War Econ 101

What we find now is an interesting misconception of how war and war preparation has affected our economy. We are told over and over that we aren't asked to sacrifice for this global war on terror, so we aren't really involved. This is grossly misleading.

Our economy is on the rocks--sacrificed--because we spend far more each day than we take in. We have massive unemployment because we insist that any employment must be privately created and then we see the public subsidies to the wealthy being used to decrease, rather than increase, the number of jobs. We have sacrificed millions of jobs by spending on capital intensive military instead of labor intensive infrastructure and social service sectors. Creating a peace economy means creating an infrastructure that produces more jobs and weans us off the oil that is fueling and driving so much conflict.

No, there aren't ration cards. It's not like WWII. Instead, we've postponed that day. Much of it began to manifest in 2008 when the weakness of the economy produced a tidal wave of foreclosures--a major sacrifice indeed--and now, three years on, we've continued to ignore Pentagon spending and we see we are still making it worse. This economic slide into catastrophe continues because the Pentagon consumes and does not produce. Historian William McNeill called the military the first macro parasite and that is why war is not good for "the" economy; it is great for the economy of war profiteers only. Jobs created by war are jobs created by misspending our taxes and taking out unnecessary loans. Americans get that concept; most of us manage to control our credit card spending so that we can handle that debt down to zero every month, or at least every few months. We understand what happens when we only make a minimal payment and continue the same pattern of deficit spending; our debt balloons. We are about to experience the sacrifice of the basic credit rating of our entire country on the altar of militarism, adding yet more sacrifice to our deep sacrifices already made.

There will be no end to these sacrifices until we stop electing politicians who are afraid to defund the Pentagon. No other country on Earth has a military remotely as huge as ours in terms of weaponry and foreign bases. It's as though these are invisible, demanding endless sacrifice without much evaluation. It is an interesting coincidence that we hear the politicians shrieking that they must cut $4 trillion over the next period in order to help balance the budget, which is almost exactly what the global war on terror is costing, according to a Brown University study. No war, no debt. Problem solved. Oops--too late.

Make no mistake, we are sacrificing heavily. To say that members of the military are the only ones sacrificing in this global war on terror is a lie. Everyone is sacrificing and the unemployed and homeless have already sacrificed much more than most civilians did during World War II, which is always held up as the war that helped all Americans to share in the sacrifice. Time for some honest accounting as our "leaders" press the pedal to the metal and drive us toward fiscal ruin.

Well, the credit card companies are cutting us off, thanks to an unbelievably malfunctioning Congress and an atmosphere of uncivil attack rather than meaningful dialog. Our Congress could postpone the day of reckoning even more or even try to fix it in meaningful annual increments, but they choose to take us flying off the cliff, apparently. We'll see if they are correct in their assumption that they are the ones with parachutes--that question needs to wait for the next election. Politics used to be the art of compromise but in the US politics is really war by other means and we see the mudwrestling results.

References
McNeill, William H. (1984). The pursuit of power. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Repubican't touch rich nor military

Anyone with the ability to do simple math could have predicted the inevitability of John Boehner's announcement that he was about to fail his Tea Party compatriots and instead just try to save the US from going belly up in the near term. He did so on the basis of two big lies--one by omission and one by commission.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes.”
--Boehner blames Obama

The lie of omission is that neither Obama nor Boehner's Republicans will agree to any remotely significant cut in the massive military profits that have bled the red out of so many Afghans, Iraqis, and US military personnel and bled the green out of the US dollar. It's hard to waste $1.26 trillion without precipitating job loss, foreclosures, and personal/state government/US bankruptcies.

The lie of commission is that Obama has basically been proposing closing loopholes, not hiking taxes. Who takes advantage of loopholes? That would be the elites and corporations, neither of whom pay even remotely close to what might be called a fair share of taxes. The tax codes are radically influenced by highly paid lobbyists who manage to get exemptions for their clients from Richistan that working Americans know nothing about. The grossly overpaid tax lawyers then make sure their clients pay very little, stiffing the diminishing middle class again and again. But Boehner believes--and is sadly correct--that telling this lie enough times with all his Speaker of the House authority will make Americans believe him.

Well, don't. Learn about this and draw the line. When you work hard all year and pay more taxes than many corporations whose profits run to the $billions and whose executives take home increasingly bloated salaries, you know this lie is all that is supporting the unsupportable failure to finally make the obscenely wealthy pay their share. Boehner protects them in the name of the American people and it is the American people who suffer from his lies.

How's that violent reaction workin' out for ya?

Gandhi always counseled that we had three basic paths, violence, nonviolence and apathy or avoidance. In a bit of a fit of pique once, he wrote what became known as the Doctrine of the Sword, in which he claimed he'd rather see someone fight back violently than slink away like a coward. Of all his blunders--and he made many, let's be a little honest here--that was his worst, not because he was wrong on a bounded, individual, specific basis, but because he thus authored his version of the Just War Doctrine.

Give people who either love violence, or don't mind someone else using it to protect them, a rhetorical inch and they will take a real mile. If Gandhi were around today, he'd be dashing about trying to answer all those who excuse violence with the smug assurance that even Gandhi would have approved, as is evident by his regrettable line, "I do believe that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence I would advise violence."

This was in the aftermath of the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of hundreds of innocent civilians, perhaps more than 1,500, at the command of Reginald Dyer, the British officer who will go down in history as a criminal against humankind. That massacre was simply the worst act of direct terrorism committed by the British empire upon the restive India, but it came in the context of other violence and in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the draconian Rowlatt Acts, curtailing civil rights for Indians in India after some 1.3 million Indians had aided the British as they fought World War I, either as soldiers or in logistical support. It was also just as Gandhi was emerging as a leader in India, and many assumed his nonviolence was a cover for his plans to later use military insurgency. His Doctrine of the Sword was written in that context and all it was meant to do was to reassure everyone that he had no secrets, that he was openly honest in his choice of nonviolence. Indeed, he ended that piece of writing:

Meanwhile, I urge those who distrust me not to disturb the even working of the struggle that has just commenced by inciting to violence in the belief that I want violence. I detest secrecy as sin. Let them give nonviolent noncooperation a trial and they will find that I had no mental reservation whatsoever.

---

--Young India, Ahmedabad, Wednesday, 11th August, 1920.

In other words, he was telling those who hoped he had a violent plan after using nonviolence to gain some following that they should not use violence thinking that he secretly wanted it. Sadly, the earlier unfortunate sentence is repeated ad nauseam by those who don't mind misquoting Gandhi by lifting out a bit that he later explains quite well.

But this is how it usually is. Those who want to use violence can quote the Bible, the Qur'an, Augustine or Aquinas, and even Gandhi. Justifying violence is child's play, because so many want to believe it works in their favor. Show me a violent attack and I'll construct an argument based on these sources. Easy beans, violence is permitted, q.e.d. But most of those violent attacks were not done in the spirit of the 'proof' and none of them likely lacked alternative paths to management, if not resolution.


More than 1 million Afghan, Iraqi, US, British, Canadian, Pakistani, and other human lives, huge mountains of irreplacable natural resources and in excess of $1.1T from the US treasury so far--that is the cost of war since 9.11.01. Can we look at that cost and honestly say we had no logical alternatives?