Foreign wars that only benefit international corporations and their ruling plutocrats are also responsible for widening the social gap between poor and rich. The poor spill their blood to protect the business interests of the wealthy elites who neither need their labor nor want to pay decent wages. Keep you ear and eye on the NATO conference in Wales next week. There will be precious little talk of peace, but plenty talk of confronting "an expansionist Russia". Ask yourself this question: How many nations that share a border with Russia in Europe are now members of NATO compared to 1990? Unless you are a plutocrat neo-imperialist, the answer might surprise you. Europe will join the US in putting the financial screws to Gazprom, Russia's 800lb economic gorilla, but it probably will not be enough to dissuade Mr. Putin from his plan for the Donbass. The energy scimitar cuts both ways in Ukraine and Europe. Russia has more leverage when it comes to energy; it again demonstrated its willingness to foster Chinese-Russian cooperation by signing an agreement in Yakutsk to begin construction of a new 3,968km pipeline linking gas fields in Siberia to China, soon to be the world's biggest economy. In return for $400bn Russia will transport 38bn m³ of gas over thirty years. That contract represents a real pivot to the east, not just rhetorical fireworks.
Here is something else to think about. Marx projected the eventual crisis of capitalism in his seminal critique, Das Capital. There he wrote that the capitalist's blind faith in ever expanding markets supplied by ever-growing production utilizing slave wages, unlimited natural resource exploitation, and ever-cheaper credit would lead to economic collapse (he did not mention ecological disaster) through over-supply and under-consumption. One case on point: Samsung, the world's #1 producer of cell phones, sells about 930 million units world-wide a year, extrapolating from 2013 last quarter sales. World cell phone capacity including Apple, LG Electronics and Lenovo is estimated about 2bn a year. The world's population growth in 2013 was 69 million for a total world population of 7.1bn. Are you a rocket scientist? No, well, you only need to understand arithmetic to realize there is a gross over-production of cell phones in the world. This condition will lead to a price collapse unless everybody decides immediately they need 28 mobile phones for every baby born in the world, every year! No amount of Madison Avenue cynicism can induce that amount of perceived need. Fully functional cellphones are thrown in the trash because the resale value of a cellphone is practically nil. Even smart phones resell at a 95% discount. A similar over-production exists for automobiles. Just check out a seaside new car dump in South Korea, Japan, Brazil, UK or the USA. It is the crisis of capitalism, and it was predicted by an irrelevant, antiquated economic genius, Karl Marx.
