MILO MINDERBINDER LIVES!
Iran War Boondoggle Further Enriches the Oil Companies and Military Contractors (& more...)
(This article was started last week in NYC but not completed as reality intervened in the form of a gig, recording and mixing projects in the studio, event commitments, and then a flight to Italy and the commencement of the first of my workshops on this tour. Here in Florence now, the finishing touches to the article have been added.)
Showing my age (happy to still be around) but one of the many seminal books of my youth was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Ultimately, a screed proving the destructive irrationality of armed conflict and of much human behavior, Catch-22 was also a darkly comic tale taking place during World War II that delved deeply into the personal; the thoughts and feelings of those in the military, especially Pvt. Yossarian, the unwilling hero of the book. A central character is Milo Minderbinder, painted as a free-market visionary, buying anything and everything low and selling it high to whomever is buying. If it could be monetized, it was fair game for the Jeff Bezos of his time. Morality had no place in the Minderbinder business model, only profit. And if this meant selling armaments to the Germans to bomb American bases, that was okay, and in fact, good for business.
Just as a war to control oil production, supply, and distribution leads to a scarcity of oil and difficulty in obtaining it, one must not see this as a bug, but as a feature of this new Gilded Age. The desire is to maximize profit for the oil companies who have paid good money to iDJT in campaign financing and outright bribery. IDJT complies with an attack that does everything to raise the price of oil. Feature, not bug. The oil companies are receiving excellent return on their investment.
Peace is antithetical to the selling of armaments. If there is peace, then no armaments get used and no new ones get bought. Profits down? Start a war...everyone benefits, at least everyone who “counts.”
If a war destroys lots of military equipment, what is there to do but manufacture more? War begats scarcity of armaments begats more armaments begats more war. Easy.
Finally, the tariffs: the amount that the US gubmint collected in tariffs varies with the telling with an absurdly inflated figure of $13 trillion from iDJT. He presented the tariffs to an ignorant and gullible public as money paid by the countries exporting to the US. One of the things most of us learned in elementary school was that tariffs are paid by the importers. American multi-corporations paid these ridiculous tariffs to the US and then passed the cost on to the consumers. Now that many courts have ruled that the tariffs were illegally created (common knowledge to those with any understanding of how tariffs work), further rulings state that the US must reimburse the tariffs to these corporations and to everyone else who can prove that they paid. How many believe that the corporations will refund the costs added to those who consumed their products? If you do, I’d like to sell you a Mars colony, ready for settling. The corporations (who without a doubt contributed to iDJT’s election), are being rewarded with a ready-made steal from the pockets of the public and deposited into their own.
A coda: in the NY Times for May 16 there is an article titled “The Secretive Conglomerate That Controls Cuba’s Economy.” There’s a chart that’s meant to scare the viewer into seeing the interlock between the military, government, corporations, and banks as this powerful conspiracy. One could, of course, substitute any number of American institutions into this chart as proof of the basic corruption of the US system of secret conglomerate control on such a huge scale that it dwarfs anything going on in Cuba...but would that be nice?...