THE MONSTER SITTING ON YOUR SKULL!:
Overhead!
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
May 18, 2009
There! proximate to the decaying rows of bungalows and diseased-ridden tenements, with their shutters hanging, listlessly, at the sides of dirtied, broken windows, sit the despairing unemployed men and women and the wan, grey dirty faces of the children. What invading horde of predators might have brought about this state of affairs? The enemy which did this is called, not "Legion," but, a more monstrous predator, called "Post-Industrial Overhead." There is that ugly monster, which has been glutting himself by snatching the loot of what it calls "investment," the bread taken from the mouths of the unemployed and their hopeless children. The sound you hear from the background, is the chatter and creaking of useless windmills mocking the looted poor with the few sparks which they produce, from time to time. Welcome to your "Green" paradise, which the present Administration has promised you! We must cover the overhead!
Our United States is suffering from a problem which is fairly described as the urgent need for solving "A useless feeders crisis." Near the top of the list of waste to be debrided is the waste represented by paying the so-called administrative costs of feeding the parasites on the administrative payroll of the HMO program whose effects have has been killing more and more patients as the years have passed. Simply kill the HMO legislation, reactivate Hill-Burton, and develop a "single-payer" program to expand the scope of what are now the remnants of what had been the low-overhead burden of what had been Hill-Burton.
Cutting HMOs out of the costs of health-care is the single biggest category of harmless cuts in cost of health-care overhead. There are some other big cuts in government-subsidized items that could be made in a program of "waste elimination." Take, for example, a big cut in what we used to recognize as the "Dick Cheney" swindle in privatized military spending. Cheney was a prominent figure in that giant rip-off of the U.S. military establishment, but the real authors of the program could be found, foregathered, from time to time, at Vermont's Middlebury College, where George Shultz and Felix Rohatyn have been heading up plans for replacing our military establishment with what amounts to a "back-to-feudalism," all-mercenary U.S. military.
However, the really gigantic economic waste in the U.S.A. economy is the result of the build-up of a gigantic ratio of overhead-to-production since 1968-1973, wrecking the U.S. economy through slashing of the ration of the total labor-force employed in actually useful forms of productive occupations. Productively useful occupations are typified by farmers, by what used to be unionized industrial operatives and the scientists and engineers associated with that production, or essential scientific occupations such as medicine, development of high-energy-flux-density generation of power and mass transport for support for such as agricultural and industrial output and related high-technology productive operations, instead of low-paid, near-to-useless, make-work activities funded chiefly for the purpose of maintaining an otherwise unproductive and burgeoning mass of the labor-force as being actually counted as those kept off the streets during the nominally productive hours of the working week.
One wonders if it were not the case, that somewhere in the mass of commuters who are traveling several hours each working day, to and from what is officially classified as "work," there are some people, somewhere, who must surely be employed in such niches as the work of those hired to replace defective pits in individual cherries with up-to-standard, plastic simulations, in the pit-substitution-industry.
You think I exaggerate in saying this? From the standpoint of any competent farmer or industrial operative, that is a fair description of the kind of employer mentality which has replaced the habits of times seemingly long past, when our U.S. was a leading productive nation of the world, per capita and per square kilometer.
What I am emphasizing in that way, is not merely that much employment is a substitute for the lack of places of employment for work that is actually a net contribution to national real wealth. The most costly feature of this current mass-insanity in U.S. economic policy, is not the money spent on employing people in useless categories of "keep-them-busy" positions. The most costly feature is the overhead cost of these recent and current trends. The ratio of overhead expenses to what might be considered as actual or merely fictitious produced economic output. The percentile of the total nominal "value" of throughput of the U.S.A. and western European economies which lies in even the nominal category of produced output, is approaching the state of affairs which I used to describe, decades past, as the day on which General Motors becomes a giant skyscraper, filled, in all stories, from the ground up, with executives and administrative staff, while a lone operative bangs out the total physical output of that firm at his bench in the basement.
Would it be that that were the worst of what is being done to our U.S. economy—among others?
In physical-economic terms, the present trend toward "green," ultra-low energy-flux-density technologies, such as solar and wind "power," already represents a product of negative physical-economic growth-rates; the actually incurred, net physical cost of production exceeds the net physical value of the net output of that production.
Amid all this, the ratio of "overhead" to production is growing. This growth is essentially composed of two readily identifiable components. One is the falling ratio of net physical ouput to overhead costs incurred by that output; the second, is the ratio of total overhead costs to the portion of overhead which is associated with the lowered level of productive output, as measured both per capita and square kilometer of land-area.
Meanwhile, through the gigantic financial swindles launched, in succession by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama governments, since August 31, 2007, especially since the launching of the financial "bail-outs" with the consent of a stupefied U.S. Congress, the world as a whole, the U.S.A. and U.K. most significantly, presents us with a picture of falling net physical output, per capita and per square kilometer, while the mass of purely fictitious nominal financial wealth is skyrocketting all the way to the doom of global civilization as a whole.
The present driver of that exhibition of mass-insanity from financier circles and government combined, throughout the major parts of the world, assumes the form of mass-murder of nations strangled to death by suffocation with overgrowth of useless overhead. Meanwhile, throughout the world generally, the lunatics in power, from the highest levels of government, to the entrepreneur making a living by picking up garbarge from the street, are being told that "recovery is just around the corner," once more.
The worst, and most criminally dangerous among those lunatics, are those who envisage prosperity as the fruit of covering the rising relative costs of "overhead."
