Only a continuing confrontation along East-West lines -and in the future increasingly along the North-South divide -can create the conditions of international tension that make the US strategy possible and, so far, successful in forcing the other countries to follow

During the second half of the 1990s and Clinton’s second Administration, profits continued to grow, but at slower and slower rates, falling back nearly to the annual increases of the first half of the 1980s.

America’s self-induced role as policeman of the world and the associated orientation of research and development (R&D) spending in the service of that objective played a role in causing it to lag behind other States whose post-World War II development was oriented around the non-military, civil economy, such that R&D spending in them was used to develop their economies in a more competitive way.

Generally speaking, however, from the end of World War II until today, profits have not depended so much on America entering foreign conflicts, even though under its “containment” strategy, war has been a constant feature since the 1950s.

In “Capital”, Volume I, Part I, Chapter I, Karl Marx describes the commodity which is the core component of capitalism as follows…

And will the 21st century be the “Asian century” -advocates of this view, such as Kishore Mahbubani¹⁰⁹, refer us back to earlier times when the great empires of the East dominated the world.

But Then It Was Too Late

“What no one seemed to notice,” said a colleague of mine, a philologist, “was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

In the winter of 1788, a small team of men were building a bridge across the river Don in Rotherham. The fact that before Christmas a stream of distinguished visitors had been to see the construction was an indication that this was no ordinary bridge and its designer was no ordinary engineer. Leading the project was Thomas Paine (right), author of Common Sense and The American Crisis, which had been read to Washington’s soldiers before the Battle of Trenton on Christmas Day 1776.