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Grand Poobah!
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I am pot
 
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die with honor
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Grand Poobah!
Last Seen:
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I am pot
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General
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televisionary.
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| Let terrorism hit Canada, France or any of these other sissy countries and see how fast their defense budget goes up.
France has already had its Arab terrorist bombs... ten years ago they bombed the metro.
Because of France's historic imperial past in Northern Africa and continuing links with the ex colonies, France has had trouble with Algerian terrorists for a long time.
It would be interesting to see if the UK's defence beudget has actually gone up, or goes up next year. Or if France's went up in the nineties.
Make no mistake, France may disagree about how to tackle terrorism (I mean, by invading Iraq) but it's not 'cause they don't understand that there's a real threat. They regard Paris as a prime target: we have here a large Arab-descent population and a long bloody history in North Africa, of racism, torture and colonial oppression, and of terrorist attacks that grew out of that situation. |
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No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. - John Donne |   |  |
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die with honor
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televisionary.
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| The Dept. of Homeland Defense gets like 48 billion a year
OK, help me out here. What exactly is the Dept of Homeland Defense?
US military spending seems to be much greater.. in the order of $400 billion a year.link
It almost equals the entire rest of the world's spending combined, according to the figures here.
Wikipedia confirm these figures.
here
The first site also quotes:
Global military expenditure and arms trade form the largest spending in the world at over $950 billion in annual expenditure, as noted by the prestigous Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SPIRI), for 2003.
Now, Military Keynesianism, from a leftist article:
Military-fuelled growth, or military Keynesianism as it is now known in academic circles, was first theorised by the Polish economist Michal Kalecki in 1943. Kalecki argued that capitalists and their political champions tended to bridle against classic Keynesianism; achieving full employment through public spending made them nervous because it risked over-empowering the working class and the unions.
The military was a much more desirable investment from their point of view, although justifying such a diversion of public funds required a certain degree of political repression, best achieved through appeals to patriotism and fear-mongering about an enemy threat - and, inexorably, an actual war.
At the time, Kalecki's best example of military Keynesianism was Nazi Germany. But the concept does not just operate under fascist dictatorships. Indeed, it has been taken up with enthusiasm by the neo-liberal right wing in the United States.
Ronald Reagan famously resorted to deficit spending, using talk of the Evil Empire and communist threats from Central America as his excuse to ratchet up the military budget. In 1984, the deficit rose to a whopping 6.2 per cent of GDP. Consequently, the economy grew by more than 7 per cent that year, and he was re-elected by a landslide.
source
Now if the arms trade is one of the key trades on the planet, especially for the US, a big arms seller, it makes sense to prime the home industries with plenty of demand. Plus the spinoffs to civilian industry are huge (where Boeing planes came from for example).
I think the thesis is not unproblematic - the US does run into trouble when wars become too costly, financially and politically. That does not mean it is not a strategy that the government has used and is still using.
War is the health of the state, up to a point. Scared people vote for the great leader and rally round the flag. They want a strong state to protect them. The war on terror has justified raising budgets, running a big deficit, following an aggressive interventionist policy abroad... but now I read, many Americans are losing faith in the Iraq war/situation.
Ultimately, over spending on the military was credited (by Woodrow Wilson for example) with causing the decline of Europe's empires, already visible in his day.
Myself I think the strategy of Bush and the Project for the New American Century, is a flawed strategy. But they beleive in it.
We'll see I guess what happens this time round. |
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No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. - John Donne | | | |
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