I'm sure corporate bosses wield a lot of power, but their power is not absolute and I think you're crediting them with too much finesse and foresight.
Ah so!: The Military Industrial Complex [not my words] is the tail to the dog. Tail wags the dog at this time.
Well, what I meant was that Britain and France gave guarantees to Poland in Spring 1939. And then in August 1939 in Moscow they tried to persuade USSR to protect Poland instead of them. Poland was really sold to Hitler, so-called "allies" didn't even think about doing anything to save it. An interesting thing about Yalta/Potsdam: "allies" didn't want to see Polish state on a map, it was evil Stalin who insisted on creating a new Poland.
GM owned Opel since 1930s, and still does. American bomber crews had areas marked on their maps where they shouldn't drop bombs, because American capital was invested in factories there. I find it amazing.
Looseleaf, I actually read your "War is a Racket" link (it had the benefit of being short). What I can't figure out is how Butler came to his conclusions, because he doesn't consider proportions. Suppose a little kid sells glasses of lemonade for 50 cents each, out of which he makes 25 cents in profit. Maybe on a cool, overcast day he sells 4 glasses and earns a dollar, but the next day is sunny and hot and he sells 40 glasses. His profits increase tenfold - but so did his sales (assuming his operation scales linearly). Consider now one of the examples Smedley Butler uses: He doesn't tell how much their production increased! They may well have sold 10 times as much gunpowder! And everybody has a sense that some things have an economy of scale - that up to a point a business can be more profitable by producing goods in large quantities. For that reason perhaps they sold 6 times as much gunpowder and made 10 times as much profit. All of these are fairly basic pieces of a complex puzzle, but it would appear that Butler didn't consider them. Maybe they did run up an excessive profit - I still can't tell based upon the information he provides. If the other examples he wrote of are true (saddles, shoes, etc.) then I agree that is either negligence, profiteering or both. I still stand by my opinion that the military-industrial complex today is a far cry from whatever it may have been during the Cold War (the discrete DoD budget is projected to fall from 20% to 15% of the budget in the next 4 years, compared to an all-time high of nearly 70% in the 1950s). I'm surprised you're not making a fuss about the insurance and healthcare industry, because in the years ahead they are going to make huge gains courtesy of Uncle Sam.
Quick example: http://books.google.com/books?id=Ny...resnum=1&ved=0CAgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=&f=false note first column, second paragraph about lower one third of column: "... a 12 cent allen wrench sold for $9,609.00 ..."
Sure, that's all rotten stuff done by greedy people. I still don't think it's evidence of an industry as a whole conspiring to take taxpayers' money (which is what Eisenhower warned of). The article even says that GD's overcharges were "more than twice the average of the Pentagon's top 200 contractors" which means there were a great number who weren't engaging in those activities (or perhaps they weren't as aggressive). There is indeed competition in the defense industry, as can be seen even in the case of the excerpt's subject: GD. The aerospace part of that company was sold off to Lockheed in the 90s, and it seems like Lockheed, Northrop-Grumman and Boeing are the only major American players in defense aerospace these days. I'm sure you remember aerospace names like Bell, McDonnell Douglas, North American, Convair, Rockwell, Vought, Fairchild and Martin. And Curtiss-Wright's aerospace division, the largest American airplane manufacturer by the end of WW2, didn't even last 4 years after the end of the war. When it comes to survival, the industry has deemed it necessary to build conglomerates and trim out the fat to stay afloat. There just isn't the steady flow of contracts for new projects like there was in the 50s and 60s.
Btw Poland is not 1-st country with such law, nazy Germany had almost same one, that's a fact to think about . I can easily understand why nazi symbols are banned. They are connected with ideology, that directly calls for one group of people to kill some another, so we can say it's dangerous and ban it to prevent some crimes. Now let's look at communism, i mean not at Soviet Union and it's role in history, but at an idea itself and its symbols. What's wrong with it, exept some problems with its realization in practice? For example, christian ideology has just same advantages and problems. How can it be dangerous to anybody? And if it is not dangerous, what is the purpouse of such law? But anyway, the will of anybody should be respected, i can just offer to continue what had been started: stop any relations with China and arrest for using of any chineese goods, ban christianity and it's symbols in Europe cause of inquisition, stop talking english in the memory of victims of america colonization. Talking serious, where is the line between banning communism and stupid ideas like that above? U don't like an idea - u don't vote for a party using it, that is democracy. Banning an idea is like an assuming that the whole people are idiots and arrests is the only way to prevent returning of communists in Polish government. That is much closer to Soviet Union or nazi Germany than to any kind of democracy. So it may be really looool for anybody exept Polanders, cause it is a step in a dangerous way for them. P.S. Soviet Union was just an attempt to build communism, that failed, and now it's an argument for impossibility of real communistic society. Nor Poland, nor USSR ever lived in communism. It was announced only for 1980 in USSR but never came true. So talking about bad sides of life in Eastern Europe after WW2 u can use it only as an arguments to say "fuck soviet model" but not "fuck communism". P.P.S. I'm not a communist, i just hate doubleness and double standard.
Like it or not, in europia anyway, the soviet communism became the image of communism, just like nazism is personalized to adolf. Ideologies... when you look the word nazism from wikipedia (that thing that always knows everything. ALL HAIL WIKI! We bow thee) it has more than one similarity with communism, as an idea. Not the practice.
I suppose there is not enough room here for further discussion. Have a lookie : http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/politics.html
Lookied. Could you please explain how that had anything to do with anything the topics about? (just because I was three days sober)
Now u should go to prison for 2 years for searching through wiki for communism. BTW i can already see ur state of mind and education if u have to check with wiki what is national socialism and what is communism. No wonders why you believe that system in which 49% of ppl always suffer because its minority , is a good system
And you my friend should learn to read before commenting. 49% of the people suffer in my system? What system is that, democracy? You have a better solution?
