The next chapter, Changed Management, addresses what happened last time we were at this precipice. Again it discusses, in a bit more detail, what occurred in World War II. It covered actions taken by Volkswagen, Bayer, and BASF, and addresses such notables as Abbie Hoffman, Bill Gates, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, and Teddy Roosevelt.
Wealth, Women, and War was reviewed and published by WorTechs Press in July 2008. It was written as a working guide for the average service worker, and a warning to the elite. It draws from multiple sources, books, and websites which can be verified with ease. It was critically reviewed at the time of its publication. It was not intended to be politically correct, it was meant to be an honest evaluation of Globalization. If the Tea Party, and Occupy will not pay attention to what is happening, then we will all be condemned by future generations.
It is all up to you.
October 19, 2014
In the 1920s, due to the harsh penalties imposed upon
Germany by England and France , run away inflation led to
the obliteration of the German middle class. This in turn led to the rise of
the National Socialist German Workers Party (the Nazi Party). This eventually
led to World War Two and to 55 Million dead world wide, plus the destruction of
Germany , Italy , Russia ,
Poland , and England .
Even Belgium , the Netherlands ,
and Luxemburg did not escape. Paris survived
unscathed, because it capitulated to Germany early in the war. The
French countryside, however, was ground under by the crush of the formidable
German war machine and the Allied Armies.
Wealth, Women, and War was reviewed and published by WorTechs Press in July 2008. It was written as a working guide for the average service worker, and a warning to the elite. It draws from multiple sources, books, and websites which can be verified with ease. It was critically reviewed at the time of its publication. It was not intended to be politically correct, it was meant to be an honest evaluation of Globalization. If the Tea Party, and Occupy will not pay attention to what is happening, then we will all be condemned by future generations.
It is all up to you.
Wealth, Women, and War is released in accordance with the solidarity principals of Occupy Wall Street adopted on February 9, 2012.Cliff Potts
October 19, 2014
Change Management
From 1919 to 1933 Germany was cut off from the world.
The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany
to give up 10% of its national territory, all of its colonies, 12.5% of its
population, 16% of its coalfields, and half of its iron and steel industry. It
was limited to an army of 100,000 men. It could not conscript men for an army.
Manufacturing of weapons were restricted, as was the import and export of
weapons. It was to have no air force, no submarines, no tanks, and no poison
gas. This is not unlike the sanctions imposed today upon many uncooperative
nations. Almost a full generation of Germans grew up in isolation and deprivation.
Once again we can see those twin factors, now on a national scale, cropping up
in troubled locations.
The economic loss from both wars was staggering. It
does not say much for the management of the German corporations who were more
than willing to support Hitler in exchange for favorable deals with the
government and expanding markets. Germany ’s recovery in the 1930s was
facilitated, in no small part, by the corporate support of and cooperation with
the Nazi Party.
Volkswagen was created by a direct command of Adolph
Hitler to Ferdinand Porsche to make the 1931 design more suitable for the
common people. It first rolled off the assembly line in 1936 in Stuttgart , Germany
It may not be convincing to look at the German losses
alone in this situation. Perhaps the data is tainted due to their national
status as aggressors in both World Wars. However, the Allied losses, can give
us a better picture. Half of all fatalities in the Second World War were Allied
civilians. The United
Kingdom , which was never successfully
invaded by the Axis powers, lost 0.14% of its total population. France who
capitulated to the Germans lost 0.6% of its total population. Both numbers
represent civilian losses only. These are the losses to the corporations. In
raw figures that is 67,000 civilians for the United Kingdom and 267,000 civilian
deaths for the French. The Soviet Union lost
the most people with a count of 11,900,000.
Maybe in today’s desensitized world such losses are
meaningless, but it calls into question the corporation’s ability to control
the governments with the market forces when the politics of an era become
fluid. How can an accountant report the total loss of production facilities on
the books? How are the losses of key personal covered on the P&L? How does
one explain war crimes to auditors? This has to take some creative accounting.
The losses get broken up and scattered. Bayer and
BASF spun off of the I.G. Farben the manufacturer of Zyklon B. Daimler-Benz,
the parent of DaimlerChrysler, “used thousands of slaves and forced laborers
including Jews, foreigners, and POWs.”[1]
How is this profitable for the managers or the shareholders? Moreover, how is
it profitable to push a nation so far that is sees no other option than to
elect a dictatorial warlord as chancellor? The only rational conclusion is that
it is not profitable.
The corporations felt they could control the Nazi
expansion and avoid a war through an appeasement policy and favorable trade
deals. They did get rich off the process, but they did not stop the war. Maybe
they had no intention of stopping it; maybe the goal was just getting on the
inside of the war machine to make a profit on it. Hard to call the end result a
profit.
From 1908 to 1938, the international opinion was that
another global war was impossible. The argument was that it would disrupt
global trade. This was essentially the same argument used to dispel fears that
World War One would erupt. From 1900 to 1946, the proponents of global trade
proved to be wrong, twice. That was one of the main arguments used to dispel
the fear of Nuclear War in the 1960s. Global trade is the mantra which is used
to dispel all fears of world war. It would be nice if it was true. Trade and
commerce are unquestionably preferred to mayhem and bloodshed. However, there
are two problems. One, it only serves the few who shine in business, and two,
it requires that the corporations make room in the economy for every single
willing individual to “win.” The nature of raw absolute capitalism doesn’t lend
itself to making room for increased competition in a community.
Those who have are more inclined to prevent others
from getting theirs. This is the message hidden in the current dictum that an
individual is not “entitled,” and he has to work for what is his. This is all
well and good, but if he is never really taught how the system works, or how to
make it work for him, then it is a rather moot point.
If the business of America is business then one would assume that the public education system
would be training people to engage in business.
Since the capitalism system builds a hyper-competitive environment, and we do
little to teach children how to make the system work for them. Children are
taught a great deal of esoteric and idealistic nonsense and then they grow up
to be adults who have no real understanding of the nuts and bolts of the
system. This automatically creates culture classes within our own culture. Atop
this, we have spent more time talking about teaching religion in the classrooms
than we have about teaching our economic system. The command to teach math and
science is all well and fine, but if the individual does not understand the
rational behind the push, then the motivation to learn is lost. To make more
cogs in the corporate machine, the goal of the public school system is a
breeding ground for cultural conflict. For the most part, the population does
not understand what it takes to “win” in this system. This is not new, even the
revolutionary Abbie Hoffman confessed that he did not even know there was a
great depression in the 1930s until he was in college. He was born in 1936. The
lack of knowledge on how to make the system work is essentially the cause of
the wars.
The tripping point for the Second
World War was the inability of the corporations to retain control
of the governments. They also lost credibility with the public as to the
soundness of the system. People put trust in the system based on what they were
told by the corporations without having a sound educational base to understand
risk management. The roaring ‘20s roared because of an overwhelming optimism
that business had solved everything and poverty and war were things of the
past. Once credibility, and the wealth, was lost, the corporate leaders became
just another group of citizens. This in turn elevated Hitler to power with all
his promises of recovering the wealth of Germany .[2]
In the United States
this occurred when the stock market crashed on October 24, 1929. In November of
1932, the corporations, without any influence with the population, saw Franklin
D. Roosevelt win the White House. The business friendly Republicans were out of
power and would remain out of power until 1952 when Dwight D. Eisenhower won
the general election.
In spite of the revisionist arguments citing that FDR
caused the Great Depression, he was a product of the ’29 Market Crash. FDR was
as much a result of Depression as he was a catalyst for change towards a more
socialist form of capitalism. It is disingenuous to demonize a man for being a
product of the history of his era. Socialism in the 1920s did not yet have the
taint from the Communist Soviet Union and Roosevelt
saw that the nation’s back was against the wall. He had to draw on
unconventional sources to get the nation moving again. The corporations were
effectually in as much danger as the general population. FDR can be criticized
in 20/20 hind site for the increase of tariffs through the Smoot-Hawley Tariff
Act but that was signed into law under the Hoover on June 17, 1930, before FDR took
office. While economic indicators did return to normal by 1936, the economy
lurched again and in 1937 the unemployment rate jumped from roughly 15% to 19%.
This was laid at the feet of the corporate monopolies, once again due to lack
of understanding and lack of influence the corporations were pushed further
aside.
The only recovery came from the attack on the United States by the Japanese on December 7,
1941 and the German’s declaration of war against the United States on December 11, 1941.
Credibility, and status, as seen today, is just as much economic resources as
is capital. One can effectively argue that without credibility, access to
capital is denied.
While it is beyond the scope of this discussion to
get into the specifics of what FDR did and did not do during his term in
office, he did begin the process of softening up and socializing the harsh
nature of the capitalistic system in the United States . His goal was to rid
the general population of the concept of being “losers” in the capitalistic
system. The depression had minimal affect on the upper ends of the economic
scale, but ravaged the middle class and the working poor. Those who were still
working for a living were working from paycheck to paycheck with longer waits
between paychecks and much lower wages. Their recovery and growth was stifled
by less and less opportunity. It has been observed that the depression of the 1930s
did not so much eliminate jobs as it drove most working class people into a
state of perpetual underemployment. We seem to be on the cusp of something
similar today.
The best summation of what is happening today comes
from a passage in Robert A. Heinlein’s Logic
of Empire in the anthology The Past
Through Tomorrow. It is part of a discussion on how societies decline into
slave-wage economies if not into slavery itself. This is essentially what has
occurred in the past and is what is occurring today. Moreover it pollutes the
validity of the advantages of globalization. However, it is not by deliberate
design, it is by accident.
“… In any expanding free-enterprise
economy,” Heinlein wrote,” which does not have a money system designed to fit
its requirements the use of mother-country capital to develop the colony
inevitably results in subsistence-level wages at home and salve labor in the
colonies. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and all the good will in
the world on the part of the so-called ruling class won’t change it, because
the basic problem is one requiring scientific analysis and a mathematical
mind.”[3]
Based on Gray’s analysis in Men, Women, and Relationships, it may also require more of a
woman’s touch in defining when we are going to get to each mile-marker in the
journey into the future. Perchance we would be better suited as a society, a
nation, and a planet, if we let the men pick the course needed, and let the
women define what we will need when we get to each mile-stone in the process.
The expansion of the free-enterprise economy (now
called globalization) occurred to some lesser degree from the end of World War
One to the stock market crash of 1929. Some historians have argued that global
trade was not as big an influence on the economy of the 1920s. That depends on
perspective. The few years following World War One saw a marked rise in revenue
in the agricultural industries. U.S.
farmers were getting wealthy feeding a decimated Europe .
The decline in the agricultural industries early in the slumping cycle is still
considered by many to be one of the precursors to the Great Depression. This
could be analogous to the current domestic boom in oil production to offset the
unease in the foreign market. If so, the end results could be equally
devastating.
At the end of World War One, the United Kingdom had been bled financially,
and the ability to progressively influence and confidently control the
economies in her empire greatly diminished. Additionally, her willingness to treat
the world civilly had diminished. By the outbreak of World War Two even Edward
R. Murrow was appalled by the class distinction seen in the various levels of
Air Raid preparations. The wealthy were moved to hotels, the middle class had
home built bomb shelters in their gardens, and the working poor were left to
use slit trenches in public parks. It says a lot about a society when it
engages in war and refuses to provide for the safety of all its citizens. It is
even more absurd when one realizes that a working class welder is as important
as the industrialist in war production.
The U.S. ,
helping her Anglo-Saxon brethren, stepped into the void after World War One and
began the rise to empire. It can be argued that U.S. imperialism was by design. But
case for accidental imperialism seems to be the strongest. If it had been by
design it would not be void of “scientific analysis” and the “mathematical
mind” referred to by Mr. Heinlein. What we do have seems more reflective of
what Leonard M. Flud, in The Secret
Language of Competitive Intelligence,[4]
calls the SWAG (Scientific Wild Assed Guess); it is methodically compiled with
care and forethought but is still essentially guesswork. Again, this argues
well for Gray’s observation that women define what we shall do when we get to
our destination. Most corporations are run by men; they are great at getting to
the goal, but rather poor at determining what to do when they get there.
The connection between World War One and World War
Two cannot be overlooked. Essentially, the troops went over there in World War
One and did the job. In a typical male dominated Victorian fashion they decided
to beat on the losers some more. This piece of “bad mojo” set up the events
which led to World War Two. To Woodrow Wilson’s credit, he did try to moderate
the judicial application of sanctions and vengeance, but he became ill at a
critical time and the negotiations took on a vicious note. One can speculate
that if Queen Victoria
had been alive to see the day, the results would have been more humane. The
dialogue lacked a woman’s touch to say the least.
Empires are built by men like Mr. Bill Gates who see
an opportunity and throw everything they have into it. With knowledge, genius,
skill and a touch of providence, not to mention a dash of cunning and a pinch
of guile, they become the big winners in the capitalist game. Men like Gates
are not evil villains. They are the men which every society needs to expand the
economy and develop new technologies to the fullest potential. Having
successfully done so, however, others need to come into the social matrix and
fine tune, adjust, balance what has been developed. Since the latter often
doesn’t occur, the society gets buffeted by the obvious dark side of
capitalism. For this reason, one can successfully argue that imperial expansion
is happenstance, rather than design, conspiracy, and revolution. This occurred
in the 1920s, and is occurring again today.
The approach which FDR took to cure the ills of the
economy in the 1930s was a product of the loss of corporate sway in the
economy. He was the focal point of the political will of many who saw that the
New American Empire needed to be balanced between the needs of the citizens and
the needs of business. He, being a survivor of polio, knew too well that
unforeseen circumstances could blindside an individual and diminish their
capacity to compete in the capitalist game.
A casual reading of FDR’s “fireside chats” would
indicate that no long term agenda other than creating a sense of security for
the women of the United
States . The March 12, 1933 “Chat” begins
with the following paragraph:
I want to talk for a few minutes with the
people of the United States about banking -- with the comparatively few who
understand the mechanics of banking but more particularly with the overwhelming
majority who use banks for the making of deposits and the drawing of checks. I
want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and
what the next steps are going to be. I recognize that the many proclamations
from State Capitols and from Washington, the legislation, the Treasury
regulations, etc., couched for the most part in banking and legal terms should
be explained for the benefit of the average citizen. I owe this in particular
because of the fortitude and good temper with which everybody has accepted the
inconvenience and hardships of the banking holiday. I know that when you
understand what we in Washington
Arguments can be made that FDR had a master plan to
make the nation a socialist nation. Very few of those who experienced the
terror of the Great Depression would have given that idea validity. Only today
in the drive to discredit FDR’s New Deal, have the propagandists of the right
made headway on selling the idea to the public. It may be a case of yesterday’s
heroes becoming today’s villains. Very few of the survivors of that era would
corroborate the willful socialization of the FDR program. No doubt whatsoever
is raised on the man’s political abilities. Once the women of the nation felt
secure about the direction of the nation, the men would follow suite and all
would reap the rewards of the new social contract.
The government sponsored propaganda of the era focuses on people going back to
work in a reorganized version of the “Square Deal” adapted for the time from
his Uncle Theodore Roosevelt. Today, “Teddy” Roosevelt is still a hero in the
GOP.
On September 7, 1903, some 30 years before FDR’s
proclamation of a New Deal, “Teddy” Roosevelt in a speech to New York State
Agricultural Association in Syracuse ,
New York
We must act upon the motto of all for each
and each for all. There must be ever present in our minds the fundamental truth
that in a republic such as ours the only safety is to stand neither for nor
against any man because he is rich or because he is poor, because he is engaged
in one occupation or another, because he works with his brains or because he
works with his hands. We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man.
We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more
and should receive no less.[6]
This is a far cry from what occurred in the U.S.
in the 1920s, or today. The corporations of today are again catering to the
rich at the expense of the majority of the population, choosing who is worthy
of a deference, and making allowances for the bad behavior of modern man.[7]
This is not in line with either Roosevelt ’s
ideal of government. As “Teddy” went onto say in 1903:
Finally, we must keep ever in mind that a
republic such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly liberty which
comes through the equal domination of the law over all men alike, and through
its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all
that no man is above it and no man below it.[8]
More than one historian has said that the United States of America
in the 1930s was on the verge of Civil War. They point out that the U.S.
could have easily elected an Adolph Hitler. Franklin Roosevelt guided the
nation from such an extreme point to a more communal form of free market
economy. The quasi-socialist approach to the market was due to the corporations’
loss of the good-will, trust, and loyalty of the general population. That loss
is happening again.
There may be some truth to the arguments that the
crash of 1929 was foreseeable, and had effectively been recovered from by 1931
if not 1930. However, the stock market as a viable vehicle for wealth expansion
and economic security lost all credibility in the mass media and the popular
mind well into the 1940s. The G.I. generation for the most part never fully
regained their trust of the stock market or the corporations. The crash of
1929, rightly or wrongly, was laid at the doorstep of the corporations, and
they lived with the tainted image for the better part of forty years. Much has
been written in conservative journals which attribute the Great Depression to
FDR. While there is no doubt that the FDR administration made some mistakes, it
is imprudent to overlook that FDR came to power when the corporations could no
longer influence government or control the effects of run-away, free market
competition.
[1]
Adams, Cecil . "Did Krups, Braun, and Mercedes-Benz make Nazi
concentration camp ovens? Did Hitler name the Volkswagen?." The
Straight Dope. 29 Sep. 1991. Cecil's storehouse of human knowledge. 22 Jan.
2008 <http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_078.html>.
[2]
It has to be noted that the German people were looking for a messiah, and
Hitler filled the bill well.
[3]
Heinlein, Robert A. "The Past Through Tomorrow." Logic of Empire.
New York : Ace
Books, 1987, p 420.
[4]
Fuld, L. (2006). The Secret Language of Competitive Intelligence: How to See
Through and Stay Ahead of Business Disruptions, Distortions, Rumors, and Smoke
Screens . New York :
Crown Business.
[5]
ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT DELIVERED BY RADIO FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, March 12,
1933, http://www.mhric.org/fdr/chat1.html
[6]
"THE SQUARE DEAL." Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt. 2006. Chapultepec,
Inc. 11 Mar. 2008
<http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsquaredealspeech.html>.
[7]
Within today’s society there is a mob fixation with individual sexuality and
exploits, but little attention paid to common core values of human decency in
the market place.
[8]
"THE SQUARE DEAL." Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt. 2006.
Chapultepec, Inc. 11 Mar. 2008
<http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsquaredealspeech.html>.
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