Thank you Senators Byrd, Kennedy, Leahy, Jeffords and all those who voted against the IWR

[DeSwiss]

37. It gets better:

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

- 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.''