The drive for raw profits

Norman Markowit

Karl Marx once wrote that the United States had a relatively 
"pure" form of capitalism where the capitalists faced the workers 
directly, with no aristocracies, pre-capitalist classes, or non-
capitalist ideological survivals to get in the way — just the 
raw drive for profits.

Wars and war-profiteering are great illustrations of Marx's 
point.

War profiteering has a long history in the US, with some famous 
names attached. In the Civil War, which really was on one level a 
war for freedom against slavery, industrial capitalists like Jay 
Gould profited from war spending and war contracts and, if they 
had to, bought $300 exemptions from the draft.

Cornelius Vanderbilt took his black-sheep son William into the 
family business when William, who had a farm on Staten Island, 
proved his worth by selling hay to Union Army cavalry troops at 
inflated prices.

In the Civil War, tainted meat and other products sold by 
contractors in an unregulated economy spread disease and death. 
In the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898, where US battle 
casualties were minimal, historians estimate that more soldiers 
died as a result of contaminated foodstuffs than in combat.

Companies such as DuPont in World War I and General Motors and 
Ford in World War II (when the modern military-industrial complex 
was born) greatly increased their wealth through government 
contracts, and had their executives serve on wartime planning 
boards as "dollar-a-year men".

But, unlike today, they did not have one of their former chief 
executives as vice president of the United States. Also, they had 
to face a large tax increase and government protection for 
unionised workers in both World Wars as a trade off for their 
increased profits.

Earlier, even Andrew Mellon, treasury secretary under Presidents 
Harding, Coolidge and Hoover in the 1920s and a minor big-
business folk hero, had to resign his post during the early 
Depression so that his Pittsburgh banking empire could receive 
loans from the government's Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

Mellon is no role model for Vice President Dick Cheney, former 
Halliburton CEO, who shamelessly rolls on with and for the 
company, channelling multibillion-dollar super-profitable federal 
contracts its way without competitive bidding, even as the press 
reports corruption in Halliburton-supervised food sales to the US 
military.

In a way, Cheney is closer to former General Motors President 
Charles E Wilson, who proclaimed, "What's good for General Motors 
is good for the country". But even Wilson had to break his direct 
GM connections when he became Secretary of Defense, and a number 
of minor Defense Department officials with connections to firms 
selling clothing and other supplies were later forced to resign 
their positions under a cloud of suspicion.

Crisis and wars

Another point made by Karl Marx was that as a system goes into 
crisis, its contradictions become more and more apparent to the 
masses of people. Today Americans are both seeing and feeling 
those contradictions.

This administration is fighting a 19th century imperial war with 
21st century weapons in Iraq. It has turned loose a legion of 
"private contractors" to get rich there even if many of their 
employees get killed in the process. It has permitted these 
companies in many instances to bring in their own private 
security forces, even though that may conflict with US military 
strategy and tactics.

Since the Bush administration's interest is in making sure that 
the hundreds of billions in profits go to the industrial side of 
the military-industrial complex, to Halliburton especially, it is 
treating US soldiers the way big employers do non-union workers.

It is taking National Guard forces and reserves out of their 
domestic jobs where they are needed and sending them with 
virtually no training to occupy a foreign country. As the 
disaster in Iraq deepens, the attitude of Halliburton and Bush's 
other big-business supporters towards this administration reminds 
me of gangster Hyman Roth's comment about the Batista regime in 
Cuba in the film The Godfather Part II: "We have here what we 
have been always looking for: a government that we can really 
work with".

Today, more than 150 years after Karl Marx saw the US as 
representing a "pure form" of capitalism, the Bush administration 
is providing the world with a textbook example of "state monopoly 
capitalism", with no apologies for the open connections between 
high government officials and a firm like Halliburton, with its 
multibillion-dollar Pentagon contracts.

Fortunately we have the power in the coming election to defeat 
the Bush administration and war profiteers like Halliburton.

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People's Weekly World