Epistle to the Ecotopians

[Lauren Johnson]

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: "Crisis of under-consumption." When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

From footnote at p. 145 of Colby's The Will Be Done:

"It is not only an important factor in our political and cultural relations with Latin America, " Collier wrote Robert G. Caldwell, chairman of CIAA's Cultural Relations Program, in November 1940, "but it is also of supreme importance to the economic stability of the entire Western hemisphere. In addition to the untapped productive energy and material resources of these thirty million Indians, we have a great potential undeveloped market which, by educating the Indians to desire an improvement in their standard of living and by increasing their purchasing power, would relieve greatly the economic strain caused by the loss of European markets."