealth.