War. What is it good for? Well, financially, absolutely everything. WW2 pulled America out of the depression and this lesson has never been lost on big business. A long drawn out not-too-destructive-at-home war is the one and the Cold War had it all. Endless money to buy absurd weaponry and no thought of morality, use of resources, etc.
What could be as good, now that the evil empire has embraced billionaires and poverty again? Well, if you can both direct a war and use your own companies to supply the expensive weaponry for the boys, then you are in a stunning economic position. And all underwritten by the tax payers. It helps if you are both the Vice President and a leading businessman.
Let’s knock it down and build it up. Why the Iraqi business community would be thought to want to enrich westerners, when they could enrich themselves is one question that seems to have been unasked. “Come on generals don’t be slow, man this is war a go go.” Here, Country Joe memorably described financial opportunities in Vietnam, but his line “Be the first one on the block to have your boy come home in a box.” is more striking.
I thought about this whilst watching the lovely Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a young man killed in Iraq, who would not lie down and accept her tragedy with good grace and dignity. A bit of me thought that she should have known this could happen and what about all the poor Iraqi mothers who are not heard. Then I thought no, go for it Cindy and I wished I’d seen her when she came to Scotland.
This is Casey's song and it just goes on and on.
'Hamish ' is an antiwar writer socialist- scientist and musician living in Scotland.
As one who has lived through the great depression I am quite aware that overpopulation and under consumption caused it. In spite of the Kenesian remedies of Roosevelt it took World War II to unglut the marketplace. Keyens knew that war would perform this miracle and proposed public works projects; but while they alleviated the suffering of the people they did not do the job. When I got out of the army in 1945 I could not buy my wife a car or a washing machine. For four years the only things produced were war materials that could be blown up or rapidly become obsolete. Five years later the economy was glutted again and it was time for another war. Since then we have had the cold war, Korea, Vietnam and dozens of battles in South America over the war on drugs. Modern corporations cannot exist without war but this policy is bankrupting us. Depressions are not a natural catastrophe like a hurricane. There is no scarcity of consumer goods in a depression; there is only a scarcity of money. The desire for peace must be accompanied by a recognition that the corporation business form has to be replaced by cooperatives.
Nobody owns a corporation. It was made that way to separate ownership from liability. It is a robot that, unlike Isaac Azimov’s robot that had a prime directive, “thou shalt not harm a human being,” has a prime directive , “Thou shall adhere to the bottom line.” Everyone in a corporation is an employee. The C.E.O. is an employee who has been hired to take the rap for any criminal activity that the corporation engages in. That is why they are so highly paid. Both Tom Englehardt and Chalmers Johnson warn us about a coming financial crisis. We can either choose revolution or getting rid of the corporations. The trouble with revolution is that it often leaves the people under worse bastards than they had before. The problem with socialism is that the government did not turn the tools of production over to the workers that use them . . . It turned them over to the government. We need capital and we need investors but we do not need corporations.
by
gramps (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 107 comments)
on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 at 9:17:10 AM
1 comments
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