Thursday, November 28, 2013

BETTER ONE LONE NUT THAN EN ENTIRE PEOPLE OUT TO GET THEM   [PART II]
                                                                   
                                by Neville Raymond


             Members of dysfunctional families are known to go to any lengths to deny that a respected family member is a child molester or a sexual predator.  It takes courage of the highest order to throw away the tissue of self-serving rationalizations and evasions that stand in our way and look squarely at the evidence that is before one’s eyes.  Certainly it is not for the faint of heart!  It is not for those prone to lying down and going along with the spurious comforts of the status quo!  It is not for those who must have quick fixes and easy solutions to appease a desperate need to cling to a shred of sanity.
            The truth is there is nothing harder than acknowledging that a well-liked or trusted uncle is a child molester.  Unless, perhaps, it is acknowledging that our beloved Uncle Sam – whom we are raised to respect from our high-school civics classes and venerate from our first Veteran's Day or 4th of July parade - is in collusion with the dark forces that are out to rape and ravage and ruin us. 
           
            Honestly now, which one of us hasn’t been tempted to drift on the river of denial?   Imagine your state of mind after your eyes had opened to the mountains of evidence proving that the plot to assassinate President Kennedy was organized at the highest levels of government, banking and industry.  
            Wouldn’t it be one hell of a hair-raising epiphany!                                      
            Wouldn’t the trusted pillars of your world buckle and fall like a row of dominoes?  
            Can you really go back to watching your favorite TV reality show or crime drama after experiencing a bombshell like that?   
            Can you wake up and go back to work the next day as if nothing had happened.
           
             Imagine your state of mind after listening to a briefing that leaves not a shadow of doubt that the World Trade Center was leveled by controlled demolition - that the 19 hijackers were dupes and patsies, like Lee Harvey Oswald - and that the guiding force behind 9-11 was the long arm of the national security state.        
             Would you be able to take a load off and relax and make yourself comfortable, even if it is in your own living room?  
             Or would you be reeling from the fact that the iconic authority figures you trusted and believed in with the naiveté of a child have gone the way of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy?
           
            If you want the reason why the corporate-owned media has been so successful in bamboozling the American public with preposterous narratives of 9-11 and the JFK assassination, look no further, here it is!  People are scared witless of the implications of finding the invisible government guilty of orchestrating these horrific tragedies.  They are terrified of realizing that they are ruled by a criminal syndicate of high-level sociopaths and homicidal thugs.  
            It doesn’t matter how logical that realization may be.  Everyone knows that politicians lie and cheat where the masses are concerned.  Is it that much of a stretch to believe that they engage in mass murder as well?  
            Evidently not.  But the implications, the implications, the implications of it all!  
            If we really believe that a fire has broken out in the theater of American politics that threatens to devour everyone alive, how are we supposed to stay calm and carry on with business as usual!  Do we go home and pop a can of beer and zone out before our favorite TV sitcom?  Do we curl up into a fetal position and let a pack of lying, cheating, murdering psychopaths turn everything we stand for to ashes in our mouth?  Or do we stand on the street corner or climb to the rooftops and open our mouths like something out of an Edvard Munch painting and scream the horrifying news to the world?   
             
             This is what makes debunking the official government line so challenging!  Once we take on board the realization that the government is no longer to be trusted, it means rethinking everything we have been taught about authority figures.  It means reevaluating our concepts about democracy and capitalism, the greed of the powerful and the needs of the people.   
             And who knows, after all that rethinking and reevaluating, it might even mean that the onus is now on us to take charge, to organize, to blaze a path to recovery.  It might mean that the government of the world is now effectively up to us!  It might mean that there is nothing left but for us to deputize ourselves as leaders in our own right and go out and fill the hideous vacuum created by the moral collapse of our institutional leaders! 
           
            That can be a scary and unsettling proposition for anyone, even the best-equipped and most conscious among us.  What about for Americans who are dumbed down by the school system and drilled to keep their heads down and put their noses to the grindstone of corporate America?  For them it must feel downright crazy and terrifying.  Some of us would do anything to get out of feeling that!  And who can blame them if they do - by going along with the official conspiracy to pooh-pooh so-called conspiracy theories that expose the lawless underbelly of the corporatocracy.                
           The great thing about allowing ourselves to be taken in hook, line, and sinker by official explanations of the JFK assassination and 9-11 is that it lets us off the hook.  It doesn't matter how illogical and ludicrous they might be!  As long as we believe in these outlandish official explanations, we don’t have to rise to the personal challenge of believing in our individual selves and in our collective power to actually do something about it!   
             What though there is a weight of scientific evidence to prove that 9-11 was an inside job and that the JFK assassination could only have been carried out with the full resources and complicity of the national security state?  To dismiss the preponderant weight of this evidence is a small price to pay for relieving ourselves of a more pressing weight – you know, the sheer weight of responsibility of getting off our rear ends and stepping up to the plate and doing whatever needs to be done to create a world that doesn't arrest the fulfillment of our potential as a species by perennially banking on threats of danger to advance the agenda of power. 
           
            At the end of the day, that is the ace in the hole of the anti-conspiracy cabal.  
             That is the chief selling point of a corporate mythology that pooh-poohs the evidence that 9-11 is the Reichstag fire of a newly emergent fascist state and that the JFK assassination is organized at the highest reaches of power.  
              That is the beauty of inoculating the populace against so-called conspiracy theories.  
              As long as we can buy into the party line, we can all forget about mobilizing in a white heat of consensual outrage and tamely retreat into our individual shells.  As long as we believe that Oswald or Osama did it, we can be secretly relieved that we dodged the bullet and go back to binge shopping or binge TV watching and act as though nothing is fundamentally wrong! 
             On the surface, America might seem to be a violence-prone aggression-addled, gun-addicted nation, but there are times when Americans seem to fit the psychological profile of women who love too much.  They would rather put up with those plutocratic bad boys who abuse them silly and betray their trust ten ways to Sunday than face the daunting prospect of dumping their treacherous asses and starting over.  
            Or as the Elvis Presley ballad goes, "I'd rather go on believing your lies than living without you."
            
            If we want to fool ourselves about 9-11 or JFK, that's our prerogative.  But let's not fool ourselves about how tough it can be to see these events for what they really are - a clarion call to throw off our victim status and take charge of our collective destiny.  
            Why not come right out and say it?  It's going to take everything we have to stop putting our blind faith in authority figures who have lied and swindled and slaughtered their way into our hearts throughout history.  It's going to take everything we have, and some things we didn't even think we had in us, to walk away from those who have walked all over us for centuries and wake up to the realization that we are the ones we are waiting for
           Naturally there is some scared part of us that thinks that it might be better to delay that realization as long as humanly possible.  Better still, couldn't we just put it off indefinitely by being good little citizens and swallowing the Big Lie that the system has our best interests at heart? 
            Sure we could.  But for how much longer?   How unbearably hard must it get for us before we decide not to take the easy way out?  Clearly the system is geared towards working for someone’s best interest.  It's sure as hell not ours.  It's theirs!  And come hell or high water, they are determined to keep it that way.                 
            Which is why they would rather give us to believe that the world’s most powerful plutocracy can be brought down by an occasional loser or kook than give us all the reason we need to come together with a common purpose and bring it down en masse


BETTER ONE LONE NUT THAN AN ENTIRE PEOPLE OUT TO GET THEM   [PART I]
                                
                                    by Neville Raymond



           Every time the anniversary of a landmark American tragedy rolls around, they come crawling out of the woodwork - or is it the networks.  The 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination brought them out in droves.  It was quite the seasonal spectacle to behold.  The minions of the mainstream media, swimming upstream against the currents of common sense and logic.  The usual assortment of shills tying themselves into pretzel-like knots over the official explanation of the JFK assassination.  They may as well just grab the country from behind and perform a giant Heimlich maneuver, because this is one pretzel that the American people find it increasingly difficult to swallow without choking. 
           
            Let’s face it.  The plutocrats know the public is on to them.  They know that fewer and fewer people believe their outrageous conspiracy theories.  Lee Harvey Oswald, a known CIA asset, methodically set up to take the fall for a presidential assassination, is trumpeted as the lone shooter.   Steel buildings burn up from a depleted supply of kerosene fuel and pancake down at free-fall speed.  It can only happen in a twilight zone where the laws of physics and logic and common sense are violated on a surreal scale.  And so armies of spinmeisters have to be marched out to shore up the house of cards.
           
            One of the treasured explanations in their little boxed set of fairy tales is the psychological one.  This one takes the cake.  Here are shills who normally wouldn’t give a psychotherapist the time of day, all of a sudden trying to explain America’s mass acceptance of ‘conspiracy theories’ in psychological terms.  Google any article that seeks to explain the mounting level of disbelief in official stories.  Pull down the “Edit” menu and under “Find” insert such words as “scared” and “powerless” – and oh, the all-time biggie, “comfort”.  They are guaranteed to make an appearance in every such mainstream article. 
            The prevailing theory is that these shocking events cause Americans to feel frightened.  A lone nut can bring down a president.  A few crazed hijackers can bring down U.S. landmarks.  This is too scary to contemplate.  And so people grasp at the straws of conspiracy theories in their hunger for meaning and structure.  The idea that these events are staged by invisible powers allays their sense of powerlessness.  It helps them to make sense of the world.  It serves as a much-needed source of comfort.  

             Talk about bending and twisting the psychological truth back on its head.  It is an upside-down position that does a yoga master proud!  Maybe these shills are naïve but anyone with a scintilla of understanding of psychology knows better.   People naturally crave reassurance and comfort during times when assassins and hijackers seem to run the show.  But nothing provides greater reassurance than a narrative that allows the authority figures to assert themselves as the good guys, and convince the rest of us to put ourselves in their capable and protective hands.  Nothing brings greater comfort to a traumatized nation than the notion that the evil that is loose in society is the work of isolated crackpots beyond the pale, against which the forces of law and order are committed to defend us.
           
            But what happens when the good guys we turn to in times of crisis turn out to be the bad guys who are secretly terrorizing us?  Then it is not just a President who gets shot.  The credibility of an entire system of government is shot to pieces.  
            What happens when the orders had to have come from high up to rig the World Trade Center with explosives or shut down an air defense system to give planes a chance to fly off course and crash into U.S. landmarks?  Then it is not just a couple of skyscrapers that blow up.  The prestige and authority of an entire power structure blows up in our faces as spectacularly as the Capitol dome in the trailer for Independence Day!                                                                             
            So-called journalists can allege all day long that conspiracy theories combat a sense of impotence and confusion.[1]  Nothing is calculated to induce a more debilitating anxiety, a more demoralizing sense of despair, betrayal and confusion, than the charge that our public servants are foot soldiers, enforcers and hit men for a criminal conspiracy that is hatched in the highest corridors of power           
           
            That’s why they fight tooth and nail against any suggestion that those who are entrusted with keeping us safe could in any way, shape or form be responsible for terrorizing us.  Our very survival as a civilized society depends upon it!  And that’s why we are determined to idealize our leaders in times of danger and dutifully give them every benefit of doubt, no matter how much evidence piles up to prove their complicity and guilt! 
            In times of crisis, people instinctually home in on a comfort zone that is fortified all around by towering walls of denial.  They desperately want to blame some alien or isolated scapegoat or other for the shocking tragedy.  The last thing they want to believe is that their own leaders could be up to their necks in plots to assassinate their commander-in-chief or massacre three thousand of their own citizens.  Please, please, let it be a ragtag bunch of lone nuts and rogue psychos at work!  We don’t have to know that they flunked their flying lessons or used a rifle that couldn’t shoot straight.   Just so long as we can mop our brows and declare it’s a huge load off our minds.  Just so long as we can all heave a collective sigh of relief, and after an initial period of grief and mourning, go back to business as usual! 
           
            Conspiracies theories in this respect don’t go down easily at all with most people.  In fact, they go against the very grain of our collective need for stability, sanity and social orderliness.  Why on earth should we open ourselves up to the possibility that these shocking tragedies are planned, organized and executed by the national security state?  Do we really want to be confronted by a monstrous evil whose scope knocks the wind out of our sails and demolishes every anchor of our existence!   Are we really such gluttons for punishment that we would want our whole world to come crashing about our ears? 
            Talk about the horror of the abyss staring us in the face!  That is what it is like to believe in a JFK “conspiracy theory”!  That is what it is like to believe that 9-11 was an inside job!  Far from being a source of comfort, we find ourselves at the mercy of a nightmarish evil that rips every shred of comfort from us!  Far from helping us to make sense of the world, it turns our whole world upside down and makes a sweeping mockery of the most cherished principles on which this country was founded!  Far from allowing us to regain a semblance of power, it leaves us squirming in the grip of an Orwellian power that is so fantastic and far-reaching that we have difficulty going to sleep at night!

            Who in his right mind would want that?  Who would deliberately choose to believe a “conspiracy theory” that cuts the ground from under all the hallowed pillars that the American people hold dear?  Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to continue swallowing the anodynes of the official story and go back to enjoy the sleep of the blissfully ignorant and the politically unconscious?  That there is such a swelling groundswell of refusal to go along with that is proof that the American people are made of sterner stuff than we give them credit for!  That as much as two-thirds or even three-fourths of Americans reject the official story speaks volumes on our heroic willingness to confront the unthinkable.  
             Either that or the cover story put out by the corporate media has worn so threadbare over time that its preposterous premises show through at every turn – and you would have to be a mentally challenged pollyanna not to face up to the grim, chilling ugly reality that a government that is sworn to be the protector of the people is really a violent predator of the craziest sort.




[1] Patrik Jonsson, “50 years after JFK, conspiracy theories of all sorts thrive in America”, Christian Science Monitor, November 18, 2013

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

THE JORDAN GESTURE by Neville Raymond


            Out of the mouth of babes.....
            
            We’ve all heard that phrase.  It means that children have an unerring way of shining a light on the truth.  They have not yet gotten into the habit of weighing their words or filtering their thoughts, and so they retain an uncanny knack for nailing it.

            At the opposite remove are adults who have a way of obfuscating the truth.  They are trained in the use of language that is designed to mute, dull or disguise the truth in all its shocking clarity, so that it doesn’t make as powerful an impact as it should.

            I’m sure we can all come up with personal examples to drive the point home.  My epiphany occurred on the first day of a class on social justice that I was leading for half a dozen eight-year-old kids in my living room.  I wanted to find some way of expressing in kiddie language the intrinsically unfair nature of our economic and political system.   And I wanted to bring out the ways in which children respond to it. 

            The fact is that we live on an incredibly resource-rich planet.  Oil, coal, timber, gold – that’s just for openers.  Humanity is the de facto trustee of this stupendous array of wealth, which belongs to all the people.
             The kids drank a toast to that with a cup of sparkling apple cider and kicked off the class by singing along to the Woodie Guthrie song: “This land is your land – this land is my land.”
             
            And yet it is the same old dismal story.  A tiny minority grabs most of the land for itself and makes a cynical mockery of that sentiment.  It grows filthy rich from profits that come of monopolizing a universe of resources that rightfully belong to all the people.   
             The “Enclosure laws” in 18th century England spring to mind as one of many such outrageous examples of privatization through the ages.  
             Closer to home, we see it at work in Colonial America, the cradle of modern democracy.  
             We are so flabbergasted by the latest statistics showing 1/10th of the 1 % controlling much of the world that we forget that by the turn of the 18th century three-fourths of the acreage in New York belonged to less than a dozen persons.  
              In the interior of Virginia, seven persons acquired a total of 1.7 million acres, almost a quarter million acres per person.  
              By 1760, fewer than 500 merchants in five colonial cities controlled most of the trade on the eastern seaboard.[1] 
           
            Sure, a middle class of farmers, tavern-keepers and shop-keepers was comfortably well off by the standards of the time.
             But the great bulk of people, amounting to 80% to 85% of the white population of the day, were poor freeholders, tenants, squatters, indentured laborers or hired hands.  Cities teemed with cobblers, weavers, bakers, blacksmiths, peddlers, clerks and domestics who worked long hours for a pittance.   
            New England dirt farmers may have seemed like princes compared to the Irish poor who labored under the heel of English oppressors, living in wretched hovels of mud and straw, clothed in rags and subsisting on potatoes.[2]  But their plight was still a pitiful one compared to our home-grown aristocracy who lolled in ornate colonial mansions and dined off fine Georgian silver.
            The result is not just disparities between parts of the world.  Third World vs. First World countries, for example.  The result is disparities within a country itself.  
             In the richest country in the world there are heartbreaking gaps between areas like Appalachia, which are reduced to a colonial status though they abound in mineral deposits like coal, and playgrounds of the wealthy, like the Hamptons.

            This is an untenable state of affairs, to say the least.  It is profoundly unjust, unfair, and fraught with every strain of resentment, envy, frustration and rage imaginable.  And it cannot exist naturally on its own.  As a matter of fact, it requires all the help that it can possibly get.  
            This is where government comes in.
            Government is the deus ex machina - the artificial god that pops out of the stage machinery to confer an aura of legitimacy on this unfair system and enshrine it as the order of the day.  
          
             So it is that under the guise of protecting private property, government is really in the business of promoting the wholesale theft of collective property.
             If there is any bank that is genuinely too big to fail, it is the universal bank of our mother earth of which we are all equal co-owners.  Emperors and oligarchs, princes and plutocrats are determined to make out like bandits by perpetually holding up this mother of all banks at gunpoint.  And government is the getaway vehicle that enables them to get away with it time after time, throughout much of history.
             The trick is for society to be engrossed in a make-believe game of cops and robbers.
             We focus all our attention on chasing down two-bit crooks whose assaults on private property yield a few measly bucks.  That way we turn a blind eye to the billions of acres of land grants to private corporations, the trillions of dollars worth of public leases for coal and oil, copper and gold, sold off for a song to monopolistic industries, and the untold earnings potential of broadcasting licenses for airwaves in the public domain, virtually given away to media conglomerates year after year.
              All these wind up in the grubby hands of a few well-connected crony capitalists who reap a staggering windfall of riches from this wholesale looting and plundering of our collective treasure.  

            It's not as though we must have an axe to grind to see how capitalism kills us with a thousand cuts.  The great Adam Smith, patron saint of free marketeers, was the first to admit it.
            “Civil authority, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” 
           
            The Founding Fathers themselves had no illusions about it.  They were not about to let the dream of freedom and equality interfere with the practical goal at the top of their agenda - to create a government that could protect the spoils of the have-it-alls from the backlash of the have-little-or-nothings.  
            They knew very well that the real job of government was not to save its citizens from natural disasters but to save a superwealthy minority from the tsunamis of envy and rage, the earthquakes of resentment and frustration, whipped up by the age-old policy of cutting the resource-rich ground from under the people and violently arrogating the right to control it.
            
             The editors of the Wall Street Journal are gung-ho to talk up any war, anywhere, any time.  The only war that they are too coy to talk about is class war.  
             The Framers of the Constitution suffered from no such inhibitions.  They agreed with James Madison that the commonest, most enduring source of conflict was class warfare arising from the unequal and undemocratic distribution of property.  
             The haves and have-nots fell into two distinct camps...and most of the founding fathers didn't hesitate to embrace a strong, central government that would guarantee the victory of their propertied interests in the warring struggle against the bankrupt rabble. 

                              *                                            *                                               *
           
            The language of the American Revolutionaries soared when it came to fighting for ideals like liberty and equality.  It was rather plodding and dry when it came to doing justice to the sordid reality of class warfare.   For that it takes a child who finds himself in the position of a have-more, impulsively using the body language of alarm and defensiveness to make a resounding statement for the ages.

            I myself was a witness to the whole thing, along with the other kids in my social justice class.  The first exercise of the day was to dole out two almonds apiece to the first five children.  
            The sixth boy, Jordan, received the munificent sum of (count them!) ten almonds. 

            Jordan was no slouch. He sensed that he was an immediate object of envy and resentment by the other kids.  He picked up how he was in imminent danger of having some part of his ten almonds snatched back and redistributed to the others.  
            And so he adopted a gesture that betrayed his insecurity at the same time that it was meant to abate it.  He bent over with his upper body and reached out his arms to form a protective circle around his store of almonds.  
             It was as if he was letting the other kids know that these ten almonds were now his sole and private property and they better not think of taking even one away. 

            Talk about Enclosure Laws!  Jordan’s whole body was a striking study in enclosure!  I can still see him with his torso bent over and arms outstretched to “enclose” his private store of wealth.  It branded itself into my brain as one of those unforgettable moments that stay with you a lifetime.  
             In one graphic pose he demonstrated what it takes political historians volumes to explain.  
             He knew that he was the wealthiest almond-owner around.  
             And he knew that his status didn’t sit well with his fellow humans.  
             And so he reacted by literally embodying the main function of government.  He used his torso and arms to form a sort of physical enclosure as a way of staking out his claim to his inordinate wealth and declaring that no one else was entitled to any part of it!                  

            One might be tempted to assume that his gesture was an artless one.   Perhaps it sprang from some natural impulse in the boy.  The evidence shows that the other children did not share it.  
            One of the kids, when it came her turn to receive ten almonds, was all for giving them away so that everyone would share and share alike.  
            Another verbalized his discomfort at being the target of negative attention, confessing that he was unwilling to have it continue.  
            The fact is that Jordan stood out from the rest.  He had a competitive edge that bordered on aggression.  He could be sweet and charming at times, especially when it came to dispensing hugs.  But some imbalance in his relationship with his dad ate away at him, and left with an overbearing streak to his personality. 

            Though Jordan’s reaction was thankfully atypical, it typifies the chief function of government from Babylonian times to the present.  Indeed, the rest of what government does can be considered as something of a footnote, as it usually is by so-called libertarians.  
             For the one function of government that overshadows the others is to elaborately flesh out the implications of the Jordan Gesture.  
             It is to reinforce the Jordan Gesture with armies and national militias, courts and bureaucracies, lobbyists and media propagandists.  
             Government takes the maldistribution of those ten almonds as its starting point and through an invidious system rife with every sort of cronyism and favoritism multiplies its effects ten million fold.  
              It bends much of society’s collective resources to the task of safeguarding what is, in the first analysis, a grossly unfair division of property.  
              And then, despite the fact that it flies in the face of our common decency and shared humanity, government keeps on building on that unjust and unjustifiable division and buttressing it, until, in the last analysis, it becomes a political philosophy and an economic way of life that is taken for granted as the most natural thing in the world. 


[1] Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few [p. 51] 2nd Edition
[2] Thomas Fleming, Liberty, The American Revolution [p. 43]

Thursday, February 7, 2013


WHY WAR IS THE FINAL SOLUTION TO A DEPRESSION 
                          
                             by Neville Raymond 



              Depression, it is said, is bottled up anger turned inwards.  


          So it is conceivable that aggressively acting out that anger can pull one out of a depression.  Certainly this works in a psychological context.   



          But what about that organized form of hostility known as war?  How does it pull us out of an economic depression?          

          Therein hangs one of the most grimmest, most pernicious myths of our time.

            Count me as a former believer in that myth.   For the longest time, I actually believed that World War II brought an end to the Great Depression.  All of FDR’s vaunted social programs couldn’t do it.  But by golly, the miracle of a world war did the trick.  The outbreak of a global cataclysm finally allowed Americans to put behind them the decade-long ordeal of misery and poverty known as the Great Depression. 

             Whenever I heard this piece of conventional wisdom bandied around, I found myself buying into it with a vague sense of buyer's remorse.  Hmm.  Yet another of great unsung virtues of war.  It sets factories humming again, puts millions of people back to work and boosts the GDP.  Never mind all those soldier sent home with missing arms or legs.  War can get a country on its feet again after the most crippling depression.

            It wasn’t until I reached a ripe middle age that my eyes were opened to the truth.  And then I felt like kicking myself for my stupidity and ignorance in believing such whopper of a tale. 
           
         But first, some context.  To debunk this whole fantasy of World War II ending the Depression, we have to go back to what actually started it.  The Great Depression was not a force of nature, like an earthquake or a tsunami or a meteor strike.   No Act of God wiped out our farmlands, threw people out of work or plunged them into the economic doldrums.  Everything was working just fine going into the 1930s.  Except for one thing that was being monkeyed around with behind the scenes.  The supply of paper money.  The international bankers had decided to drain the amount of money circulating in society.  They put their hands around the throat of the economy and squeezed it until it was down to its last breath.  Now there was almost no money left to carry out the basic tasks of an industrialized society, like buying goods, building factories and hiring people.  Eventually, the drastic decrease in paper money made it impossible for the U.S. economy to function, and it more or less shut down through the course of the decade.
            FDR came galloping to the rescue by borrowing money from bankers at higher rates of interest.  The money was spent on social causes - public works, putting people to work – what we like to call stimulating the economy today.  All this helped – but clearly not enough.
           
         The Great Depression was not about to end until the banksters said that it could end.  And that meant reversing their original course.  After all, they were the ones who caused the Great Depression by choking off the amount of money in circulation.   And the only way they could end it was by doing an about-face and expanding the money supply.   Whereas before they had caused the American economy to black out and collapse by draining the lifeblood of it,  all they had to do to revive it now was open the floodgates and let it flow.
           
         And so they did.  But why did the bankers become so generous all of a sudden?  What could have possibly motivated the financial powers that be to go on a spending spree, acting like money was no longer any object?  Why, the prospect of getting the members of the human species to butcher each other like there was no tomorrow. 
           Yeah, that’s right.  Money may be the lifeblood of the economy.   When it suited their purposes, the central bankers saw nothing wrong in wringing this lifeblood out of the economy and putting it into a dead faint.  But now the prospect of war got their juices flowing.  It got them pumping all the money back into the system.           
            Whereas a decade earlier, there was no money for food or houses, now there was money in abundance for Army barracks and K-rations.  Whereas before there was no money for a nation to feed and shelter itself and live the good life, now there was money aplenty to build bombs and airplanes to spread death and destruction all over the world.  And whereas before the banksters let crops rot in the fields, because they refused to extend the credit to harvest them, now there was money and then some to ramp up industrial capacity and production to harvest the killing fields in Europe, Asia and the Soviet Union.

            Sorry to disappoint all the warmongers.  World War II did not put an end to the Great Depression.  It was the banksters’ machiavellian withdrawal of money for people to enjoy the basics of the good life that got the Great Depression going in the first place.  And it was their sadistic preference to make money freely available for a fratricidal bloodbath that apparently put an end to it. 

         Doesn’t this tell us everything we need to know about how the power structure rates welfare and warfare?  They are positive killjoys when it comes to pulling the plug on the Good Life for millions of people.  But they dance on the rooftops and jump for joy when it comes to priming the pump for the Good War where millions suffer wholesale death and destruction. 
         They are tight-fisted in the extreme when it comes to bringing the human race material comfort and security, pleasure and leisure.  But they spend money hand over fist when it comes to plunging the human race into an abyss of violence, bloodshed and destruction.
         And you wonder why mankind fares so poorly at the hands of its so-called leaders!  Their obsession with funding the technology of death and destruction is in a sense the inevitable outcome of a readiness to take away everything that makes life worth living for the majority of the human race.
         Their fanatical commitment to economic warfare demands that they take away the livelihoods, the homes, and the savings of millions of innocent people and generally drive their lifestyles into the gutter.  And their no less fanatical commitment to military warfare simply takes that agenda to its logical conclusion by marching millions of innocent human beings to a premature grave