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53 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
We had an advantage with Hussein in power. Oh, well. A lot of people made a lot of money with the no-bid, cost-plus contracts. 
''The true value of a conflict is in the debt it produces -- you control the debt, you control everything''.
- Wars are never about any conflict on the ground. It's always about conflicts in the Board rooms.
- Wars are never about any conflict on the ground. It's always about conflicts in the Board rooms.
“Like the Venetians,” says Adams, “the British laid the basis of their high fortune by piracy and slaving.” Following the Spanish discovery of the Potosi mines, Sir Francis Drake and his followers robbed the Spanish fleet of a vast treasure. John Hawkins added to the flow of wealth by capturing the slave trade from the Spaniards and supplying the labour-hungry colonies in the West Indies. Together they monopolized Spanish silver and brought Elizabethan England to the status of a world power.
An expanding trade with the East gradually depleted this new supply of silver. The foundation of the Bank of England provided a temporary respite through the creation of paper but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, coin was again dangerously low. South American silver had been travelling steadily by way of Europe to India, where it accumulated in the vaults of the ruling princes. This flow was suddenly reversed when the East India Company, under the military leadership of Robert Clive, turned from trade to plunder. Millions of pounds were taken back to England, where they provided the financial impetus which led to the industrial revolution and the British Empire.
Adams realized that such massive military operations were extensions of the normal means whereby the moneyed classes maintained their power. One hopes that Adams compiled his own index, for it contains one of the book’s pithiest comments: War: see Police”. Here lies another crucial difference which he sees between the Middle Ages and the ascendancy of the “economic type”:
Through this process the bourgeoisie gained another valuable monopoly—that of physical force. The armed men whose salaries they paid protected their interests under the laws which they created. There were local pockets of resistance under surviving feudal lords, but these were gradually subdued. In the study of history, Adams thus provided a shift of focus from the succession of kings to the economic groups which used the monarchy as a means to centralization. The latter have been largely passed over, for, unlike a monarch, a banker’s power was apt to be in inverse ratio to his notoriety. Fame and Glory are not words often heard in the Exchange.
If armed force is a monopoly, it can not only be used to protect vested interests—it can also be made to turn a profit. Since Adams wrote the Law, manipulation of international conflict has become a fine art. This demands a thesis in itself, but Pound’s references to the practice deserve a brief mention.
'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
An expanding trade with the East gradually depleted this new supply of silver. The foundation of the Bank of England provided a temporary respite through the creation of paper but, by the middle of the eighteenth century, coin was again dangerously low. South American silver had been travelling steadily by way of Europe to India, where it accumulated in the vaults of the ruling princes. This flow was suddenly reversed when the East India Company, under the military leadership of Robert Clive, turned from trade to plunder. Millions of pounds were taken back to England, where they provided the financial impetus which led to the industrial revolution and the British Empire.
Adams realized that such massive military operations were extensions of the normal means whereby the moneyed classes maintained their power. One hopes that Adams compiled his own index, for it contains one of the book’s pithiest comments: War: see Police”. Here lies another crucial difference which he sees between the Middle Ages and the ascendancy of the “economic type”:
The basis of the secular society of the early Middle Ages was individual physical force. . . With the spread of the mercantile type, however, a change began—the transmutation of physical force into money. Thus, from the time when the economic type had multiplied sufficiently to hire a police, the strength of the State came to depend on its revenue, and financiers grew to be the controlling element of civilization.
Through this process the bourgeoisie gained another valuable monopoly—that of physical force. The armed men whose salaries they paid protected their interests under the laws which they created. There were local pockets of resistance under surviving feudal lords, but these were gradually subdued. In the study of history, Adams thus provided a shift of focus from the succession of kings to the economic groups which used the monarchy as a means to centralization. The latter have been largely passed over, for, unlike a monarch, a banker’s power was apt to be in inverse ratio to his notoriety. Fame and Glory are not words often heard in the Exchange.
If armed force is a monopoly, it can not only be used to protect vested interests—it can also be made to turn a profit. Since Adams wrote the Law, manipulation of international conflict has become a fine art. This demands a thesis in itself, but Pound’s references to the practice deserve a brief mention.
'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
If armed force is a monopoly, it can not only be used to protect vested interests—it can also be made to turn a profit. Since Adams wrote the Law, manipulation of international conflict has become a fine art. This demands a thesis in itself, but Pound’s references to the practice deserve a brief mention.
Canto 38, in particular, cites the manipulations of Metevsky (Sir Basil Zaharoffb ), Akers (Vickers), and Herr Krupp. All three were munitions manufacturers who were able to sell huge quantities of armaments to both sides in a conflict by encouraging them to surpass each other in destructive potential—a game which combined the most exciting features of a Dutch Auction and Russian Roulette. But wars not only boost sales, they can also prevent goods from becoming so abundant that they fall in price:
When there is danger of abundance of any, or almost all, commodities, then the usurocracy unleashes a war in order to diminish purchasing power.
What better way to neutralise abundance than to concentrate production in goods which are ceremonially destroyed, as in a primitive potlatch? Of coarse, now that total war has become an anachronism, the ceremony must take place within a limited area. Such practices are difficult to document, since all evidence is classified in the interests of “national security”.
Even the Pentagon Papers tell us more about the relatively public world of government than the private world of finance. But G. William Domhoff, in his important and meticulously documented book, Who Rules America?, offers powerful evidence that industry is the dominant partner in America’s military-industrial complex. And, according to George Thayer in The War Business,
The government officials who sell arms today have power that Zaharoff never dreamed of, they are protected to a degree that no private entrepreneur of old ever enjoyed, and they operate with less restraints upon them than even those few imposed on the master arms merchant himself two score years ago.
'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
Canto 38, in particular, cites the manipulations of Metevsky (Sir Basil Zaharoffb ), Akers (Vickers), and Herr Krupp. All three were munitions manufacturers who were able to sell huge quantities of armaments to both sides in a conflict by encouraging them to surpass each other in destructive potential—a game which combined the most exciting features of a Dutch Auction and Russian Roulette. But wars not only boost sales, they can also prevent goods from becoming so abundant that they fall in price:
When there is danger of abundance of any, or almost all, commodities, then the usurocracy unleashes a war in order to diminish purchasing power.
What better way to neutralise abundance than to concentrate production in goods which are ceremonially destroyed, as in a primitive potlatch? Of coarse, now that total war has become an anachronism, the ceremony must take place within a limited area. Such practices are difficult to document, since all evidence is classified in the interests of “national security”.
Even the Pentagon Papers tell us more about the relatively public world of government than the private world of finance. But G. William Domhoff, in his important and meticulously documented book, Who Rules America?, offers powerful evidence that industry is the dominant partner in America’s military-industrial complex. And, according to George Thayer in The War Business,
The government officials who sell arms today have power that Zaharoff never dreamed of, they are protected to a degree that no private entrepreneur of old ever enjoyed, and they operate with less restraints upon them than even those few imposed on the master arms merchant himself two score years ago.
'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
- Just as Orwell concluded later in the novel ''1984'': ''The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.''
"War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!" can no longer be considered accurate. 
That was who he'll always be for me. I grew up with him. He was one of my brother's friends (who's 10 years older - I was the kid who got in the way) while I sat around and listened to them sing doo-wop and Sam Cooke songs back in the day in Cleveland. And actually, he was right. It ain't good for nothing if you have to fight in it.
- It's only good for something if you've invested in it.
And when they return home after a conflict they often find their fortunes have taken a turn for the worse.
- That's because we usually don't realize until later, that the real fight was with ourselves all along.
you have it wrong. The Iraqi people have democracy now. The people are free to vote, die and be run out of town by a terrorist group, who by the way WERE NOT in that country before bushieboy, cheney and other members of PNAC, with the help of those (D) mentioned above, started our oil war. Human beings being slaughtered, uprooted and fleeing before the extreme violence of a terrorist group does not justify the idea of "my country, right or wrong". Paul Bremer, the blood of all these people in on your RW hands. Bushieboy and cheney are war criminals.
