Friday, February 28, 2014

Capitalism vs Corporatism

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

My grandfather was a WWI vet from chemical warfare in the trenches, with the scars to prove it. He later made top quality silk parachutes for the Army Air Corps and was asked to move to Formosa/Taiwan to vertically integrate manufacturing for savings. My father served in Normandy and Okinawa on a destroyer kamikazeed on the bridge and made it back to Pearl Harbor and Hunters Point without a rudder to make sports clothes and swim suits out of Lycra. One nephew went to the Naval Academy and another served in classified submarine warfare...

XXXIV. THE ECONOMICS OF WAR


2. War and the Market Economy



The market economy, say the socialists and the interventionists, is at best a system that may be tolerated in peacetime. 

But when war comes, such indulgence is impermissible. It would jeopardize the vital interests of the nation for the sole benefit of the selfish concerns of capitalists and entrepreneurs. 

War, and in any case modern total war, peremptorily requires government control of business.
Hardly anybody has been bold enough to challenge this dogma. It served in both World Wars as a convenient pretext for innumerable measures of government interference with business which in many countries step by step led to full "war socialism." 

When the hostilities ceased, a new slogan was launched. 

The period of transition from war to peace and of "reconversion," people contended, requires even more government control than the period of war. 

Besides, why should one ever return to a social system which can work, if at all, only in the interval between two wars? 

The most appropriate thing would be to cling permanently to government control in order to be duly prepared for any possible emergency.
An examination of the problems which the United States had to face in the second World War will clearly show how fallacious this reasoning is.

What America needed in order to win the war was a radical conversion of all its production activities. 

All not absolutely indispensable civilian consumption was to be eliminated. 

The plants and farms were henceforth to turn out only a minimum of goods for nonmilitary use. 

For the rest, they were to devote themselves completely to the task of supplying the armed forces.
The realization of this program did not require the establishment of controls and priorities. 

If the government had raised all the funds needed for the conduct of war by taxing the citizens and by borrowing from them, everybody would have been forced to cut down his [p. 826] consumption drastically. 

The entrepreneurs and farmers would have turned toward production for the government because the sale of goods to private citizens would have dropped. 

The government, now by virtue of the inflow of taxes and borrowed money the biggest buyer on the market, would have been in a position to obtain all it wanted. 

Even the fact that the government chose to finance a considerable part of the war expenditure by increasing the quantity of money in circulation and by borrowing from the commercial banks would not have altered this state of affairs. 

The inflation must, of course, bring about a marked tendency toward a rise in the prices of all goods and services. 

The government would have had to pay higher nominal prices. But it would still have been the most solvent buyer on the market. 

It would have been possible for it to outbid the citizens who on the one hand had not the right of manufacturing the money they needed and on the other hand would have been squeezed by enormous taxes.

But the government deliberately adopted a policy which was bound to make it impossible for it to rely upon the operation of the unhampered market. 

It resorted to price control and make it illegal to raise commodity prices. 

Furthermore it was very slow in taxing the incomes swollen by the inflation. 

It surrendered to the claim of the unions that the worker's real take-home wages should be kept at a height which would enable them to preserve in the war their prewar standard of living. 

In fact, the most numerous class of the nation, the class which in peacetime consumed the greatest part of the total amount of goods consumed, had so much more money in their pockets that their power to buy and to consume was greater than in peacetime. 

The wage earners--and to some extent also the farmers and the owners of plants producing for the government--would have frustrated the government's endeavors to direct industries toward the production of war materials. 

They would have induced business to produce more, not less, of those goods which in wartime are considered superfluous luxuries. 

It was this circumstance that forced the Administration to resort to the systems of priorities and of rationing. 

The shortcomings of the methods adopted for financing war expenditure made government control of business necessary. 

If no inflation had been made and if taxation had cut down the income (after taxes) of all citizens, not only of those enjoying higher incomes, to a fraction of their peacetime revenues, these controls would have been supererogatory. 

The endorsement of the doctrine that the wage earners' real income must in wartime be even higher than in peacetime made them unavoidable. [p. 827]

Not government decrees and the paper work of hosts of people on the governments payroll, but the efforts of private enterprise produced those goods which enabled the American armed forces to win the war and to provide all the material equipment its allies needed for their cooperation. 

The economist does not infer anything from these historical facts. 

But it is expedient to mention them as the interventionists would have us believe that a decree prohibiting the employment of steel for the construction of apartment houses automatically produces airplanes and battleships.
The adjustment of production activities to a change in the demand of consumers is the source of profits. 

The greater the discrepancy between the previous state of production activities and that agreeing with the new structure of demand, the greater adjustments are required and the greater profits are earned by those who succeed best in accomplishing these adjustments. 

The sudden transition from peace to war revolutionizes the structure of the market, makes radical readjustments indispensable and thus becomes for many a source of high profits. 

The planners and interventionists regard such profits as a scandal. 

As they see it, the first duty of government in time of war is to prevent the emergence of new millionaires. It is, they say, unfair to let some people become richer while other people are killed or maimed.
Nothing is fair in war. 

It is not just that God is for the big battalions and that those who are better equipped defeat poorly equipped adversaries. 

It is not just that those in the front line shed their life-blood in obscurity, while the commanders, comfortably located in headquarters hundreds of miles behind the trenches, gain glory and fame. 

It is not just that John is killed and Mark crippled for the rest of his life, while Paul returns home safe and sound and enjoys all the privileges accorded to veterans.
It may be admitted that it is not "fair" that war enhances the profits of those entrepreneurs who contribute best to the equipment of the fighting forces. 

But it would be foolish to deny that the profit system produces the best weapons. 

It was not socialist Russia that aided capitalist America with lend-lease; the Russians were lamentably defeated before American-made bombs fell on Germany and before they got the arms manufactured by American big business. 

The most important thing in war is not to avoid the emergence of high profits, but to give the best equipment to one's own country's soldiers and sailors. 

The worst enemies of a nation are those malicious demagogues who would give their envy precedence over the vital interests of their nation's cause. [p. 828]

Of course, in the long run war and the preservation of the market economy are incompatible. 

Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. 

But this does not mean that a nation which is forced to repel foreign aggressors must substitute government control for private enterprise. 

If it were to do this, it would deprive itself of the most efficient means of defense. 

There is no record of a socialist nation which defeated a capitalist nation. 

In spite of their much glorified war socialism, the Germans were defeated in both World Wars.
What the incompatibility of war and capitalism really means is that war and high civilization are incompatible. 

If the efficiency of capitalism is directed by governments toward the output of instruments of destruction, the ingenuity of private business turn out weapons which are powerful enough to destroy everything. 

What makes war and capitalism incompatible with one another is precisely the unparalleled efficiency of the capitalist mode of production.
The market economy, subject to the sovereignty of the individual consumers, turns out products which make the individual's life more agreeable. 

It caters to the individual's demand for more comfort. 

It is this that made capitalism despicable in the eyes of the apostles of violence. 

They worshiped the "hero," the destroyer and killer, and despised the bourgeois and his "peddler mentality" (Sombart). 

Now mankind is reaping the fruits which ripened from the seeds sown by these men.

http://mises.org/humanaction/chap34sec2.asp

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Oligarchs United vs We the People


Nixon, Rockefeller, IG Farben, and global control



by Jon Rappoport

February 28, 2014




To learn why Richard Nixon was really blown out of the White House, you could begin with the infamous Nazi chemical/pharmaceutical cartel, IG Farben. 

The cartel that pushed Hitler over the top into power in Germany.



One of its lasting legacies is the multinational corporation expanded to titanic proportions. 

Farben didn't just buy smaller companies, it forged favorable agreements with huge corporations all over the world: Standard Oil (Rockefeller); Rhone-Poulenc; Imperial Chemical Industries; Du Pont; Dow.



During World War 2, Josiah Du Bois, representing the US federal government, was sent on a fact-finding mission to Guatemala. 

His comment: "As far as I can tell the country is a wholly owned subsidiary of Farben."



What Farben stood for was an attempt to remake the planet in terms of power.



Farben held important cards. It employed brilliant chemists who, in some ways, were far ahead of its competitors. 

Farben was all about synthetics. Rubber, oil, dyes, pharmaceuticals.



Farben saw itself as a modern version of the old alchemists. 

Transforming one substance into another. It came to believe that, with enough time, it would be able to make anything from anything. 

It envisioned labs in which basic chemical facts would be changed so that, in practice, elements would be virtually interchangeable.



This paralleled the Nazi obsession to discover the lost secrets of the mythical Aryan race and then reconstitute it with selective breeding, genetic engineering, and of course the mass murder of "lesser peoples."



On one level, there was the idea of chemical transformations, and on another level, the transformation of the human species.



Farben had prisoners shipped from Auschwitz to its nearby facility, where horrendous medical/pharmaceutical experiments were carried out on them.



At the end of World War 2, the Farben executives were put on trial and, despite the efforts of Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor, the sentences handed out were light.



There was a reason for this. A new world was coming into being, and mega-corporations and cartels were at the heart of it. 

They would be the engines driving the global economy and pillaging the natural resources of the planet. 

It was colonialism with a different face, the East India company running on technology and industry and a planetary reach beyond anything ever attempted.



So the Farben moguls, and those like them, were seen by many as designers of the new "peace."



Consider the total volume of international trade of goods today---the largest 300 corporations in the world are responsible for an unbelievable percentage of it...as high as 25%.



So now you see the reason why these treaties like GATT and NAFTA and CAFTA have been launched. 

Mega-corporations want to roam free. 

They want to be able to inject money into any entity in the world and suddenly remove it at will. 

They certainly want to be able to ship goods from one nation to another without paying tariffs, which otherwise would cost them an extraordinary amount of money. 

For these corporations, nations and borders don't really exist anymore---they are inconvenient fictions. 

These corporations don't want any restrictions on their plundering of the Global Village.



Farben envisioned and planned for this kind of licentious freedom. It saw itself as more than a German cartel. It was already international, and it was moving toward domination.



It is in the arena of pharmaceutical domination that one of Farben's goals has endured. 

Two of its original components, Bayer and Hoechst, have survived and prospered. And many other drug companies have copied the basic model.



For a number of years, I've researched and published on this subject: death, maiming, destruction, poisoning---the overall effects of drug-based medicine. 

Judging solely by these effects, one could say that war by other means has continued after 1945. 

And the waves of devastation have spread.



On the mega-corporate front, the plan for world control remains the Rockefeller template. 

"Free trade." This plan was advanced, ceaselessly, for 40 years until, on January 1, 1995, the World Trade Organization was fully formed and took charge of the criminal rules of global commerce: the crowning moment.



However, back in the early 1970s, the whole operation developed a kink. 

One man, a crook, a president, a liar, an insecure parody of a head of state, Richard Nixon, went off script. He REALLY went off script.



In an effort to bolster US companies and protect them from foreign competition inside the United States, Nixon began erecting tariffs on a range of goods imported into the US.



If this Nixon economic plan spread to other countries, the entire global program to install "free trade" and mega-corporate emperors on their thrones for a thousand years could crash and burn.



Nixon was a Rockefeller man. He was owned by them. He'd been rescued from financial ruin by The Family, and now he was in the White House sticking pins in their greatest dream. 

You can't overstate the degree of the betrayal, from the Rockefeller point of view. You simply can't.



Something had to be done. The president had to go. 

This was the real motivation behind Watergate. This was the real op. 

Yes, there were sub-motives and smaller contexts, as in any major op, but the prime mover was: get Free Trade back on track: get suitable revenge on the puppet in the White House who went off the script.



Whether the Watergate break-in was planned to serve the higher goal or was pounced upon, after the fact, as the grand opportunity, is beside the point. 

It was there, and it was used. It became the starting point for the Washington Post, its publisher, veteran editor, and two cub reporters to break Richard Nixon into pieces.



And if the Rockefeller people needed an inside man to report on the deteriorating mental state of the president as he heated up in the pressure cooker, they had Henry Kissinger, who was another Rockefeller operative.



The Washington Post was owned by Katharine Graham, who was herself a very close friend of the Rockefeller Family. 

Years later, she would be awarded a medal of honor by the University of Chicago, an institution founded by John D. Rockefeller. 

On her death, a paid heartfelt obituary was inserted in the NY Times by the trustees, faculty, and staff of Rockefeller University, where she had served on the University Council.



And she and Nixon already hated each other by the early 1970s.



The managing editor of the Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, was an old hand at writing promotional material, having worked in Europe crafting releases for a CIA front group. 

A former Naval intelligence man, he liked one of his cub reporters, Bob Woodward, who had also worked for the Navy in intelligence.



When Woodward came to Bradlee with a story about a man in a parking garage who was passing secrets from the White House/FBI about Watergate, we are supposed to believe that Bradlee naturally responded by giving the green light to a major investigation. 

Woodward and Carl Bernstein, another cub, would undertake it---with nothing more than Bradlee's reputation and the future survival of the Post and Katharine Graham's empire on the line if the cubs got it wrong.



We are supposed to believe Bradlee gave the green light, without knowing who the man in the garage was, without knowing whether Woodward could be trusted, without even getting permission from Graham to move ahead.



Bradlee, a grizzled veteran of Washington, understanding exactly what Washington could do to people who told secrets out of school, just said to Woodward and Bernstein, "You'd better be damned sure you're right, because otherwise we're all in trouble."



Two untested cub reporters set loose in a cage with tigers.



The odds of that happening were nil.



Bradlee had to know a great deal from the beginning, and he had to have Katharine Graham's signal to move. 

The series of breaking stories would be spoon-fed to the two unsuspecting young reporters. They would be consumed by their ambition to advance their careers. 

Bradlee was confident because he had the essentials of the scandal in hand---all the way up to Nixon, the target---well in advance of his two reporters.



To have proceeded otherwise---Bradlee was simply not that kind of fool. 

Whatever Deep Throat, the man in the garage, was dishing out to Woodward, Bradlee already had it in his pocket. 

Deep Throat was merely a contrivance to allow the story to expand and grow by steps, and to permit Woodward and Bernstein to believe they were peeling layers from an onion.



The man behind the curtain was David Rockefeller.



After the whole scandal had been exposed and Nixon had flown away, in disgrace, from the White House for the last time, Rockefeller addressed a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce of the European Community (October, 1975). 

He was there to allay their fears about Nixon's betrayal of the new economic world order. 

There was really very little he needed to say. David had already created (1973) the free-trade Trilateral Commission. 

And a new puppet, Gerald Ford was in the White House, and Ford had appointed David's brother, Nelson Rockefeller, as his vice president.



David told the European attendees, "Fortunately, there are no signs that these anti-[free] trade measures [of Nixon] are supported by the [Ford] Administration."



And that was that. The global mega-corporate colossus was back on track.



The temporary rip in the Matrix had been repaired.



On a far lower level of power politics, everyone and his brother was consumed with the contrails of the scandal that had driven away Nixon and his colleagues. 

People were congratulating each other on the expunging of a corrupt conspiracy from public life.



The real players, of course, were still in place, more powerful than ever. 

David Rockefeller and his aides were preparing for an even greater coup. 

They had chosen an obscure man with zero name recognition to be the next president of the United States. Jimmy Carter. Carter would function to forward the goals of the Trilateral Commission in bold view of anyone who knew the score.



And every president since Carter, regardless of party affiliation, has supported and extended those Globalist-corporate goals. 

No questions asked. 

Obama, who fatuously remarked during his 2008 election campaign that NAFTA "needs to be revisited," has taken his cues like any other puppet.



When, from this perspective, you examine the global takeover of land and resources by GMO agribusiness, the destruction of small family farms, the plundering of natural resources in the Third World, the use of "peacekeepers" and "humanitarian groups" and intelligence agencies to create a wedge, for corporations, into these areas, you see the hand of the Rockefeller plan.



When you see the destruction of currencies and the escalation of insupportable debt, you see the plan.



You can see that the trashing of Nixon, who like every president since, was put in place to serve his masters, was a Globalist piece of "highway repair."


Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at  NoMoreFakeNews.com.

 




 Use this link to order Jon's Matrix Collections: 



http://bit.ly/1eIpCFE


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Thursday, February 27, 2014

GMO IV

After denying WFM sold GMO foods, then admitting it would label them, Whole Foods Market went from 65.44 in October 2013 to 51.28 in February 2014, a loss of $5 Billion dollars so far

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_22485.cfm

What the Whole Foods-Monsanto connection really means



by Jon Rappoport

February 26, 2014




Yesterday, I wrote and posted an article, "Top shareholders in Whole Foods and Monsanto: identical." 

I laid out the five investment funds that hold huge numbers of shares of both companies.



This means very little to Monsanto. 

But to Whole Foods---that's a very different story.



Suppose, for example, Whole Foods executives suddenly decided the best and most ethical approach to GMO crops is to ban them altogether. 

Not label them. (I know, it's a fantasy, but just suppose.)



And suppose Whole Foods led such a movement.



Now, the investment funds that own all that Whole Foods stock could decide Whole Foods was going too far, and needed to be taught a lesson. 

The lesson could come in the form of unloading WF shares and sending the company's stock price plummeting.



The message would be: "Look, if you want to label GMOs, it won't make Monsanto and Dow and the other ag-bio-tech giants very happy, but they can handle the fallout from labeling. 

If you start to get serious, though, and go for an outright ban on GMO crops in counties across America...that's a no-no. That's a violation of the existing order, and we will punish you."



In other words, if a company is playing in the field of the big boys, the money boys, who buy and sell shares in the millions and billions without blinking an eye, the game changes. The rules tighten. The options dwindle.



The men who came up with the money to back those GMO-labeling ballot initiatives in California and Washington? 

They were doing anti-GMO Lite. That's the soft approach. That still leaves the majority of farm acreage in America with GMO crops---and genes drifting into non-GMO growing fields 24/7.



But a real movement, with money behind it, to ban growing GMO food? 

That's anti-GMO Heavy. That's going for the throat.



In the world of buying and selling stocks in publicly traded companies, companies are under a ceiling. 

The CEOs know serious activism of any kind, on any vital issue, can disturb Big Money, the kind of money the giant investment funds use to send the market up...and take it down.



All publicly traded companies willingly sign on to a tacit understanding. 

They're "in the stock market." They're in that world. They're in a space where the status quo is respected and acknowledged.



The boundaries are drawn.



That world, in certain respects, resembles one of those Club Feds, where white collar criminals and other Lite offenders are sent to serve out their sentences.



The convicts enjoy many privileges. Within those fences, they can move about with relative freedom. 

But if an inmate decides to hop the fence and go out into the wider world, and if he's caught, he'll find out what a real prison feels like.



In an interview I did years ago with Richard Bell, a financial analyst, Richard put it to me this way: 

"Imagine that a publicly traded energy company suddenly brought out a device that supplied enormous amounts of energy at a very, very cheap price.



"Among the many punishments that would be heaped on the company, its stock price would go into free fall. 

It would be taken down, amid accusations of fraud. 

It would be massacred in the market..."


Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at  NoMoreFakeNews.com.

 




 Use this link to order Jon's Matrix Collections: 



http://bit.ly/1hnS6cF 

Now voters may better appreciate why we are undertaking the challenge of the Nevada Libertarian Party nominated Common Sense Fresh Start Politics of Prosperity Constitutional Campaign for US representative in Las Vegas District 1. 

Join the campaign for Constitutional Government with more Justice, Life, Liberty, Peace and Prosperity for All.

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