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Cost is huge for the lower classes and maybe half the upper classes. They are sold on honor, but they fought for the profit of the ruling class, via conquest or
by lonelappde 7y ago
Cost is huge for the lower classes and maybe half the upper classes. They are sold on honor, but they fought for the profit of the ruling class, via conquest or be diverting fund to the military industrial complex.
- jvanderbot 7y agoWhat you describe is the effect of war, not its origin. Ironmongers get rich from war, but they probably don't make the conflict happen. How could Northrup Grumman force the invasion of Kuwait to improve F117 sales?
- blackrock 7y agoOne word: Lobbyist
- adventured 7y agoIronmongers are also a much smaller - less important - share of the US economic pie than they used to be, back when US manufacturing was a much larger share of the economy. Now, granted, even with their lessened share of economy, they still of course carry outsized influence politically as proxy arms of the Pentagon. As recently as the first Gulf War, Microsoft (for example) was a tiny speck compared to the military industrial complex. In five years or so, Microsoft's annual sales will be equal to about 25% of the annual US military budget (not meant to be apples to apples, it merely points out the massively increased scale of big tech vs eg 1990; Microsoft's sales for fiscal 1990 were... $1.18 billion). To put it into tangible dollar terms: Apple, by itself, generates approximately twice the annual operating profit of all US defense contractors combined. Apple benefits from calm globalization, not war. Big tech humiliates the military industrial complex on generating profits. And big tech is still expanding, whereas most major sectors are not. Which is to say, big tech money looks like it's going to double in size again in the next ten years (7% * 10 years). AAPL + MSFT + GOOGL + FB + INTC + AMZN = ~$220-$230 billion in annual operating profit for 2020. There are three trillion dollar corporations in there (Amazon is just shy of it; and FB will join them in that club within a few years). The rest of the world has one, which isn't really a corporation, in Aramco. It's $5.5 trillion in combined market cap. The Tokyo stock exchange is the third most valuable exchange by total market cap in the world, at about $5.5 to $5.7 trillion (the next two are US exchanges).
- snaky 7y agoSo digital giants have more lobbyist potential (in financial terms only, they cannot compete in massive 'job creation' in a districts all around the US, especially blue collar jobs) than the whole MIC, and the incentives to use it to counter lobbyist potential of warmongers. Why don't they use it for actual lobbying-for-global-piece?
- selimthegrim 7y agoI think Google under Eric Schmidt during the Obama administration was trying to get involved around the Arab Spring time and it engendered a backlash.
- aedron 7y agoThe "Arab Spring" was just another power projection project, you only need to examine how many so-called NGOs that ran the social media campaigns were directly or indirectly funded by intelligence agencies. But more to the point of the GP, to think that only the military industrial complex profits from American global dominance is incredibly naive. All the U.S. interventionism in South America for the last century (i.e. armed insurrection against democracies to install fascist dictatorships) was about opening markets and resources for exploitation by American (civil) corporations.
- xiphias2 7y agoWar is still highly profitable for oil companies (like Aramco) as long as they can get oil fields for cheap, set the price for oil and poor people (central banks) pay for the costs. In the next 20 years both oil companies and central banks are getting distrupted, at the same time a brave new world is coming...
- artificialidiot 7y agoYou have a good point about tech getting bigger. What worries me is that tech starting to profit more from war. Surveillance , GIS, AI, chips, robotics... are already a huge area and expanding. It is not a stretch to imagine a scenario like facebook signing a deal to provide intelligence, google or amazon providing infrastructure.
- deogeo 7y agoI don't know about Northrup Grumman, but General Electric, also a major defense contractor, could fire anti-Iraq-war hosts from MSNBC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Donahue#MSNBC_program
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThe MIC whispers in the ear of the movers and shakers of Washington to ensure conditions are good for business. General Eisenhower witnessed this happening. They are directly responsible for the last 100+ years of American military adventurism.
- deogeo 7y ago> General Eisenhower witnessed this happening. I know he warned about it in his last speech, but do you have a source or more specifics on how he witnessed it?
- baddox 7y agoHis speech was about the result of the Second World War: > Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. His point wasn’t about specific instances of armaments manufacturers influencing foreign policy, it was simply about the existence of a new and vast industry permanently dedicated to manufacturing armaments.
- baddox 7y agoEisenhower’s speech was precisely about the fact that, in conflicts before World War 2, existing manufacturers would temporarily make weapons, but that World War 2 left us with a “permanents armaments industry of vast proportions.” Literally his point is that it used to be ironmongers making weapons, but now it’s weapons manufacturers making weapons.
- ezconnect 7y agoKuwait was invaded because it was part of Iraq and Saddam was lobbied to do what he did.