Fri Feb 10 2012

War Keyensianism
by John H. St.John
November 6, 2005

Sir Maynard Keyenes idea to rid the glut of consumer products that periodically choke industrial production, and are the primary cause of economic depression, was to use the government treasury to create work by financing public works projects. This was tried by the Roosevelt administration but didn't work. The reason was that it further stimulated industry to the point of adding more surpluses to the pile of consumer goods that choked the economy and it wasn't until the outbreak of WWII that the great depression ended.

Perhaps it is unfair to call the deliberate creation of wars that kept the economy purring war keyenesianism. Keyenes was perfectly aware that war would solve the problem of overproduction and under consumption and hoped for a peaceful method of accomplishing the same end but it didn't work. The reason was quite obvious. When I came back from Europe after WWII and picked up my young wife and child to begin life as a family man I couldn't even buy her a refrigerator. The only used car I could buy was an antiquated Model A Ford. For four years nothing had been produced that couldn't be blown up, or became obsolete. Prosperity was here. It lasted for about five years when the market again became glutted. It was time for another war.

When it became obvious that massive retaliation with nukes was not producing a cold war, but a cold peace, the theory of "flexible response" was pursued. This was the brush-fire war theory of Henry Kissinger put into action. It involved the creation of the civil war type states dividing countries by drawing a line and calling them North Korea and South Korea, or North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The CIA carried this out. Now war could be conducted without massive destruction by nuclear war-heads. The death of the Soviet Union ended the cold war and the CIA and the Reagan administration kept the ball rolling by sending troops to Central America to fight popular uprisings. We had the war on drugs, the assault on small countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador and are now the "War in Iraq". The military industrial complex has been getting over half of our national tax money and a public that is so accustomed to war doesn't even question why we need 12 air-craft carrier groups when there is no possible adversary.

I am of the opinion that the problem of overproduction and under consumption is not caused by capitalism but is caused by corporatism. We need a free market, but corporations with their grip on patents and their mergers are the enemy of a free market. A truly free market involving businesses with an owner and not a CEO don't glut the market. A small business that produces more than it can sell will go out of business. Not so the corporations who can take Chapter 11 bankruptcy and be back on the big board the following year. They cannot be reformed any more than a robot that has been created to rob a bank can come to Jesus. Corporations have to go! Mussolini said that fascism should properly be called corporatism because it is a marriage of corporation power and state power. Ed Kennedy said that the Republicans get 95% of their money from the corporations and the Democrats 75%. Where does that leave us? According to Benito the only thing saving us from an open terroristic dictatorship is the 30% that come from the public.

The rationale given by the Supreme Court judge that decided corporations were "persons" and entitled to all the rights of a human being under the IV Amendment was that the economic life of the country depended upon corporations and they had to have these rights in order to stay in business. It was the same Supreme Court that decided that Dred Scott was not a person, but the property of his owner. A Corporation has no owner and therefore is entitled to be a person.

These "persons" now control our media, our universities, our military, and our government. We humans are weak and can be bribed, and these robotic persons have the money to do it. Like Esau, we have sold our birthright for a mess of pottage. Sure we should go after the criminal Bush, but Dubya is a walking corporation. Corporation money pays the hit man lets go after them too.

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