A Crock and a Hard Place: Spurious Choices and the IMF

Ukraininan parents forced to choose between warmth and food for their kids? The IMF would have us believe that profligate Ukrainians should pay more of their "fair" share to fight off the brutal, eastern winter cold. If this means pulling their belts another notch or three tighter, so be it. This is international politics as usual at the expense of the defenseless and voiceless. In an era of recession across most of the world, when deficit spending should be recognized as a useful tool of pubic policy, it is, instead, neutered by self-serving politicians. Great good could be done through guarantees alone, not even cash, yet they stoop to count nickles and dimes. Leaders everywhere build their careers on spurious choices: heat or food, Russia or the West; Rome or Moscow. The choice should never be food or heat: the self-evident answer is that they must have both. The answer can only be Russia and the West: a geographic fact (complicated by 70 years of shared infrastructure) that just won't go away. Both Rome and Moscow, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, have parts to play: a metaphysical question in the end, but one with potentially bloody consequences in the real world. Where are the insistent public cries for peace from religious "leaders"? Francis? Ukrainians of all nationalities are certainly far from blameless in this mess. Nonetheless, spurious choices continue to lure Ukrainian boys, and many are truly boys, to join the anonymous rows of club-toting police. Spurious choices lead their opponents, boys too, and girls, from the same streets, schools, and families to pick up rebar and chunks of concrete on their way to the stand-off. Let's hope they all just walk away. Choose peace with their feet.