OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: How the GOP Will Benefit From Impending Economic Collapse

Those fortunate businesses now make more money per unit produced and will do so with fewer employees. The world is not so kind to everyone else, primarily smaller businesses and entrepreneurs, freelancers, and worker bees.

Prices, we learned in Economics 101, are determined by supply and demand. If the demand is such that the market is quite willing to pay any price for it (prescription drugs, gasoline, certain rents) then demand is said to be inelastic.

At the expense of over-simplifying, consumer demand is the arbiter of price only in markets characterized by diffuse competition. Recessions militate against a market of this sort, weeding out all but 'privileged' businesses, primarily those with juicy government contracts or GOP cronies in office. Only in the textbook model, is it assumed that the oligopolist's market demand curve becomes less elastic at prices below a certain point. In markets characterized by the continuing decline in the number of 'sellers', it is obvious that there are fewer motivations for oligopolists to reduce prices. In such a market, the oligopolist (an aspiring monopolist) makes more money selling fewer units at higher prices than could be earned selling more units at lower prices. How many people are out of a job makes no difference to the American right wing for whom Scrooge is their abiding inspiration.

"Are there no workhouses? Are there no prisons...then let them die and decrease the surplus population."
-Scrooge

It is now time to address the concerns of Scrooge. The American right wing, consulted as they are by slick, suited Madison avenue whiz kids will never call the American gulag of FEMA camps by the names 'work houses' or 'prisons'. By any name, they are presumably open and ready for those who fall through the gaping cracks. A perpetually depressed economy is a good source of slave labor. Who benefits? KBR? Halliburton?

Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of Bush's "unlawful enemy combatants." Americans are certain to be among them.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."
Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.
Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.
The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.
Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.
--American Prison Camps Are on the Way, Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet.

There is more on the prospects of work camps, concentration camps, the illegal, unconstitutional war on dissent, and slave labor in America:

American Concentration Camps

In Bush's Orwellian dictatorship, a 'terrorist' is anyone Bush decrees a 'terrorist'. As the article points out, US dissidents are always targeted by the right wing. The Bush regime --having set aside habeas corpus --has the right wing's best chance ever of putting away the Bill of Rights for good. Bush has already done so on paper, by decree! "Stop throwing the Constitution up to me," he is reported by two witnesses to have screamed! "It's just a goddamned piece of paper!" Americans must dissent or risk being thrown into FEMA work camps forever. Bush believes that disagreement with him is 'treasonous'. I deny his authority to define 'treason' upon his unlawful, unconstitutional decree. His proclamation is, therefore, null and void, still-born bullshit!

Bush, having made free Americans traitors by illegal decree, Bush is a real traitor to the very foundation of US law: the Constitution. His war of naked aggression against Iraq, resulting as it has in the deaths of millions of civilians, is a capital crime under Geneva, to which the US is a party, affirmed by US Codes, Title 18, Section 2441, and, likewise, the Nuremberg Principles. Let's get on with the trial of George W. Bush for capital crimes.

"During the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, as labor unions organized and gathered power, as socialism grew in popularity among working and other oppressed peoples, industries owned by Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman, Carnegie, and others, began hiring their own police forces and goon squads to infiltrate labor unions and spy on the political and personal activities of union organizers for the purpose of bringing arrests and convictions and eliminating all socialist activity in the nation. The most notorious example was the Homestead Strike of 1892, when Pinkerton agents killed several people while enforcing the strikebreaking measures of Henry Clay Frick, acting on behalf of Andrew Carnegie."
--Carolyn Baker, PhD, US Government Targets American Dissent - Part I

It has been quipped: a conservative is never so miserable as when times are good. Certainly, miserable grinches got what they wished for. The surplus was pissed away in a series of Bush tax cuts benefiting only the very rich. Now, when the US faces the very real prospect of utter collapse, millions will be thrown out of work. What is to be said of an entire class of people who are happiest when others are miserable? I leave that to another article...

Another "benefit" of a recession is that it purges the excesses of the previous boom, leaving the economy in a healthier state. The Fed's massive easing after the dotcom bubble burst delayed this cleansing process and simply replaced one bubble with another, leaving America's imbalances (inadequate saving, excessive debt and a huge current-account deficit) in place. A recession now would reduce America's trade gap as consumers would at last be forced to trim their spending. Delaying the correction of past excesses by pumping in more money and encouraging more borrowing is likely to make the eventual correction more painful. The policy dilemma facing the Fed may not be a choice of recession or no recession. It may be a choice between a mild recession now and a nastier one later.
--Does America need a recession?

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