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The Price at the Pump is about to soar and the ragged hardships of those making under 100K a year is about to get harder.
All we (the West) have managed to do is translate total war over to the economic sphere. Total war in whatever form is totally wrong because it inevitably impacts on civilians.
The whole premise of the modern law of war was to confine it to the military and to military targets. Area bombing was wrong because, by definition, it targeted civilians in order to terrorize them into submission. (Those were the exact words of the theory.) Indiscriminate non-targeted sanctions are no different.
Americans don't seem to realize that, in an interdependent world, economic sanctions automatically boomerang. Hit the other guy; smash yourself. (For the philosophically inclined it's pure Schopenhauer.) That is exactly what is happening now. We hit Russia's oil production and smash ourselves in the wallet.
And, in purest Orwellian fashion, we are told by our politicians that this is good for us; that getting even broker still is something we should take pride in... for freedom's sake.
If the political elites actually had to suffer what ordinary people are told to endure, there would be less war and less sanctions.
What can we in this paragon of liberal democracy do about this? Actually nothing. Our rulers are invulnerable and indifferent to any pathetic squeaks of protest
