Lawyers, Guns, and Money

[davidswanson]

Why would anyone phone the United States and ask for lawyers, guns, and money? Primarily because, other than bad movies, that's most of what the United States produces. What else could you phone home for if you wanted to? We produce weapons and movies about weapons and weapons that were in movies about weapons, and so on .

And we produce lawyers who push money around desks and into drawers and out of envelopes. They manipulate money all day and night, and they call that work, and we compensate them royally for it. But the money is increasingly play money because we're not producing anything else, except the lawyers and the guns.

We measure the play money with the stock market and report on its fate every day with the same solemnity used to report the weather, the sports scores, and the celebrity sex news, but with an even greater pretense that it somehow affects us. And, instead of refocusing on producing useful things through real work, when the whole phony system starts to teeter, we rush to the toy store, buy up all the board games, rip all the money out of the packages and give it to the lawyers.

Six years ago, Kevin Phillips wrote in "Wealth and Democracy":

"The wealthiest peoples of the last five hundred years have been among the most speculative -- Americans, British, Dutch. We have seen how a late stage of luxuriating in finance was clearly an important element in the Dutch and then British decline. … If Spain could be bled dry on the battlefields of Germany and Italy, the Dutch critically shorn of their trade routes, and British financial hegemony strangled by war debt, the extent to which the United States has let its economy become financialized stands to be a twenty-first-century Achilles' heel."

Today, Richard Cook wrote:

"he problem stems from the fact that in 1913 Congress privatized our money supply by turning it over to the private banks that own the Federal Reserve System. This is also why we have lived under the mass delusion that a healthy financial sector leads to a healthy producing economy. Actually it's the other way around. The financial sector should support the producing economy, not bleed it dry through interest, fees, commissions, and the destruction that arises from financial profit-seeking. There is also the fact that while the producing economy has been hammered by job outsourcing and bled white by financial parasitism, it is still a powerful machine that can produce the goods and services people need. We are a strong, capable nation. And we are blessed with the resources we require for a decent standard of living, though not necessarily at a rate of consumption that forever outpaces the rest of the world. But what is wrong with that? The underlying strength of the producing economy was on display this morning, when the Dow-Jones defied the doomsayers by coming back strongly the day after the bailout was defeated."

I pair up these two quotes in an attempt to suggest that imperial greed and paper-pushing-as-work go together like guns and lawyers. We can maintain neither, and past empires have seen their home populations better served by ending both.

Here's a plan to invest in the real economy and improve global relations, without borrowing another dime. Our military acknowledges about 780 bases maintained in other people's countries, breeding hatred and resentment at huge financial cost. That's about one base per billion dollars in proposed bailout for weapon-selling, money-scamming lawyers. And don't think any of these bases don't drain billions of dollars from our shriveling real economy.

Here's the plan. Shut the bases down. Take all the money saved, wave it in front of the bankers' noses, and then tell them we're going to use it to pay off our national debt and create real sustainable jobs. Offer them a choice: they can face prosecution or they can fill out a job application and begin working for a living.

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. According to Will Hutton, in his most informative book, The State We're In -

the only non-fiction book to have topped the best-seller list in the UK - the German Banks were exemplars of how banks should serve businesses, and not simply plunder them.

It's hilarious now to recall the way in which our corporate media in the UK never ceased to mock the Europeans as low-achievers (though it would apparently have taken us a 100 years to catch up with Germanys' economy, even if they stood still; and I believe that was prior to the re-unification). Germany, apparently, had a rust-bucket economy, and the French propped up peasant farmers, instead of consolidating the farms into factory farms!

As for the remaining French nationalised bank! Well, how pathetic it was, apparently. When it had to compete with the UK and US banks, with their false accounting, is it any wonder? Believe it or not, Rees-Mogg of the Daily Mail, and another Mail columnist (oddly enough a war correspondent by avocation, I believe), have been maundering that we shouldn't treat the financial sector too harshly - no, don't laugh - because it was acknowledged to be a sector in which we led the world! I kid you not. Even as the markets plummet and teeter on the edge of a precipice; or that they were so successful, that most of them seem to have been bought by German and Japanese banks. And those of other countries, I'm sure.

A few months ago, they were trumpeting that Brown, ever slow on the uptake - was considering pushing for a state funeral for Thatcher. (His timing is always immaculate. Remember he sold most of this country's gold at the bottom of the market). Well, what they have instead is a state funeral, nay, a planetary funeral for Thatcherism/Reaganism and the philosophy of their guru, the primordial imbecile, Milton Friedman.

Never mind that its "profits" were the product of a Ponzi scheme, or that the pound had been kept artificially high, at the expense of industry. No more worries bout those Bolshie workers - even before the outsourcing by the remnant of our industry. While the value of the pound was kept ludicrously high, they exploited it by buying nice properties in the South of France, Catalonia and Tuscany, so that when the reckoning came, they'd be well set up. Except it may be that the intensely evil and cretinous Anglo-Saxon ecoonomic model will shortly lead to a planetary, economic Armageddon.

[bertman]

3. Please don't praise the demise of peasant farmers in favor of factory farms. Teach the peasants the

better techniques and let them produce food. Factory farms are AgriBidness. We know how that works and it isn't for the good of the people or the planet.

[Joe Chi Minh]

5. No, you've completely misunderstood me. I'm 1000% in favour of

small-holdings, and 1000,000% against factory farming! I'm really very sorry if I didn't make that clear. Just as I don't think foreign interests buying our banks is a sign of success! These post-1980 politicians in the UK are clowns but, alas, dangerous, immensely destructive ones.

[bertman]

6. My bad, KCabotDMIII. I misinterper-etated it.

[Truth2Tell]

2. Only in a sane world David.

But not here.

K&R

[bertman]

4. A reassessment of our Imperial bases is definitely required; although, I imagine that some of the

countries who have a base in them are not angry about it and may even see the base as a form of security. Everything our military does abroad is not bad even though I'm sure that a lot of it is and deserves to be stopped.

If our guiding principles were in line with our Constitution and the ideals of democracy rather than Imperial hegemony, the bases that remained could be outposts of security for us and the host countries.

I'm not ready yet to say the U.S. shouldn't play a major role in maintaining international order. But I also don't care to see us remain as the Imperial Storm Troopers who are at the beck and call of the corporatists. Who knows when that will change?

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