The need for practical controls over blind economics rings as true now as it did in 1933, writes Tony Kinsella
FRANKLIN DELANO Roosevelt, the president who led the US out of the depression of the 1930s and through the second World War, is back in fashion - perhaps because we face comparable challenges.
During his second inaugural address in January 1937, Roosevelt pointed out that "we have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics".
Fifty years later, Margaret Thatcher offered us the antithesis, telling Women's Own that ". . . there is no such thing as society . . . it's our duty to look after ourselves". She was echoed by Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street, telling us that "greed is good".
As the sands of 2008 run out, our self-interest cannot afford to be heedless as failed states and emptied houses threaten us.
Failed states come in all shapes, sizes and degrees of failure because of enduring conflicts and civil wars and decades of incompetent and corrupt autocratic government.
Both circumstances almost always require significant external support and intervention. When combined they can create a real witches' brew of collapse.
States do not collapse overnight. Armed conflict inevitably destroys the physical infrastructure - roads, railways, hospitals, power and water systems. Thieving rulers let them fall into ruin. As the state breaks down officials' salaries become irregular and then disappear. Teachers stop teaching, doctors emigrate, security forces become brigands.
Atrocities may be commonplace but the most devastating legacy of a failed state is the generations of children who have no schools to attend and become illiterate peasants or shanty town dwellers.
When eventually a dictator is overthrown, or a conflict consumes itself, the task of reassembling the devastated country is rendered all the more difficult by the absence of trained personnel and an illiterate society.
Afghanistan offers the most dramatic demonstration of the capacity of failed states to destabilise our entire planet. Under its obscurantist Taliban regime it offered the recruiting beacon and base for the September 11th, 2001, attacks on the US. The US National Security Council had warned that Afghanistan had become "a state sponsored by terrorists".
Afghanistan is still struggling to re-establish even the minimum operational level it enjoyed before the 1979 Soviet intervention. Estimates suggest over a million Afghans have been killed over the last 30 years. The country is still at war, is the world's major opium producer, and continues to menace global security despite the presence of over 50,000 International Security Assistance Force troops.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, almost the size of western Europe, has been a failing state since Belgium fled. The US-supported dictator Mobutu robbed the country from 1965 to 1997, and gave us the term "kleptocracy" - where a government systematically pillages its nation's wealth.
The Congo's conflicts, billed "the deadliest war in the world" by Time magazine last May, have caused over five million fatalities. The DR Congo is assisted by the world's largest UN mission, some 17,000 troops, still only half the size of London's Metropolitan Police Force, who struggle to offer protection and stability to its 62 million people. Instability in the Congo menaces much of the Great Lakes region of Africa, the country is a sink for a range of deadly viruses such as ebola, and its tomorrows are compromised by the fact that five million of its children receive no formal education. Somalia is now a non-existent state in that its government hardly exists. Its fishermen have turned to piracy and threaten Suez-bound shipping. Asian, European, Russian and US warships are now, at enormous expense, patrolling off the Somali coast. However successful they prove to be, the threat will remain until a political solution to the Somali vacuum is found.
Haiti offers a different failure profile. Twenty years of US occupation and 30 years of the Duvalier father-and-son kleptocratic dictatorship left it without resources or an operational system of governance.
Poverty drove many of the nine million Haitians, unable to afford bottled gas for cooking, to strip its hillsides of timber for firewood. Every tropical downpour now triggers flooding and mud slides.
A 7,000-strong UN force under Brazilian command with Chinese police units has imposed a degree of order on Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, but the country lacks a functioning judiciary and an operational prison system.
US homeowners are now discovering that failure and consequent menace, even lethal menace, can happen next door just as easily as halfway around the world.
The mortgage crisis is sending foreclosures and eviction figures skyrocketing across the US. Abandoned homes and overgrown gardens depress property values for those neighbours who still manage to meet their mortgage payments.
Couyahoga county around Cleveland, Ohio, recorded 2,500 foreclosures in 1995. The figure for 2007 was 15,000. The Cleveland suburb of Euclid has lost $750,000 in property taxes from 600 foreclosed properties, and has had to borrow $1 million to pay for their security and maintenance. Alarm systems and additional police patrols discourage those who would strip empty houses of wiring and plumbing, while contractors are paid to keep lawns and hedges trimmed.
The threat from empty homes has now become more deadly as abandoned swimming pools become breeding grounds for insects including the culex pipiens mosquito which carries the deadly West Nile virus, according to the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases reporting on an outbreak in California. Almost 30,000 Americans have been infected with this virus since 1999.
Whether next door, or half a world away, collective action is vital for our survival. Franklin Roosevelt's statement that it was urgent ". . . to find through government . . . practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men" rings as true now as it did in 1933.