Economic Democracy: The Political Struggle of the 21st Century

The Political Struggle of the 21st Century

J. W. Smith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138895409
• eBook ISBN: 9781315501390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 1999: The author contends that economic democracy is the economic system the U.S. purports to have, but has thus far failed to achieve because it, like all the economic powers that have gone before, seeks to control the economies of weaker nations. It is the shocking lack of economic democracy, and the efforts of so many to achieve it, that fuels today's conflicts and will fuel those of the 21st century.To show how and why, this comprehensive work provides a detailed analysis of the history of numerous aspects of the development of the Neo-Mercantilist world economy; the geopolitical systems put in place by the developed world to manage and perpetuate that economy; and the numerous proposals and modeling plans that have been offered over the years for the achievement of economic democracy.

Introduction

Eliminating poverty is not philosophically complicated: Eliminate the monopolization of land, technology, and finance capital and equalize pay for equally productive work, both within internal economies and between trading nations. Once all nations and all people have access to technology and their labor is paid equally for equally productive work, the buying power of labor in different nations, and within nations, will equalize.

So long as all have access to land and technology as outlined herein, those monopolies cannot reconstitute themselves and the huge overcharges which lay claim to the wealth produced by others will disappear. The managers of capital will be under such intense competition that the incompetent will quickly disappear, economic efficiency will rise steeply, and the competent will be held to a fair profit. That fair profit will then be recognizable for what it really is, their fair wages.

It is those inequalities of pay for equal work which create the poles of an extremely wealthy few and an impoverished many. Following the currency collapses of the several once-robust Asian and Latin American economies in 1997-98, equally productive labor's pay in the developing world dropped to 10 percent that of workers in the developed world. This is not just a tenfold difference in buying power. As will be seen in our opening chapter, wealth accumulates exponentially with the wage differential between equally productive labor. That tenfold differential in wage rates translates into a one hundred-fold differential in potential wealth accumulation power, and accumulated wealth (capital) is the engine of capitalism. Indeed, if unequal pay for the equally productive work of weak nations were reduced to a 50 percent pay differential, the potential wealth accumulated by the high-paid nations in direct trades with low-paid labor nations would be reduced from the current wealth accumulation potential of one hundred times to a potential of only four times.

Suppression of the Freedom of Others Through Denial of Their Economic Rights Is the Untold Secret of "National Security" and the "National Interest"

Early capital formation began with European city-states monopolizing technology through militarily destroying the primitive industries of the countryside and forcing those villagers to sell their raw produce to the city and purchase back from them the manufactured products. The Europeans battled for nearly 800 years over who would own industrial capital, who would have the right to labor with those tools of production, and who would control trade. Each center of capital required a "countryside" to provide it with raw materials and markets. Each center of capital controlled its "countryside" as best it could to maintain a low price for raw material "imports" and a high price for manufactured "exports."

This control of trade developed during the pre-industrial era and was not only essential for the security of city-states, states, nations, and finally empires, but was the foundation for the accumulation of great wealth and power. The loss of freedom, both political and economic, in the dependent colonial nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was specifically the result of the need for imperial centers of capital to control resources crucial for their survival, wealth, and power.

This is the meaning of the terms "national security" and "national interest" which we hear so much; economic security is normally the subject, not military security. Thus, the true meaning of "national security" of powerful nations is the control of an economic empire of subject states. The strategies through which this is carried out become "national security secrets." It is the trumpeting of peace, freedom, justice, rights, democracy, and majority rule that requires that those Grand Strategies for controlling other people and their resources be kept secret. What is practiced is the total antithesis of what is preached.

All of us have known all our lire that the Managers of State have "secrets" and we all accept this as normal and right. The "we" includes the lower echelons of government, the media, the university system, and even members of Congress not privy to these secrets who have not taken an oath of secrecy. Only the inner sanctums of the national government (the National Security Council, the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the intelligence agencies, and members of congress with security clearances [the primarily nameless and faceless "they" deciding our destiny]) know what those secrets are and they are sworn to secrecy. Those employed in the diplomatic corps, intelligence agencies, and the military carrying out those secret tasks are also sworn to secrecy and face severe penalties for violating that oath.

We all understand that dictatorships have secrets because they do vile and unjust things that they do not want known. But what could be so secret in democratic societies where governments are supposed to be employees of the people? Quite simply, most wealthy societies have very few resources and even the resource-wealthy American consumer society is dependent upon resources and markets throughout the world. The secret that cannot be told is that the wealth of an imperial center requires controlling the "countryside" to provide cheap resources: the minerals, timber, fuel, and fibers necessary for a comfortable society. Increasingly, that dependency extends to products manufactured with cheap labor on the periphery. Thus the terms "national security" and "national interest" we hear so much about, and we accept those spoken words as all we are entitled to know.

There is only one reason "we the people" are not entitled to know what those policies "for our national security" and "in our national interest'' are: if known, they would create greater insecurity for they are against the best interests of, and they lay claim to, what are properly the rights of people in the "countryside" providing those crucial resources and cheap labor. Such claims seem normal and right only when considering the rights of those within a nation or alliance of nations whose well-being depends upon the resources and cheap labor of their "countryside. As soon as one steps outside the borders of an alliance and into the world of those being dispossessed of their resources and production of their labors, it becomes obvious that these dispossessions are neither just nor right.

The secret of the more powerful nations is that their Managers of State do not practice what they preach. Instead of permitting democracy to function on the periphery of empire (their countryside), they must subtly and secretly control those weaker nations in order to control those crucial resources and markets. We will be addressing in depth this simple secret of the inner sanctums of governments. It is the reason for the great wealth of resource-poor, but powerful, nations and the impoverishment of resource-rich, but weak, nations. No wonder it has to be kept secret even from most members of Congress, academics, and the media.

Control of other nations has functioned for so many centuries under so many excuses that most, even in the inner sanctums of government, are unaware of this fundamental secret: the imperial centers of capital are claiming a large share of what rightfully belongs to the impoverished on the periphery. This truth has been hidden all these centuries through the demonization of other leaders and other nations to justify the violence required to maintain the wealth of the world moving towards the imperial centers. Other nations have been demonized so much, and for so long, that we take it as a given that they are inherently bad and we do not look beyond those created belief systems to the struggles of those peripheral countries for their own freedom to control their own destiny.

Why should we? The struggles of those nations to gain, or maintain, their independence is described to us as the violence of dictators slaughtering their own people, the most threatening political consolidations as plans to rule the world. Those struggles for control of their own destiny, democratic revolutions (misnamed as insurgencies), thus become the very proof that other leaders and other nations are those demons. After all, we are taught that it is they who depend upon us and it is they who should emulate us, not that it is we who are dependent upon their resources and markets.

There is a germ of truth in all we are told. Historically, the resources of the losers of these wars enriched the lives of those who won and realists recognize how crucial those resources are. But social scientists recognize the enormous waste of the systems of production and distribution, and that the wars they engender are wasting a large share of those precious resources as well as causing rapid destruction and pollution of the waters, soils, and ecosystems. Although believing it is always other nations that are the aggressor, not their nation, most people understand that, if this continues, powerful nations battling—or the wastes of mass production and mass consumption—may eventually destroy the world. To avoid that, we need only restructure from the violence of neomercantilism (metamorphosed to corporate imperialism) monopolizing the world's resources into all the world's people sharing those resources through cooperative capitalism. Once that choice is made, all need for national secrets disappears and the goals of all—world peace, sustainable development, and elimination of poverty—can be attained, and all while rebuilding and protecting the world's soils and ecosystems.

Professors and Intellectuals Are Conscientious and Sincere

Professors are conscientious and sincerely want to teach true history, honest economics, and honest political science. However, when a society is under extreme threat, such as the Managers of State of the imperial centers of capital were all through the Cold War, honest expressions of threatening thoughts are not permitted in the mainstream of these soft sciences. Honest analysis can be found at the margins but those are effectively "voices in the wilderness." Quality professors and intellectuals who could, and did, challenge the Cold War belief systems being imposed upon the world as a cover for those suppressions of economic freedom were stripped out of the universities and the media or were silenced.¹

Now that the Cold War is over, opposing thought is surfacing, but those thoughts are only a whisper against the thunder of Social Control belief systems that have been carefully cultivated by the Managers of State of powerful nations for forty years. Biased and compliant historians of the winners of the hot wars—wars over who will set the rules of unequal trade and thus who will be wealthy and powerful—wrote this history and left out the real causes of those wars. We will be addressing in depth how these were battles over who will have the advantage of unequal trades.

The CIA's "Mighty Wurlitzer" Creating Reality for America and Much of the World

Through the expansion of empires in the nineteenth century, the world had become the "countryside" for the European centers of capital. The old imperial centers of capital broke themselves in World Wars I and II, battling over the world's wealth. America, the newest imperial center of capital, was at that time the only intact center of capital. The frightened leaders of the old imperial nations ultimately handed the baton to the United States to keep the entire world from gaining its economic freedom, and America has done that job well.

The risk to the imperial world was primarily the loss of the former colonial world and its precious resources, but to maintain control of those economies it was essential that the influence of the once rapidly developing former Soviet Union be contained. If the Soviet Union successfully developed, that success would be a beacon for historians, social scientists, and intellectuals worldwide—that history would be written, those economic and political philosophies would be followed—and controlling the rest of the world would be impossible.

As the Cold War was being won, Peter Coleman, author of Liberal Conspiracy, gained complete access to the archives of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an American and European writers' support group that had been covertly established by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The path to easy publication of books and articles throughout the "free" world was through this worldwide, CIA-orchestrated and -funded network:

Five years after their victory in 1945, the Western democracies were about to lose the battle for Europe, but this time to Stalinist totalitarianism instead of Nazis. To combat this prospect, an intellectual guerrilla group was formed: over one hundred European and American writers and intellectuals met in Berlin to establish the Congress for Cultural Freedom to resist the Kremlin's sustained assault on Western and liberal values. During the 1950s the Congress spread throughout the world, creating a network of affiliated national committees, a worldwide community of liberal intellectuals fiercely committed to democratic governance, but supported by grants which, unknown to most of them, originated in the Central Intelligence Agency. Through the Congress's influential publications, conferences, and international protests, it kept the issues of Soviet totalitarianism and liberal anti-Communism alive in a largely hostile environment.... It was finally dissolved in 1967 amid the revelations of its funding by the CIA.²

Coordination of the writings of Western authors was only one of the many "black ops" and covert actions, occasionally breaking out into overt actions, which became the hidden history of the Cold War, That hidden history was first exposed by the Church and Pike Congressional Committees in 1975 and 1976 and by many good researchers and reporters since. The CIA had its own wire service and its own publishing companies. It set up and supported magazines, newspapers, and radio stations. It established the largest news conglomerate in West Germany and other major media in many countries. Canned Cold War editorials were prepared and sent to large and small newspapers all over the world. These editorials were available for any editor to restructure as his or her own creation. Large independent think tanks were established, funded, and staffed with ideological supporters, as were think tanks within universities.

CI...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Conclusion: A Grand Strategy for Cooperative Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author