To invest or not to invest

Mark T. Bertolini Chairman and CEO of Aetna, said, “future generations rely on us to spend our money wisely and invest for the future.”

Sherle R. Schwenninger director of the economic growth program at the New America Foundation writes in the Nation magazine, “Over the past two decades the private sector has done a questionable job of allocating capital, over-investing in the technology sector by more that $3 trillion in the 1990’s and then recycling global surpluses into an even larger housing and mortgage bubble in the early 2000’s, all the while neglecting pressing infrastructure needs. Today, the banking and financial sector is sitting on more than $2 trillion, largely content to “arbitrage” the difference between near 0 percent short-term rates and somewhat higher longer-term rates rather than make new loans and investments in the real economy.”

Insurance companies are very much a part of the financial sector, the very same ones sitting on that capital.

Martin Leffler Professor of American history at the University of Virginia writes in the Nation magazine, “In 1959, “a congressional committee estimated that about 85 percent of electronics research was funded by the government, much of which went to major corporations like IBM, Burroughs, Control Data and Sperry. At this time, the government was paying for two-thirds of all computer-related research and development.” Government spending helped to create these mammoth corporations, banks and the financial industry who now refuse to allocate capital into investments which create jobs.

If the government can’t invest and the financial and banking industries refuse to invest, who’s left to invest in job creation?

CEO Mark Bertolini said companies like his aren’t creating jobs because they’re too concerned over the fiscal cliff. Or maybe uncertainty over Obamacare or tax rates will keep them from creating jobs.

In 1947 Kurt Vonnegut Jr. said, “there is simply not enough wealth to go around.” “If there is to be no ceiling on the amount of money a man can take out of our economy, then concomitantly there can be no firm foundation below which a human being cannot sink.”

They aren’t creating any jobs because they don’t want to, they like it just the way it is, taking wealth out of the economy and keeping it rather than investing it. We haven’t yet seen how low humans are willing to sink to maintain that control.

Immutable truths of war

Before the Vietnam war started, a fact finding mission was sent there to see if the US should become militarily involved. The report came back, either bring all the US forces up to strength and go in all at once or stay out. We did neither, we committed a grave administrative error, which is why the war ended up like it did in Vietnam. Then, through media coerced by the Administration, the country blindly blamed it on the troops. The Vietnamese were friends by day but would kill the troops by night. They hated the US soldiers, and we still don’t understand these truths of war.

Failing to learn these lessons led to the US repeating it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Invasion and occupation on behalf of Big Oil will always bring hatred and killing, it cannot be changed.

Lost in the blame game in the deaths of four Americans in Libya, is this same immutable truth, friends by day, enemy by night.

As reported in the Washington Spectator, Dan Senor who spent 13 months in Iraq as “senior advisor“ to Paul Bremer and the failed CPA “left behind a great deal of damage, yet learned nothing from Iraq.” Senor is Romney’s Middle East expert. The Spectator continues; “In an alternate universe of some GOP elites, the CPA, which Iraqis dubbed “Cant’ Provide Anything, remains a nation-building model, a deep well of neocon wisdom”. “Even as he rails about Iran, he is never questioned about the Iraqi regime he and Bremmer helped put in place, an instant Iranian ally that is now accused of aiding Syria’s regime.”

According to the Nation magazine neighborhoods where Sunnis, Shiites and Christians lived together peacefully, are now segregated, people are walled off from one another and are divided up. Bet the Iraqis are friends by day and enemies by night.

A Romney win could mean this same Middle East neocon wisdom will prevail with Dan Senor as head of the highly secretive NSA.

Vietnam is ancient history, but that doesn’t mean the lessons we should have learned do not apply to this day. Will Dan Senor understand that continued global conquest for Big Oil brings friends by day and enemies by night?