Barton was nonplussed, he wondered who his future king was.
“Charles.”
“Oh, I see.”
The both laughed as Barton wondered why foreigners often seemed to imagine Brits as being on talking terms with royalty.
“Our problem is infrastructure and transportation, Don Pedro continued, “that’s why I have to fly everywhere. As los norteamericanos say, time is money.”
“That’s true,” Barton concurred.
“But moving goods is a more serious business, getting them to and from the coast, Barranquilla or Cartagena, is hugely expensive.
“Buenaventura is our most important port, it’s our gateway to Asia and will play a role in the Pacific Alliance, that’s the free-trade pact with Mexico, Chile and Peru. Unfortunately Buenaventura is an exception when it comes to prosperity, it’s got justifiably a bad reputation, drug wars and all kinds of unpleasant business.
“Unfortunately Buenaventura remains a city where crime and violence are the products of poverty. It’s where Colombia’s evils live side by side, where the chainsaw has become a symbol of the city.”
“Chainsaw?”
“To chop up the gangs’ victims,” said Don Pedro wrinkling his nose at the thought of it. “Their business is cocaine, illegal gold mining, smuggling and lots of other bad things. Our government has still another battle on its hands there.”
Narcotics were omnipresent in Latin America - its dark face, only the week before, Barton had read, the head of the Knights Templar drug cartel had been captured by the Mexican police as part of a crackdown on gangs. Gangs and cartels controlled cocaine from Ecuador and Colombia as it transited through Central America on its route to the US.
In Buenaventura, warring gangs, known as los malos, spent a good part of their time fighting turf wars in its poorest neighbourhoods. The remains of those that fell foul of their laws were tortured to death and their remains scattered in the nearby jungle, or tossed into the river, after being dismembered in the miserable wooden huts known as casas de pique overlooking Esterio del Pinal, which led out to Buenaventura Bay and the Pacific.
“Many of the gang members are, or were, part of the Farc. They had little choice but to turn to organised crime once the war started to wind down,” Don Pedro continued with a cynical laugh. “It was the only business where their skills could be could be put to profitable gain.”
Barton looked worried and his future father-in-law hurried to reassure him. “Don’t worry, here at Barichara life is very quiet. There is little poverty and we have a good police force.”
To the amusement of the Colombian, Barton forced a relieved and slightly falsetto laugh.
“Here, let me fill your glass.”
CORNUCOPIA
John Francis, as a seasoned economist and historian, knew better than most the challenge of robotisation. Technology had threatened jobs since the end of eighteenth century and it was Adam Smith who described mass production in his opus magnum: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Francis owned an early copy of the four volume work, bought in an Istanbul second hand bookshop many years back. It was kept it in a prominent place in the library of his Dublin home, a constant reminder of economic fundamentals and change.
Labour and economics were subjects that attracted the attention many historical commentators. The oft cited quotation: History never repeats itself but it rhymes, erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, certainly contained some truths. However, Francis preferred the words from a novel Mark Twain co-wrote with his neighbour Charles Dudley Warner: History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.
Although Adam Smith was the first to have described the economics in terms of manual mass production, Francis saw robotics as its ultimate tool, in fact it was at the heart of his vision of Cornucopia. This was confirmed by the evidence around him whereby almost every industry was affected by the introduction of robotics, from white collar jobs in banking and insurance to steel and automobile production lines.
Advances in the computerisation of production tools progressed in leaps and bounds. Almost every labour oriented task was being optimised by intelligent machines in a tectonic shift that was transforming human society. Cornucopia was on the march and unless politicians and business leaders acted, its effects on those left by the wayside would be devastating.
Some described the changes as cyclic, including Francis, who believed history taught mankind its lessons, even if they were constructed out of the broken fragments of the past. However, the difference with the past was the ever accelerating speed of change, which had reached a point where leaders and institutions were no longer capable of providing an adequate response.
Quantum changes in technology had destroyed jobs: first hollowing out the working classes, then the middle classes, and in almost every sector of commerce and industry.
Moreover, as jobs were increasingly automated, the effect on real wages was inversely proportional.
Soon, Francis told his students, the economy in parts of the UK would resemble that of undeveloped countries. In fact it was already the case, with certain towns and districts of large cities already reminiscent of urban scenes in the Middle East or India, regions where small businesses dominated the economic scheme of things: food and small services, clothing and textiles, kitchen equipment, repairs and spare parts, buses, taxi services and the local transport of goods, pharmacies and medical services, local markets for agricultural products, and small farming tools.
In brief primary manufacturing was absent. With the exception of services, bakers, butchers, restaurants and the like, practically all industrially manufactured goods were imported: the affair of local distributors supplying both consumers and small industries with their needs: building materials, electrical equipment, automobiles, motor cycles, buses, trucks, tractors and household goods.
In pre-industrial times Francis explained to his students, employment was created in great European cities by small trades: butchers, bakers, tailors, carpenters, printers, masons, carriage makers, locksmiths, tanners, beltmakers and so on. Few of these remained and as China and India advanced nothing but the butchers and bakers would be left, and even that was not certain.
An automated robotic future would see the return to a pre-industrial society, where the only jobs would be in small distributive commerce and professional services.
Already manufacturing and major distribution networks were controlled by globalised corporations that robotised the production of automobiles, electrical goods and all the rest, delivered to the consumer by Amazon and Alibaba.
The dawn of Cornucopia was at hand.
The question was how to transform society? How to live in a world of plenitude? Ensure each one got his fair share? To prevent vast waves of uncontrolled immigration from war torn and dystopian societies invading advanced nations.
Europe, already threatened by the loss of secure well-paid jobs, would be forced to defend itself faced with the collapse and dysfunctionality of its neighbours to the south and east. The threat came not only from dystopian nations such as Somalia, Eritrea, or war torn states such as Iraq and Syria, but also resource dependent nations such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries as the price of their commodities collapsed and as new technologies made their commodities irrelevant, as it surely would.
The idea that planet Earth was running out of resources had always baffled Francis, had not technology always found new ways to dig our material needs from the huge globe beneath our feet?
*
Why do future gazers fear aging? Francis often asked his students. It was because they linked an aging population to traditional macro economic concepts: societies in which by definition people worked.
But what if nobody worked? Would age matter?
Until the middle of the second half of the nineteenth century li
fe expectancy at birth in the UK, Europe and the Americas was thirty five, from then onwards it started to rise, steeply, and continues to do so. The rest of the world lagged behind for another forty or fifty years, then followed the same steep curve of increasing life expectancy.
The low figures of the past were mainly due to infant mortality. In the past an adult, who reached the age of thirty five, could expect to live to sixty two or three, today this has increased to eighty.
During the past century or so, the world depended to a large degree on human labour for the production of food, goods and services. However, as Cornucopia emerged, labour needs declined steeply with surplus labour being diverted to the services of people: health care, education and training.
Fears that growth in economic terms would fall were unfounded as the Cornucopia gained ground. As the age of plenty approached all citizens in normal functioning societies could expect to share in the bountiful advantages offered them.
The idea was not new, in 1797, Thomas Pain introduced in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice the concept of a guaranteed minimum income and very much more recently Finland, Switzerland and the Netherlands, all advanced societies, considered the principal of paying all their citizens: every man, woman and child, a minimum wage. It was not an alien idea to modern society where countries like France provided aid to six million people a year in the form of unemployment, sickness, old age and a whole range of other benefits.
“Those like our friends at the City & Colonial,” Francis gleefully explained, “who imagine we need more children to replenish the workforce and provide potential consumers, are akin to nineteenth century chimney sweeps complaining gas and electricity would put their ten year olds out of work.”
Those who talked of demographic suicide and the spectre of collapsing pension schemes, forgot more people needed more jobs to pay contributions … jobs that could no longer be provided for the simple reason machines had already taken over them, even in China, where computers, cell phones and automobiles were manufactured in workerless factories in Chongqing, Shenzhen and Taipei.
Another social and economic model was needed to live with Cornucopia and its bounties. The question was whether or not politicians were up to the task? Francis would have liked to have spoken of a governing class that was more interested in the future of the people they governed rather than stuffing their pockets, where jobs for the boys was the rule, where former ministers and prime ministers were rewarded with rich sinecures, whatever future disaster they bequeathed the people.
Could a system where old school ties counted more than real innovative talent survive. A system that proposed a referendum that risked throwing Britain’s membership of the EU to the wind on a whimsical, demagogic, vote getting promise; a system where the honey pot permitted politicians and public figures to indulge in their fantasies, however perverted or vile; a system that allowed war mongers and complaisant friends of dictators to become multimillionaires.
A CLIMATE OF FEAR
Following the brutal murder of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Moscow the climate of fear deepened. Late on a Friday evening as Nemtsov walked home after dining with his girlfriend at the GUM shopping mall on Red Square, he was brutally shot down as the couple crossed the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge between the Kremlin and St Basil’s Cathedral on the Moskva River.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking to the international press, described the killing as a heinous crime, however, opposition leaders had little doubt the crime was the work of Kremlin agents.
The listing of political assassinations grew longer: Sergei Yushenkov, Yuri Shchekochikin, Anna Politkovskaya, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Barburova and Natalia Estimirova and now Nemtsov who was guilty of exposing corruption and opposing the Kremlin’s war in the Ukraine, a crime in Putin’s ultra-nationalist Russia, in which Nemtsov was seen as a traitor with a zero chance of his murderer being arrested.
Russia’s problem was not that Putin had created the system, it was already there, and had been since the time of the czars. As for his system of crony capitalism it had been in place since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The distribution of the Soviet state’s assets was intended to create a market economy, but tragically for the Russian people a large part of the national wealth had fallen into the hands of a new elite, the so called oligarchs: who John Francis compared to the Muscovy Boyars of the 14th and 15th centuries.
In the immediate post-Soviet Russian period, the government established a voucher programme for the distribution of shares in certain large industries, known as combinats, the idea was to prevent the Mafiyosa from seizing ownership. These vouchers were allocated to workers and management alike and could be exchanged for shares in the companies where they worked.
The shares were denominated in roubles, which in that chaotic post-Soviet period went through a series of successive catastrophic devaluations and dismayed workers soon found themselves holding almost worthless paper. Having little faith in the state most hurried to offload their shares and vouchers for hard cash, that is to say dollars, to senior management and insiders, who abetted by banks and powerful opportunists effectively seized control of these huge combinats: the keys to vast wealth.
This new class of capitalist entrepreneurs, known as oligarchs, quickly reorganised their newly acquired assets, generating profits and leveraging loans to finance modernisation and expansion.
Soon after, the cash strapped government, in order to raise funds, organised bids for the lease of non-privatised state industries, including prized national assets such as Norilsk Nickel, Yukos, Lukoil, Sibneft, Vostokneft, Yakutneft and Surgutneftegas.
The auctions were rigged and when Boris Yeltsin’s desperate government defaulted on the loans, as they inevitably would, the oligarchs became the effective owners of these enterprises whose wealth potential in oil and minerals was astronomical.
It was a wind fall of staggering proportions, never had the world seen such a carve up of a nation’s assets. For the new owners there was a catch and that was future governments could question the legality of such too good to be true acquisitions, so the oligarchs, anticipating the problem, hurried to bank their wealth offshore, beyond the reach of the Kremlin, if ever its incumbents decided to reverse the governments past decisions.
THE MOTHERLAND
Ekaterina translated as they watched a documentary entitled The Path To The Motherland produced by RT, the leading Russian TV channel, controlled by the Kremlin. It told the story of Vladimir Putin’s plan to annex Crimea and how it was prepared well before the peninsula’s referendum on self-determination.
In late February 2014, at an all night Kremlin meeting, orders were given to prepare for the takeover, which commenced when armed men seized the regional parliament and government buildings and raised the Russian flag.
The meeting took place following the resignation of the pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych, who immediately decamped to Russia, where he then retracted his resignation. Putin admitted that the decision to rescue Yanukovych, who he feared would be murdered, had been decided at the same meeting
When RT described the armed men as volunteers, Ekaterina shook her head.
Francis gave a questioning look.
“Very few volunteers who would act without the Kremlin’s approval. You’ve seen what happens to unapproved demonstrations here in Moscow.”
Ekaterina was not active in any opposition movement, but like many educated Russians she was a sceptic when it came to the Kremlin’s, and especially Putin’s, announcements.
“It’s for the people, they believe everything he tells them. It makes them feel good.”
“Don’t they care about the effects of the sanctions?”
“No,” she said laughing, “most have nothing anyway. It’s only Moscow and Piter that feel the effect… and they’re not starving, they just have to readjust, eat Kolbasa.”
“Piter? Kolbasa?”
“Petersburg.�
��
“Oh… and Kolbasa?”
“That’s what some say led to the collapse of the Soviet Union,” she said amused at his innocence.
John looked at her as though she was pulling his leg.
“It’s our version of American Bologna sausage. They called it sobachya radost … the dog’s paradise,” she explained, even more amused by the look on his face.”
“I’ll explain John. Kolbasa was something Mikoyan invented, he was out food minister in the twenties. The people loved it, but when hard times came in the seventies, they changed the recipe and replaced part of the meat with some kind of cheap filler and it became a Soviet joke.”
“A joke?”
“Yes. What’s long and green and smells like kolbasa?”
He looked blank.
“A Russian train,” she answered with tears of laughter running down her face, not only at her joke, but the look on his face.
“You’re too serious for an Irishman John.”
He smiled.
“I have to admit you Russians have a good sense of humour when things are looking down.”
“We’re used to it.”
Ekaterina remembered Soviet times as a young girl and the even more difficult period that had followed it. Her husband had died a hero in Putin’s fight against the Chechen rebels after the newly elected president had launched his war with the not very Churchillian words: We’ll blast them out, even in the shit-house, and he did.
After her loss, Ekaterina had brought up their daughter with the help of her parents.
“To understand Vladimir Vladimirovich, you must remember his word’s,” she told Francis “… it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
PART EIGHT
TRANS-SIBERIAN
“We Chinese have never had much love for Russia,” Lao Wu told Kennedy. “Let me tell you a little about Imperial Russia’s colonial expansion eastward, how we were forced to cede the Far East and parts of Siberia to the czars … the Amur Basin and Vladivostok … in different treaties, then Outer Manchuria in the Treaty of Peking in 1860.”
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