COMMENT BY PATRICE GREANVILLE
Lee Camp's excellent summary goes to the core of our national predicament. Why do we keep spending such ludicrous amounts of money for threats that do not exist or that we are actually creating?
The reason is simple: weapons manufacturing is the most profitable industry in the country, obscenely so, but it requires a permanent "threat"—a credible bugaboo, a feared enemy— to keep the money flowing "for defense".
Wars and permanent preparations for war provide that framework. US capitalism saturated consumer purchasing power in the 1930s. Since then only consumer credit (private indebtedness) and war expenditures—" Keyneysian militarism"— have kept the country afloat. Of course, admitting this would represent not only the liquidation of these rich cliques who have made billions at the public trough, and gained enormous political power, but also admit that capitalism itself is unsustainable under normal circumstances. Not to mention that throwing a lot of people out of rather well paid jobs is not a palatable prospect for any politician. "Defense industries" having grown to such absurd levels, they have created, like "banks too big to fail", their own rationale to be maintained at any cost.
So there. Only radical restructuring can fix this dangerous nonsense. And due to endemic corruption, there's no leadership for such a political crusade. —PG
Published on Jul 12, 2018
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