How & Why Economics Is Always An Extension Of Policy ... (and why YOUR INDUSTRY SECTOR is currently underfunded, compared to the MICC)

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



I've little to add, so I'm posting, with permission, some comments and a link forwarded by Chuck Spinney.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Chuck Spinney

Todd Pierce has produced a tour de force that is crucially important to your appreciation of the increasing possibility of Cold War II.

Related subjects not discussed include 

(1) the role of domestic politics in shaping the systematic expansion of NATO in violation of our promises to Gorbachev as a quid pro quo for ending the first Cold War and 

(2) the role of shoveling money to the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex in the shaping the domestic politics of contemporary militarism.

These issues in no way detract from the importance of Todd's message; I only mention them because they are also central to rise of a peculiar form of 21st Century American Militarism that violates all the criteria of a sensible grand strategy. 

On a personal note: as one who laughing dismissed Wolfowitz's draft Defense Planning Guidance when it was leaked to the New York Times in 1992 as the inconsequential divagations of a troglodyte moron, I stand corrected.

Chuck Spinney, The Blaster

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‘We’re All Cheneyites Now’

By Todd E. Pierce, Consortium News, 1 April 2014

In late 2008, when President Obama opted more for “continuity” than “change” — and ceded control over much of his foreign policy to hawkish “rivals” — he locked in many of Dick Cheney’s neocon theories that trampled constitutional principles, as retired JAG Major Todd E. Pierce explains.