2008 Elections/Keynes/y Gasset etc.

There was an interesting cartoon of the '2008 Madness' sweet sixteen with Democratic and Republican presidential contenders paired up to reach the Nov. election...the chances of electing a good president aren't encouraging, much less good policies. The candidates will wait until the last minute to express the 'brilliance' of their plans, in order to keep secret the content from rivals. It would be better to develop rational planning two years before taking office and put them before the public to consider in order that they might have a chance to be implemented the first for years. It will be business 'as usual' most likely.

Right wing talk radio has an essential blindness in its pursuit of profits based on corporatism. Right-wingers are something like the fascists attacking the communists in the build-up to the Spanish civil war; they tend to force every sort of democratic criticism or alternative into an extreme opposite.

The extreme right dresses itself up rather innocently in the guise of neo-liberal causes such as racial equality (for consumerist purposes, yet in so doing will corrupt the individual civil rights by transcending individualism with mass indoctrination and conformity) Corporatism developed with Mussolini, yet even Keynes anticipated it before the stock market crash he warned of the vast public debt incurred by the first world war.

Ortega y Gasset wrote an essay called 'the dehumanization of art’ that explained why the realism of the nineteenth century was passed for dehumanization such as cubism, and that coincided with the ‘revolt of the masses’ and perhaps the end of individualism. Keynes wrote an essay named ‘The End of Lassez Faire' that prescribed central banking to control inflation and later he developed deficit spending for pump priming-yet he anticipated corporatist neo-governments as alternative moderators of unrestricted egoistic capitalism. Mises criticized Keynes article as being a remedy like that of prior German neo-socialists, yet later decided, I believe, that he had not given Keynes his due.

Corporatism as ad hoc methods of infusing socialist controls into unrestricted concentrations of wealth in egoistic forms of capitalism that do not consider public interests at all may take the form of boardroom disregard for stockholder preferences regarding corporate directions and planning. Obviously shareholders might comprise a sort of democracy in a corporate context if their interests and preferences were actually the source of corporate policy and planning instead of being simple entitlements to pacifying dividends.

Keynes believed that corporatism was a form of neo-socialism that might modify predatory capitalism that cares not even for national interests, and certainly Keynes suggestions about deficit spending and central banking, controls of inflation and boardroom quasi-governmental functions were prescient economically speaking.

Keynes' views on the evolution of capital concentrations in a social environment from which detachment by individuals is not realistically practical were good considering their a priori nature, yet considered now in the post soviet era when corporatism is becoming the new sovereign it is obvious the Keynes’s point about government functions to stimulate individual savings and development of an agenda to encourage national interests and infrastructure developments in the field of economics and environment were disregarded or shunned outright perhaps becoming classified by corporatist media propagandists as 'leftist' or 'liberal'. John Maynard Keynes wrote at an interesting point in the 20th century when global socialism, population increase and capitalism were all increasing rapidly and prediction of the outcome was a fruitful field of endeavor. In the post soviet, six billion plus population, environmentally depleting corporatist environment with Chinese socialism merging toward increasing consumption and mass consumerism the mere management of monetary policy and inflation seems a bit anachronistic as a philosophy of government approach to economic engagement, yet it is a rational result of the success of capitalism and promotion of egoism in the battle against state socialism and authoritarianism known as the cold war.

Morality has an objective basis within the individual will to exist that is discovered in every human being. Morality is the description of fair and balanced relations between individuals formalized to support their actual freedom to exist, to think and to do for oneself. In the gross economic posture of the world the individual right to act as freely as possible, and to have his social, personal and economic rights secured so far as possible from collective actions by corporations, governments, criminal organizations or adverse others is a necessary pre-condition for retaining the most creative, healthy and moral economic and social environment possible.

Iraq Force Levels and Babylon

It should be considered that generals often have asked for more and more troops to overcome normal 'wastage' when intelligence is lacking.

General Abizaid recently made a Trotsky-like remark about American unwillingness to give control of its eastern ports to the Emir of United Arabs. Perhaps he plans like Trotsky in both military and political realms simultaneously, or retros the affluent line of Clauswitz dictum about war a continuation of politics to spread a sewer of stench that would unify the dar al harb and dar al Islam in such a way as to make the front line unidentifiable. Trotsky pioneered that technique although not too many generals have been egregiously adept at the art. American right wingers accused Ho Chi Minh and the 'left' that make movies like 'Broke Dick Mountain' or 'American War Efforts are Evil Imperialism by Running Stooges' of subverting the war effort with propaganda, yet propaganda is a few miles short of actively integrating opposition force (opfor) political structures or Vichy symps into ones own economy. It can be risky, and I wonder if General Abizaid learned that at the Army War College or at the Emir's table.

General Haig asked for more than a half a million troops to advance less than 15 miles over several months in a Flanders campaign in world war one while Churchill and others wanted to reinforce Italy--Haig would not let even a few field pieces be shifted east.

In the modern world there are several levels of communication and 'fear factor', political alignment possibilities and so forth. It may well be possible that the administration's corporatists have hidden agenda items delimiting the range of freedom allowable in the ongoing control of oil in Iraq and elsewhere. Certainly the administration is completely ineffective at supporting national U.S. policies that would end fossil fuel use in automobiles before a few years pass. It is a defeatist administration on that, while doing all right in Iraq to some extent.

The Iraqi and Muslim peoples of the area will scrum for control, and the area may be as peaceful as Northern Ireland during 'The Troubles' for some time. It is difficult to predict the future, yet likely the Bush administration will leave a strategically challenging situation for the next administration that it will be unprepared to administer while attempting to balance the federal debt being raise now near 9 trillion dollars and liberate the people from reliance on fossil fuel and foreign owned autos that are a permanent transfusion of economic blood abroad.

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=9598

Listening to J. Vernon McGee talking about the book of the revelation it is interesting to consider America's present activities at building a possible future Babylonian commercial center that trades with all the nations of the world, literally. If there is an evolving second world or oil based axis of politics Baghdad might technically serve as a midway between China, Africa and other southern hemispheric or low latitude nations. Will many be saved spiritually from that evolution is the most interesting question in the context.