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The Poisonous Profit Motive

In the late 1970's, a friend of mine got a job as a pattern-maker at the time-honored Portland Stove Foundry here in Maine, a company that had stood at the top of its craft for a hundred years.  They made cast-iron wood stoves for heating and cooking.  A number of his other friends were working there too, in various tasks — hard, hot, heavy, dangerous, but honest work, and producing a high quality product. During his tenure, the company was acquired by, as he told me, a bunch of young bankers, who soon fired the long-time foreman because the man didn't agree with their cut-corner methods.  Then they began to make the low level decisions themselves.  And their decisions, my friend told me, were not sound, in the light of any level of practical expertise.

Ultimately, there came the day when they put a load of scrap iron from the yard into the #1 furnace — covered with snow and ice — and the steam in the melt exploded and ruined the fine old furnace.  Before long they decided to strip out any assets and equipment they could sell, and make a run for it, leaving only a shell and a memory of the grand old company.  As we have seen, this was the beginning of a trend in the USA.

During the W decade 50,000 factories — not jobs, factories — were lost in this country, closed down or moved piece by piece overseas.  If it had been my son whose friend lost his pattern-maker job back then, and I were asked my opinion, what would I answer?  My question back then had been, "what do bankers know about casting iron"?  My reply now would be to ask a different question, "what made those young men want to become bankers?"  And my answer would be, "It seems there is a growing epidemic of avarice in this country, that raises profit to the pinnacle of human ambition, replacing quality, community, permanence, and all the foundations of the society that spawned us."  We now can look back on the "Greed is Good" decade that followed in the 1980's, also known as the Reagan Revolution, and see just how it played out.

It is plain now to me that the profit motive is an improper motive.  It is a motive which is destined inexorably to lead to disease and decline in society, just as addictions do in personal life.  Putting profit first is a definition of addictive behavior.  Eating only dessert is a recipe for illness.

Allen Dulles — Arch-traitor

The treason of Allen Dulles is better understood not as an island in the mid-ocean of history, but as a peak, a tall peak, in a major mountain range of subversion, sellout, and cynical contempt for the America that most citizens believe in, and for the Constitutional Republic, on the part of the wealthiest among us, in general terms by Wall Street, for well over a hundred years, or, perhaps more accurately, since the dawn of time.

The Founding Fathers were anxiously wary of what were then called "standing armies", that is to say, armies that were not disbanded when a war was over.

Nowadays, it would be thought impossible to ensure the safety of the nation without what Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex", i.e., not only standing armies, but standing peacetime armorers, in a speech, his farewell address [read the transcript here; video available here; the key portion is contained in a film called Why We Fight, and is excerpted on YouTube, but direct linking is blocked — to find it, Google ' "Why We Fight" Quick Movie Review '], howbeit, where this great military man warned us, a Republican, and no friend of Labor, with visible alarm and anxiety, about its "potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power”, “whether sought or unsought" by this entity, the military-industrial complex.

Thomas Jefferson went further in his expressed worries, saying,

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. Already they have raised up a monied aristocracy that has set the government at defiance. The issuing power (of money) should be taken away from the banks and restored to the people to whom it properly belongs."
Franklin Roosevelt defined Fascism this way:

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.”
Lincoln said, in a a letter written to William Elkin less than five months before he was assassinated

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.”

and Benjamin Franklin offered in his comments upon the signing of the Constitution,

"I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no Form of Government but what may be a Blessing to the People if well administered; and I believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other."
Upon departing the hall, a woman asked him, "What have you given us, Dr. Franklin?" to which he replied, "A Republic, Madame, if you can keep it!"

———

The context in which Dulles's treason began and flourished is that of the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Prior to this period, America's wars were against England (Revolution, War of 1812) in breaking away, and against the indigenous peoples of the continent, who lacked the firepower of Europe, and were not considered quite human anyway (how convenient!) Some might consider the African slave trade a war of sorts, perhaps, against that continent.

The only exceptions to the above description are the Mexican War and Spanish-American War,
both fought entirely for plunder of territory, both predicated on spurious charges of attack upon us. Lincoln, as a congressman, became famous as "Spotty Lincoln" for his speeches demanding of the Polk administration to be told "the spot" where US troops were fired on by Mexicans, knowing that in fact it was inside Mexico. And the cry of "Remember the Maine" has long been shown to be just more "yellow journalism" by the Hearst press and the McKinley imperial appetite; Admiral Hyman Rickover's study of the incident concluded that the explosion was most likely spontaneous combustion in the coal bunker, not a Spanish torpedo.

How typical of most of America's wars in our own lifetime! "No weapons of mass destruction under here!"

But the profiteering that accompanies wars (or is it the other way around?) rose to a new high in World War I. Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC (died 1940), the most highly decorated Marine general (twice Medal Of Honor) wrote a little book called War Is A Racket, available in full many places on the web, as here, in which he breaks down in detail the malfeasance and outright fraud of war profiteers, such as the tens of thousands of saddles bought by the government for an army with no cavalry!

This level of fraud, however, pales in comparison to that of World War II, in which Standard Oil of New Jersey, under the leadership of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., supplied Reichsmarschall Goering's Luftwaffe with tetraethyl lead, without which they could not fly, and an abundance of other petroleum and chemical products, such as synthetic rubber precursors, in defiance of the US Treasury Department. When Under-secretary Harold Ickes got in their face about it, they made it plain, they would cut America off at the pockets if Treasury interfered with their conduct of "business as usual". Roosevelt knew he was not the biggest guy on the block, so he used his wits, played them all carefully and managed to win the war in spite of them. These events are recorded in many sources, the best of which may be Charles Higham's Trading With The Enemy, chapter 3.

To be continued soon —





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