Reading an article about the Russian-Manchu border Conflicts in a recent issue of The Economist I was surprised when I read this sentence:At first I thought it strange that there was a reference to the Durian fruit in the middle of an article about a desperate outpost of Russian settlers on the Amur River. Could there have been a mispelling?

But it was repeated. Backtracking confirmed that the only "Daurians" mentioned were people. Then I noticed the reference to the term "man devouring demons" used by the Chinese to describe these Russians. Though I vaguely remembered reading the term I had always thought it was oriental hyperbole or perhaps a poor translation from Mandarin to a western language. Apparently not.

Since I was reading this over dinner with my partner - a terrible habit for which he has frequently and justifiably admonished me - I asked if he had noticed the references to cannibalism in the article, which he said he had read. He had not. Scouring the article carefully I noticed that the word had never been used. My partner is an editor, and good enough to have made enough to retire at 50 on the income from doing it. Yet he had "speed read" the article, apparently with little interest in the subject matter, and made the same mistake that we all make.

It is ironic that the only developed country not finding its way out of the "Great Recession" of its own creation is the United States. And it is perhaps notable that a natural disaster in Haiti has done to that nation what financiers based in the USA nearly did to the world economy.

The parallel has another aspect to it. Haiti's plight, though not of its own making, owes a lot to the absolute and wilful decimation of its own natural resources. Our economic problems are worsened by the wilful decimation of the financial markets by greedy financial corporations.

But the roots of the destruction of the USA industrial sector began well before the current administration and persisted throughout both democratic and republican administrations. And all economists not in collusion with the perpetrators know and/or have said that. Unfortunately few of those economists are in the employ of the Obama administration:They must change.