WORLD WAR II the war profiteers raked in $933 every time blood was spilt anywhere in the world. Every time an American fell in battle the Wall Street tills rang up $52,000 blood profits.

For two decades after the sensational profiteering scandals of the First World War, those who actually do the fighting were assured in the corporate media that all the necessary legislation had been worked out to keep the next war strictly a non-profit enterprise.

The slogan to ‘take the profits out of war’ became a national mantra. Not so for the money monopolists manipulated to sell to investors the bloodier and more profitable Second World War.

Within only four years the number of billion-dollar concerns in America had risen from 32 to 44. Assets of the 44 had risen to $103 billion, more than a third of the entire national wealth of the United States. Wall Street has become the ‘World’s Banker.’

Whereas the First World War produced $28.5 billion of net profits and created 22,000 millionaires, World War II practically doubled the take: enriching the monopolists by $56 billion. Never before in history has any venture proven so profitable as did World war II.

This Trillion Dollar War cost the people of the United States $336 billion, not counting destruction and suffering. On a world scale, it claimed about 60 million casualties.

There were 1,071,266 American casualties, 294,765 dead and missing. On this basis, the $56 billion war profits meant that the money monopolists raked in $933 every time blood was spilt anywhere in the world. Every time an American fell in battle the Wall Street tills rang up $52,000 blood profits.

Today American financiers not only own two-thirds of America but hold a mortgage on the rest. The $279 billion WWII debt amounts to a mortgage of nearly $9,000 on every American family, a lien of $2,551 on every man, woman and child in the nation.

American workers are being forced to pay $25 billion yearly, including $5 billion or more interest, toward the war debt and other government expenses. Nobody believes the debt will ever be paid off; it will hang over the people indefinitely, as the World War I debt did. Similar on scale happened in Westminster’s Britain.

The ‘60 Families’ had their own unique theory of how to keep down the number of new millionaires: the more billionaires the fewer millionaires. They simply paid fewer dividends to the ordinary stockholders and kept more ‘reserves’ under control of the top executives who represent the real owners.

Before 1940, corporate dividends were often as high as two-thirds of profits. But after 1940 the dividends were less than half of profits. The banks went even further in concentrating wealth. They kept back 80 percent of profits as ‘capital accounts,’ according to Federal Reserve Report, February 6, 1946.)

Consequently, liquid asset holdings of business increased 277 percent from 1939 ($17.5 billion) to 1944 ($66 billions) again the source is Federal Reserve Bulletin, June 1945.)

The figures of doubled blood profits and increasing the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands, do not give the full picture of the actual degree of war plunder on the home front.

Actually, profit increases ranged up to 2,431 percent for whole industries and up to 11,743 percent for individual concerns. The Special Senate committee investigating the National Defense Program stated:

The Planning Division of the War Production Board has estimated that net profits, after renegotiation and taxes, of the war industries (metals, chemicals, petroleum and rubber) for the four war years will be about $16,000,000,000 since the proportion of civilian business in these industries had been very small, almost all these profits may be regarded as coming from Government business. Such profits are about twice the pre-war average of such industries.

The Senate committee also discovered that of the 100 corporations having the largest volume of war business, three in. creased profits by 10 times, 19 trebled their pre-war profits and 24 others had war profits 1 to 3 times normal profits. Of the rest, 12 companies that had shown losses in 1936-39, earned between $1 and $18 million in 1942.

The 200 largest steel corporations more than doubled their annual profits during the war. The CIO United Steelworkers of America published an analysis entitled Five Years of War Profits, declaring that open and concealed steel profits from 1940 to 1945 exceeded $2 billion, an average of $245 million yearly. Reported profits, after taxes, were: 1936-39, $576,000,000; 1940-44, $1,225,000,000, an increase of 113 percent.

And these fantastic profits were over and above equally fantastic salaries paid to top corporate executives. There was no salary freeze for Charles E. Wilson, President of General Motors. GM paid him more, besides dividends, in 1943 than the combined salaries of the United States President, Vice President, entire Cabinet, entire Supreme Court, Speaker of the House and General Eisenhower.

The 802 New York, New Jersey and Connecticut member banks of the Federal Reserve System had net profits of 7.2 percent in 1943, 9.5 percent in 1944 and 11.6 percent in 1945.

The Federal Reserve reported ‘The principal reason for increased net profits of most banks was the increase in the volume of earning assets, chiefly Government securities.’

These banks also made ‘sizable additions to current net earnings from profits on securities sold during the year.’ Not only the war debt but the war inflation, paid off for the big bankers.

General Motors increased its machine tools almost 100 percent, from 75,000 in 1940 to 143,774 in 1943. The total of machine tools rose from 934,000 in 1939 to 1,400,000 by 1944. The leading corporations increased their productive wealth in other fields in similar proportions, all at the expense of the people who do the fighting and the dying.

For the American plutocracy, the Second World War was the most profitable enterprise in its history. It made the American capitalists the richest rulers that had ever emerged in human history.