Cornucopia

by John Francis Kinsella

  *

  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 life 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 te
lls 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.”