Title: Mcgowanjm Wire 2012 Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 26, 2012 Author:Various Post Date:2012-02-26 09:15:13 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:1293702 Comments:2390
According to professor Melman, who wrote these words of warning 36 years ago, the United States Permanent War Economy would so economically devastate the US, that by the year 2015, over 3.5 million manufacturing jobs would be moved offshore threatening the very survival of his country as its capital markets could not support the sheer weight of a military budget seeking to control the entire world, while at the same time supporting a vibrant civilian consumer economy.
Unfortunately for the United States, professor Melman’s estimates of the manufacturing jobs that would be lost by 2015 have far exceeded his predictions with new estimates showing that over 5.7 million of them have been lost in the last twelve years alone, a staggering figure that dwarfs even those losses suffered by America during the Great Depression.
On September 10th, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld made a stunning announcement. ��we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions �� [i]In the realm of business, with its emphasis on profit maximizing, such looseness in accounting would either be evidence of monumental incompetence or deliberate falsification.
But not in the Pentagon. For there, the dominant measure of success is gain in power, the ability to control the behavior of groups of people, even whole nations. When it comes to maximizing power, monetary efficiency often comes second. Thus it appears to be normal for Pentagon managers to treat the inability to match payments made with goods or services received as a mere inconvenience that may be brushed off as so much �budget dust�. * Magnitudes such as 2.3 trillion, while ordinary in astronomy are unusual in economy. Note that $2.3 trillion exceeds the net value of the entire plant and equipment of U.S. manufacturing industries, currently measured as $1.8 trillion. [ii]
The Pentagon managers� loss of $2.3 trillion has a far greater significance than as a mere exhibition of trashy administration. The U.S. is now in the grip of a highly militarized form of state-capitalism that was gradually installed during the half century of Cold War (as I will discuss in Chapters 1 & 2). Without formal announcement or debate, this development has spurred the deindustrialization of the U.S. (see Chapter 3).
