The last week of the year is typically the slowest news week of all, because no one is doing much of anything. But if man made news is in short supply, leave it to mother nature to step into the void. I know I don’t have to report the essential information, but I’m compelled to mention the magnitude of the event, because I got the feeling that the mainstream media in the U.S. was a little slow on the uptake. In the first couple of days, the story of what happened in southern Asia was treated like it was just your daily suicide bombing in the middle east. It was, in fact, an event which should cause everyone in the world to rethink how they are living their lives. It was an event that should cause everyone, even the warmongers in Washington and in the Middle East, to step back and realize that their petty quarrels, their guns and their bombs are insignificant in the grand scheme.

It won’t work that way, of course. Men who lust for power and money will continue to kill and continue to claim that moral and religious principles support their savagery.

The mainstream media likes to report natural disasters in terms of money. How many billions will it cost to fix this mess? But the truth is that natural disasters are not economic disasters; they’re economic windfalls. I’m not saying that thousands of people need to die to stimulate the world economy, but that is in fact what happens. Once again, I’m going to talk like the economist which I’m not. A nice steady economy consists of the rich white guys who have most of the money moving it around among themselves. They buy, sell and trade, and they grudgingly write the paychecks which keep the middle class middle. But when something unexpected happens, some of that money ends up moving in a different direction.

Without even conjecturing how the world will deal with what happened in south Asia last week, let’s look at it in a more modest example. Someone’s house burns down, and the papers say the loss was a quarter million, but that’s not true. It might be a loss but it’s not an economic loss. What actually happens is that a quarter million which some insurance company would have invested in stocks and bonds will, instead, go to the contractor who rebuilds the house, and to the retailers who sell him the materials and replace the furniture and appliances. It will go to his employees who’ll pay the rent and buy the groceries. The guys who have all the money will tell you that a good economy is one in which the Dow-Jones average stays comfortably high. That’s only a good economy for rich guys. A good economy for the rest of us is when there’s more money moving around among us.

I’m not advocating disasters on any scale. I’m sure there are better ways to spread the wealth around a little more equitably, but I risk being called a socialist or worse if I describe them. Just don’t buy it when the talking head on the TV news tells you that some impressive number of dollars were lost in some disaster. They weren’t lost at all. They were just redistributed. With any kind of luck, they were shaken out of some rich guy’s pocket into the day to day commerce of the regular folks.

Another economic truism is that resources and money are limited. There’s only so much to go around. That’s not entirely true, of course. New resources are found and exploited all the time. Sometimes they’re natural resources, sometimes they’re manufactured resources, and sometimes they’re just ideas that prove to be lucrative. When new resources are created, governments print more money. Sometimes governments print money even when there are no resources to back it up, but that’s risky business. Anyway, let’s assume that the world’s response to the devastation of southern Asia puts a real bind on the world’s resources. A fair assumption. Although the Bushwhacker grudgingly promised a lot more than the chintzy $15 million he initially wanted to throw into the pot, he’s still spending more every few days to trash Iraq and make his friends richer by rebuilding it than the total he’s willing to give to rebuild south Asia. If money is tight, there’s only one obvious answer, and every voter in the U.S. should be seeing it clearly. Shut down that nonsense in Iraq and send that money where it belongs. If we have to pay Haliburton, we can at least pay them to do some good work instead of the evil work they’re doing currently. Actually, of course, the money and resources which will flow from the U.S. are not the President’s call. Private money will flow, and Congress may have different ideas.

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As soon as the tsunami story started unfolding, I started wondering why so many people were washed away with no warning. I mean places thousands of miles away didn’t even know what hit ‘em. I realize some of these places were a little short on modern communication systems, but you have to assume there’s a telephone around, and every island or town has a Paul Revere just waiting to rise to the occasion. Then I saw a story buried on page 14 about how various celebrities and political figures were evacuated by helicopters from vacation spots. No conclusions here, but big questions.

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Finally, I see that the Grass Valley Union did what every other newspaper does on December 31^st, recapped the most important stories of the past year. So here’s what The Union calls the most important local stories of ‘04. Number one was a vehicle accident. Number two was a bunch of people who went on a group weight loss program. Number three was a county supervisor who got sick and died. Number four was the athletic success of some kids at Nevada Union High School, and number five was that we had a dry, hot summer but no serious fires.