War is bad for nearly everyone. But as long as we allow the leaders of our privatized war economy to reap unlimited rewards, their profit motive for war in Iran or anywhere will persist....Putting some numbers on it.
What we’re not encouraged to do is to criticize or even to question America’s vast military establishment and its enormous power, even though President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about that establishment in his famous farewell speech in 1961.
It’s high time we Americans listened to Ike as well as to J.W. Fulbright. Let’s give the latter a close listen, shall we?…
I stumbled across Senator J. William Fulbright’s 1970 book The Pentagon Propaganda Machine and, out of curiosity, bought it for the princely sum of five dollars. Now, talk about creepy. Fulbright, who left the Senate in 1974 and died in 1995, noted a phenomenon then that should ring a distinct bell today. Americans, he wrote, “have grown distressingly used to war.” He then added a line that still couldn’t be more up to date:
“Violence is our most important product.” Congress, he complained (and this, too, should ring a distinct bell in 2019), was shoveling money at the Pentagon “with virtually no questions asked,” while costly weapons systems were seen mainly “as a means of prosperity,” especially for the weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.
“Militarism has been creeping up on us,” he warned, and the American public, conditioned by endless crises and warnings of war, had grown numb, leaving “few, other than the young, [to] protest against what is happening.”This process has a name — "normaliztion." War and state-violence are becoming normalized in American society.
Given his erratic behavior, from daily Twitter eruptions to upping his tally of lies by the hour, it’s hard to think of Donald Trump as a man with a plan. But in at least one area — reshaping the economy to serve the needs of the military-industrial complex — he’s (gasp!) a socialist in the making.…William Hartung apparently misses that the first step in the plan is reality distortion, also known as "gaslighting." With such field distortion, establishing truth becomes impossible on evidence-based argument, opening the possibility of normalizing anything. It's the basis of the plan of a "master persuader." The president did not invent it. It has historical precedent.
His plan is now visibly taking shape — one we can see and assess thanks to a Pentagon-led study with a distinctly tongue-twisting title: “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States.” The analysis is the brainchild of Trump’s adviser for trade and manufacturing policy, Peter Navarro, who happens to also be the key architect of the president’s trade wars.
Navarro, however, can hardly take sole credit for the administration’s latest economic plan, since the lead agency for developing it was also the most interested of all in the project, the Pentagon itself, in particular its Office of Defense Industrial Policy. In addition, those producing the report did so in coordination with an alphabet soup of other agencies from the Department of Commerce to the Director of National Intelligence. And even that’s not all. It’s also the product of an “interagency task force” made up of 16 working groups and 300 “subject matter” experts, supplemented by over a dozen industry “listening sessions” with outfits like the National Defense Industrial Association, an advocacy organization that represents 1,600 companies in the defense sector.
Before jumping into its substance and implications for the American economy and national defense, let me pause a moment to mention two other small matters.
First, were you aware that the Pentagon even had an Office of Defense Industrial Policy? It sounds suspiciously like the kind of government organization that engages in economic planning, a practice anathema not just to Republicans but to many Democrats as well. The only reason it’s not a national scandal — complete with Fox News banner headlines about the end of the American way of life as we know it and the coming of creeping socialism — is because it’s part of the one institution that has always been exempt from the dictates of the “free market”: the Department of Defense.
Second, how about those 300 subject matter experts? Since when does Donald Trump consult subject matter experts? Certainly not on climate change, the most urgent issue facing humanity and one where expert opinion is remarkably unified. The Pentagon and its contractors should, however, be thought of as the ultimate special interest group and with that status comes special treatment. And if that means consulting 300 such experts to make sure their “needs” are met, so be it.
Now for the big stuff....Tom Dispatch
An indisputable fact is that what has led to both World Wars – that was British politics, or, if you prefer, whatever acted through it. However, there is an interesting difference between the activities of London in 1914 and 1917, and in 1939 – and also there exists a lot of similarities with present London (and Washington) proceedings.Britain versus Germany and Russia. WWII, the United Nations, the liberal world order, NATO, the Common Market, the European Union, and the Eurozone were supposed to preclude the these rivalries in Europe from rising anew. But here we go again.
American effort said to lag Russia, ChinaAll this is top secret, so no one really knows, or will know unless the stuff get used. Let's hope that never happens.
“If you look at some of our peer competitors, China being one, the number of facilities that they’ve built to do hypersonics… surpasses the number we have in this country. It’s quickly surpassing it by 2 or 3 times. It is very clear that China has made this one of their national priorities. We need to do the same,” Walker told a press briefing.This is emerging as a serious problem for the US owing to the sheer size of China. The US is a big country by world standards but it is still dwarfed by China and India.
I’m going to say it straight. The military industrial complex is a system of scandalous profligacy and inefficiency, the primary effect of which is not to make the USA (or other countries with similar MICs) any safer but rather to redistribute wealth out of the pockets of the general taxpayer and into the pockets of select constituencies (military personnel, defence contractors, and the like). It also largely beyond democratic control. The foundation of a liberal democratic system is accountability. But the MIC is not accountable. The large and more wasteful its failures, the more it is able to claim that it needs more money: smash up the Middle East and then the resulting disorder enables one to claim that the world is dangerous and one needs more funding; spend $190 billion failing to produce a workable missile defence system, and the fact that you don’t have a workable system justifies even more money in order to try to create one. And so on. In the world of military affairs, nothing is as rewarding as failure.Irrussianality
The American people have been sold a deadly bill of goods both for their lousy healthcare system and for their perpetual war machine – and there’s no end in sight, as Nicolas J S Davies explains.
Theories of Military Keynesianism and the Military-Industrial Complex became popular after the Second World War, and perhaps for a good reason. The prospect of military demobilization, particularly in the United States, seemed alarming. The U.S. elite remembered vividly how soaring military spending had pulled the world out of the Great Depression, and it feared that falling military budgets would reverse this process. If that were to happen, the expectation was that business would tumble, unemployment would soar, and the legitimacy of free-market capitalism would again be called into question.Since then the US is addicted to military spending to support the domestic economy and exports. Military spending is so endemic to the economy and so politically entrenched since it is dispersed through so many congressional districts as to be impossible to address rationally. The US economy is now dependent on "military Keynesianism."
Seeking to avert this prospect, in 1950 the U.S. National Security Council drafted a top-secret document, NSC-68. The document, which was declassified only in 1977, all but explicitly called on the government to use higher military spending as a way of preventing such an outcome.…
Tyranny, war, poverty, massive corruption, wholesale incarceration, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsing economy, and a pig-headed belief in its own “exceptionalism” among the leading factors contributing to the downfall of the once-great American Empire.
- FAILING DEMOCRACY [low voter participation, crony capitalism, state capture]
- WEALTH CONCENTRATION [rising inequality, growing precariat]
- DEGRADING INFRASTRUCTURE [public goods declining]
- DROP IN POPULAR OPINION ABROAD [Loss of soft power]
- MILITARISM FOR ITS OWN SAKE [Military Keynesianism]
- RESISTANCE GROWING [US perceived as most dangerous country in 2014-Gallup]
- EXCEPTIONALISM ON THE ROPES [#1 in the wrong categories]
The Washington establishment, which is bipartisan, thought that now [after the dissolution of the USSR] we could rule the world. It could dictate to everyone and it could force its ideology, which is sometimes called globalism or liberal democracy, but is in fact the soft totalitarianism of Brave New World, on everyone in the world. If necessary, with military force. This is the classic hubris that has destroyed one great power after another. There is nothing new about it.…
Russia under President Putin represents the state system and the way states normally act within the state system, based on their interests. The ideology of the Washington establishment says that is not how the world is going to work anymore. It is instead going to be essentially a one world government based in Washington. This ideology includes such concepts as the feminist definition of women’s rights, devaluation of all religions, so called gay rights, and the belief that this must be universal. Russia is saying no to this. It is saying that it still believes in the state system and is going to pursue its own interests on the world stage.…
The Washington establishment defines democracy as a system of elections that elects the people it wants to be elected. If an election in another part of the world does not put in power the government that Washington wants, then Washington refuses to recognize the election. We saw this most dramatically in the Gaza Strip, where the freest and fairest election ever held in the Arab world resulted in a Hamas government coming to power. And Washington immediately announced that it would not recognize it or deal with it.…
The neoconservatives have never gotten over the Cold War and in truth they represent the thinking that was anti-Russian long before the Soviet Union, that was anti-Russian in the 19th century. Unfortunately for America and the rest of the world, they have had an enormous impact on American foreign policy. There is no reason they should have that influence, since all of their adventures have proven disastrous. Of course, they gave us a completely unnecessary and failed war in Iraq. Nonetheless, people continue to listen to them. This may have something to do with the fact that they have a great deal of money behind them.
The neocons and the neoliberals are very similar and work together. The Washington establishment is bipartisan.…
Europe at this point is still very much in Washington’s orbit. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the EU is an American satellite.…
The United States policy in the Middle East is so stupid that there is a very real danger that we may find ourselves simultaneously fighting all three parties – the Islamist rebels in Syria, the Assad government and Iran. It takes real talent in foreign policy to fight everybody at the same time, despite the fact that they are all fighting each other.…Russia Insider
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev [2009] has accused the West of breaking promises made after the fall of the Iron Curtain, saying that NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe violated commitments made during the negotiations over German reunification. Newly discovered documents from Western archives support the Russian position.Der Spiegel
Your head will spin if you take a look at this map the New York Times published on August 21. It lists the counties that have received military surplus and the supplies they’ve received. The acquisitions under the Department of Defense (DOD) program since its inception in 1991 are valued at $5.1 billion, with $449.3 million given out in fiscal year 2013 alone. In just the past 5 years, as part of Section 1033 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 1997, the Pentagon has given away “tens of thousands of machine guns; nearly 200,000 ammunition magazines; thousands of pieces of camouflage and night-vision equipment; and hundreds of silencers, armored cars and aircraft” to counties in every state throughout the country.
While attention is now focused on the DOD’s program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a program that is three times the size. This year alone, DHS plans to give away $1.6 billion worth of military equipment for counterterrorism, border security and disaster preparedness. Thanks to DHS, every squad car in Fargo, North Dakota, has assault rifles and kevlar helmets and 1,500 beat cops in Philadelphia are trained to use AR-15s.
DHS is also giving out money for a few dozen police departments to experiment with drones. When the Federal Aviation Administration opens US airspace to drones in the coming years, civil liberty advocates fear that the nation’s 18,000 police departments will be lining up for DHS grants to get their latest toy--a toy that has the capacity to spy, stun, maim and kill.
This is already starting. In May 2012, DHS began distributing $4 million in experimental grants to help local law enforcement agencies buy their own small drones, opening a new market for politically connected drone makers as the wars overseas shrink. The sheriff’s department in Montgomery County, Texas received a $250,000 grant to buy a drone, which in April 2014 crashed into Lake Conroe and was destroyed. In 2013, citizens of Seattle pressured police into returning two drones they had received from DHS grants for $82,000. The drones were then pawned off on the LA Police Department, which is now facing a citizen backlash to get rid of them.
In the past, Congress has done nothing to rollback the handouts. When Congressman Alan Grayson introduced legislation in June to limit funding to the 1033 program, it was quashed by an overwhelming vote of 355-62, including 35 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who voted against it.….Worse than traffic cameras for revenue generation as a replacement for taxation.
Key concerns include a clause in the program that requires police to use the equipment within a year, something the American Civil Liberties Union argues may give police forces an incentive to use the equipment in inappropriate situations. The program also does not mandate training for crowd control or other uses.…
U.S. weapons makers have been eyeing what they call "adjacent" markets for years, keen to drum up fresh demand for products initially developed for the military, and recently, to offset declines in U.S. and European military spending.
Faced with a dwindling number of big-ticket military contracts, even the Pentagon's largest suppliers such as Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) and Northrop Grumman Corp (NOC.N) are competing for increasingly smaller contracts in commercial or non-military markets, analysts and industry executives said.
Among the products marketed to state and local officials are military-grade communications equipment, radios, night-vision goggles, drones and other surveillance equipment.…
ReutersRussia would consider any further expansion of NATO forces near its borders a "demonstration of hostile intentions" and would take political and military measures to ensure its own security, a senior diplomat was quoted on Monday as saying.
The comments come amid a deep crisis between Russia and the West over Ukraine and days after U.S. President Barack Obamaoffered increased military support for eastern European NATO members to ease their concerns over Moscow.
"We cannot see such a build-up of the alliance's military power near the border with Russia as anything else but a demonstration of hostile intentions," Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Titov told Interfax in an interview.
Speaking last week in NATO-member Poland, Obama unveiled plans to spend up to $1 billion on supporting and training the armed forces of alliance states bordering Russia.
The media buzz surrounding the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s May 1964 speech announcing his Great Society has focused on the question, did it “work?” In other words, did the 200-odd pieces of legislation passed over the following two years succeed in their goals of reducing poverty, improving education, providing health care for the elderly, etc. Judgments as to how the programs worked are supposed to answer the bigger question, should government intervene in the economy to make life better for its people?
It is a safe bet that the components of the Great Society—especially those dealing with the War on Poverty—are the most studied in the history of social science. For half a century, a vast army of economists, sociologists, political scientists, lawyers, and policy analysts have poured over the data. There is little doubt that almost all of the programs had benefits. The debate between conservatives and liberals is whether the benefits were worth the “costs.” But if by this time the research has not reached convincing definitive conclusions, it is unlikely that it ever will.Economic Policy Institute
Part of the problem is that such efforts to quantify cost and benefits, while useful, are inherently flawed by their reliance on market prices to establish the human value of, for example, living longer, educating a poor child, or breathing cleaner air.
They also miss the point. The Great Society was much more than the sum of its parts. Like the New Deal before it, the Great Society changed the way Americans thought about the relationship of the government to the economy.
Despite the claims of conservatives, government intervention in the economy did not start with the New Deal. It started with the founding of the republic. But by and large, it was intervention at the service of the rich and powerful—from business subsidies to legal protections for corporate theft and the use of police and the army to oppress unions.
The New Deal brought balance. Social insurance, worker protections, and aid to small farmers, small businesses, and electricity cooperatives, helped spread the benefits of economic growth beyond the financial elite. The Great Society in part dealt with the unfinished business of the New Deal—giving aid to minorities, the poor, the elderly, and the sick.
But it also broke new ground in the use of government as an instrument for making the economy more efficient, fairer, and more accountable....
Yves here. Please welcome Michael Perelman, a economics professor who is more an economistmanque than the conventional sort. Perelman now focuses particularly on economic history, which consist in large measure of describing not just how older economic theories have been distorted or misrepresented, but how the conventional accounts of economic development too often contain significant omissions and misrepresentations. For instance, his book The Invention of Capitalism describes how proto-capitalists managed to seize former community resources (the best known being pastureland, but hunting and other rights also came to be restricted). Part of the legitimation of this effort was to present free peasants, who could live comfortably without working very hard, as being made morally deficient by having too much leisure time. They’d clearly become better people if they were made by their betters to apply themselves.Michael Perelman takes a historical and geopolitical-geostrategic view of economics that differs greatly significantly from the usual analysis of 20th century economic history.
The post that follows is excerpted from a yet-to-be-published book by Perelman, The Matrix: An Exploration of the Surprising Interactions Between War, the Economy, and Economic Theory.
Hyping threats from Russia, China, and the rest of the world, the U.S. War Party is gearing up to reassert American power.Endless war. It's the only way to maintain an empire.
A new poll finds more Americans see China as their greatest enemy than any other country in the world.This is huge! It completely shifts the focus of national security. America is now back in the position of having to arm to fight on two major war fronts simultaneously, as the US faces off with Russia over its buffer zone and now China as well. A new Cold War is heating up.
