There's something in the rigging, Captain: Capitolism

The Boeing Co.'s (NYSE: BA) profit rose in its second quarter, thanks to shipments of military aircraft. A success of the free market again: huge government contracts that pay even when the contractor can't deliver without raising the cost, calling it an "overrun"; having won with the lowest bid, because it had every intention, right from the outset, of jacking up the price once it was too late for the government to back out. Thereby still paying out huge dividends to its shareholders, which, by any definition of the terms, is Centralized planning, state-sponsored terrorism (since the planes are used exclusively to strafe and bomb civilian targets and populations (when was the last time a US AIR Force jet was threatened by another nation's Air Force? That's right....WWII)), and market manipulation. That's what GSE's do, manipulate the market by providing a government guarantee: the rich take the profits, the country takes the risks. GSE: Lockheed, Martin Marrietta, and Boeing are all GSE's. So is Halliburton, KBR, Exxon/ Mobil.....ok, ok , you get it, the entire free market system is a rigged game, and that' s the whole reason its flailing. Without the backing of the US government, US Corporations would be be non-existent.

But more specifically, the reason the Keynesian stimulus is not working is because it's going into the wrong pockets, the same pockets it was going into before: the military and all its adjutants, and ancillary industries, which now include Burger King and Starbucks. Neither enterprise, having been forced to close stores in America, had to close a single outlet in Iraq or Afghanistan, as they have a captive customer base... and I do mean Base.

All this ties in with Supply side economics and the Orwellian newspeak used to talk about free markets even as they have been deliberately turned upside down and the needs and wants of consumers are dictated to them from a centralized authority that creates demands for everything starting with the very money it needs to produce the goods, and the consumers need to buy them. Everything is as centrally planned as in Soviet Russia: badly. With the difference being that there is no collective, no community, no organization allowed to exist other than the individual and the family structure, barricaded in their suburban trap and thinking they're "free".

We've become so inured to the inability of the economy to function without huge stimulus provided it by military spending that we've blinded ourselves to the fact that such spending is an enormous on-going Keynesian stimulus to the economy. This means that all the wrong industries prosper and grow. Only those with Federal government access and funding via Pentagon contracts survive, as they are the ones that'll be enabled to pay higher dividends, thereby attracting more investor dollars: this is the only free market remnant in what is now Capitolism: if Washington DC isn't your major customer, you lose. Everything else has been outsourced to foreign countries to produce, since the profit margins needed to make them in a country that doesn't allow its industries to use public resources such as rivers and streams as the receptacle of their waste aren't large enough.

More on this next.