Kudos to former U.S. senator and governor Frank Murkowski for his opinion piece about the nation’s energy crisis in the May 18 Sentinel. It is refreshing to see somebody qualified to state clearly where the problems are and how they can be fixed.
Meanwhile, the U.S. stock market has been losing ground or stagnating and inflation is soaring. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s advice to anybody who does not like the high price of fuel is to buy an electric vehicle. To think of it, we are all kind of driving electric vehicles already because every time we fill them with gas, we are in for a shock.
Looking at the increasingly bare shelves in our grocery stores and the price of fuel climbing to record highs, I am having a flashback to 1953 Czechoslovakia (CZ). When communists took over the democratic CZ government in 1948, they changed the capitalist economy to socialism. It took only five years to turn a prosperous CZ into an economic basket case with an energy crisis, supply chain issues, empty stores, high inflation, etc.
To calm the panicking population, president Antonín Zapotocky gave a speech assuring everybody that the CZ economy was doing just great and no monetary reform was going to take place. He said the rumors were a monstrous lie released by the big, bad U.S. imperialists because they were envious of how well the socialistic economy was performing. Two days later, the government closed all of the stores and financial institutions and CZ currency was declared invalid.
Enter the monetary reform: The CZ unit of currency, the koruna/crown, was replaced by a devaluated “new” crown. Every citizen was allowed to exchange a small amount of “old” crowns (equal to about one month’s salary) to “new” crowns at a 5-to-1 ratio. Any amount over that was exchanged at a 50:1 ratio. Certificates of deposits, stocks, bonds, etc. were simply confiscated without reimbursement.
Yes, consumer goods prices came down a little and inflation slowed down, but the standard of living went much lower. As a direct result, CZ was kicked out of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The new CZ currency was thus worthless on international markets, nonconvertible to any hard currency.
The communist CZ government presented the whole fiasco as “the victory of the socialist working man and the defeat of jealous U.S. war mongers,” while Czechs lost most of their savings and had to wait in long lines to buy basic foods.
I am not saying a similar scenario will happen here, but seeing empty shelves and energy-driven inflation makes me kind of nervous for what will come next.
Hey, this is America, the land of plenty and unlimited opportunities. So why are we losing the way and heading in the wrong direction? You can blame the two convenient Ps (pandemic and Putin) only so much.
-- Ivan Simonek
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