Charles Austin Beard (1874-1948) was once regarded as the most famous and influential economist in the US; beginning in 1913, Beard wrote about the power of money over politics and foreign policy.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2022
"The depression of the 1930s intensified his radicalism.
"He condemned with increasing fierceness the failure of American corporate capitalism to provide a secure and decent life for the people who lived here.
"A vast audience of admiring readers found in Beard’s writing a cogent explanation for the country’s ills in that terrible decade."
Beard believed that American history in general had proceeded under the firm guidance of a collaboration among its elite economic groups and the federal government, and the country's foreign policy followed natually from this "deep state" arrangement.
The economic infrastructure put in place after WWII created the substructure for the American Century. Beard grew increasingly alarmed about the imperial role the US would play in the postwar world:
"He surmised that the Bretton Woods program would bring into existence a new and improved system of economic imperialism over the economically backward peoples of the earth through the machinery of control employed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
"Its military and economic power vastly increased during the war, the United States would dominate the world, as he had written in "Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels.'"
The current war in Ukraine is the latest example of how America uses a combination of IMF loans and illegal coups to prove all empires permit no genuine equality regardless of the number of human beings maimed, murdered, and displaced.
SEPTEMBER 23, 2022
Some Historical Background for an Economic Interpretation of the War in Ukraine
BY RICHARD DRAKE"The depression of the 1930s intensified his radicalism.
"He condemned with increasing fierceness the failure of American corporate capitalism to provide a secure and decent life for the people who lived here.
"A vast audience of admiring readers found in Beard’s writing a cogent explanation for the country’s ills in that terrible decade."
Beard believed that American history in general had proceeded under the firm guidance of a collaboration among its elite economic groups and the federal government, and the country's foreign policy followed natually from this "deep state" arrangement.
The economic infrastructure put in place after WWII created the substructure for the American Century. Beard grew increasingly alarmed about the imperial role the US would play in the postwar world:
"He surmised that the Bretton Woods program would bring into existence a new and improved system of economic imperialism over the economically backward peoples of the earth through the machinery of control employed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
"Its military and economic power vastly increased during the war, the United States would dominate the world, as he had written in "Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels.'"
The current war in Ukraine is the latest example of how America uses a combination of IMF loans and illegal coups to prove all empires permit no genuine equality regardless of the number of human beings maimed, murdered, and displaced.
