March 25, 2008

Military keynesians: What is that and why should I care: crosspost

From Bear Republic Blog:

Yeah, what am I talking about? Well it’s like this…malcontent has his ‘invisible conspiracy’, tekstone is all about ‘The Fed’ although I can remember when it was ‘The Democrat Party’ everybody has their meme with which they want to explain what is happening in this no longer ‘Shining City on the Hill’ and why.

Well, I got one too. And in this post I will attempt to start an explanation of it and show why it’s something every American should be very, very scared about.

I was listening to Chalmers Johnson on Nice Polite Republican Radio this afternoon, Neil ‘Fascist Pimp’ Conan ‘moderator’, talk about his new book Nemesis be sure and read the comments about the reviews that’s were it gets good. In the course of his discussion with Neil, more like a whinefest on Neil’s part as he is totally a tool of the ReichWing.

Wikipedia calls Military Keynesianism is a government economic policy in which the government devotes large amounts of spending to the military in an effort to increase economic growth. Here’s a chart on the percentage of GDP which military spending generates.

Here’s a bar graph of U.S. military spending vs. the rest of the known world:

Gee…looks like we are waaaaaaaaaay out in front. But that’s not really to the point I’m making, but feel free to shut up about how important it is to protect ourselves from the Tehhahists, so let’s look at this graph from the suspect pages of the WaPo:


Hmmmmmm…… A mere 21%, that certainly doesn’t seem too much to pay to be safe from the likes of Osama bin Laden and his nuke tossing IslamoFascist gang. Does it?

But what about this bar chart!

I suppose it’s all in how you look at it. Let’s look at what the rest of the world is spending here:


clik on image for full screen view.

This doesn’t look too bad either until you dig a little deeper as malcontent always likes to do. You see and Mr. Johnson points out in his book almost 40% of the United States defense budget is ‘black’ that means no one, not Congress not you not me, knows what the dollar amounts are norwhat the money is being spent on.

For quite some time now, since the Vietnam War when my dad and all his buddies counted on working every Saturday for years at double time to rebuild the U.S. Navy jets assclowns like Senator ‘SlimeBall’ McCain wore out shooting the jungles of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to shit, I’ve been aware that the U.S. is addicted. Addicted all right but our worst addiction is not to oil but rather…

To military spending.

The amount we will waste on The MeatGrinder is estimated by non-ReThuglican analysts to be 2 Trillion dollars. That’s enough to fix every problem our nation has with it’s infrastructure.

Enough to get started on fixing our broken healthcare system.

But let’s face it a lot of people don’t want anyone talking about this issue. Much less doing anything about it. You see it’s good for K-Street, it’s good for the Republicans, it’s good for Democrats. And stupidest of all many Americans think it’s good for them.

It’s not and here’s why. No matter what you think of the charts here and believe me it’s very curious that I couldn’t find any that were current. That is, showed any of the measures I looked at here past 2001-2003. Very curious until you understand what is going on.

The Military-Industrial Complex is running the country. Not the Republican Party, not the ‘Democrat’ Party the largest companies of those the DOD pays to build new air-superiority fighters, Stryker Combat Vehicles, the V-22 Osprey VTOL, and new air craft carriers and nuclear submarines. I’m sure Osama is laughing somewhere at the thought of this being used against him. The MI-Complex is has made itself an indispensable component of the economy . Politicians campaign on their ability to ‘bring home the bacon’. With disastrous results.

They are running the country into the ground as they loot the U.S. Treasury to produce their products. Products which do not result in economic growth. Only economic stagnation. What can you do with an Abrams M-1 Main Battle Tank. Drive it around in The MeatGrinder which is a very sandy place you see not where Abrams tanks were designed to operate then the DOD has to pay a lot of money for maintenance and parts for same. It’s a great scam and scam it is as the presence of an Abrams tank does not deter Iraqi citizens from attempting to defend their nation insurgents from attacking our brave men and women fighting for Halliburton Freedom.

But even more damaging to us and our nation is the opportunity cost the billions and billions the Federal Government, it’s not just Bush doing this it’s been building since WWII, has wasted on war equipment instead of infrastructure, education, health-care and reversing the damage done to our environment.by us and these self-same military-based industries.

This lost opportunity cost is immense. In a real sense you can make the argument that the MI complex is destroying our future as well as our freedom. And the brutal fact is that most current politicians are the creatures of the MI-complex. Indeed so brainwashed are they and much of the citizenry that the facts outlined here are deemed irrelevant to our political discourse. The ocean of cash created by the diversion of tax money from productive pursuits to an immense standing army as a famous early American warned us about is the life-giving medium which has supported and continues to support such creatures as Joe Liebermann, George H.W. Bush, Richard ‘Shooter’ Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld the and all the rest of the MI-complex’s tools.

To be continued….


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