Where my Peoples At?
I ask you: Are you pro or anti diatribe?
I myself am pretty pro-diatribe. As a rule I can get into a good yelling, frustrated, angry assault on something. Especially if it’s your mom. Okay, Okay, so not really, but you have to admit that sentence was really asking for it.
I say this becauseit seems to me that in a nation of emotional polemics the ability to appreciate a full tilt rar about something really enhances the quality of life. That or blasting some Public Enemy out into the night. (Damn shame about those last couple albums they put out though, puerile trash…)
Shut em Down! Shut em Shut Em Shut Em Down.
So I saw this movie recently, “Why We Fight.” It’s a documentary that outlines the current state of the military industrial complex in this country and talks a little about the true motivations for going to war in Iraq. It’s pretty sobering stuff. One overriding message of the documentary, and a compellingly made one, is that the United States mostly went to war in Iraq to bolster the market for weapons systems within the USmilitary. Now you can see the movie and see how much stock you put in their particular reasoning, but let me put a little more angle on the light that’s hitting that for you.
Basically the world is in the midst of a great flattening. (Yeah Friedman is inthe house) The great powers of the world are finding their economies increasingly interwoven, and finding that multinational companies are intertwining their business operations amongst these powers. (For instance technology outsourcing to India, industrial off shoringto China, Rolls Royce moving production centers all over Europe, Boeing trying to secure addition aerospace engineers in Russia.) These economic connections are best facilitated by two things: A lack of trade barriers, and as predictable a marketplace as possible. (i.e. no revolutions, no great power conflicts, no internal instability) Multinational companies interests will revolve around these points.
Sadly for the US, our dramatically out of balance spending on guns over butter has left our economy ill equipped to handle the new economic realities created by a flat, frictionless free market world. US companies in the domestic sector by and large are getting either hammered, or becoming international companies with only token ties to the United States. (Such as HP, which is the largest tech company in both Europe, Africa, the US, and a handful of other places. You think at that point they really give a damn about the US past keeping it open as a market?) Anyhow the bottom line is that “US” companies are fighting for their lives, except of course if they’re in the business of taking other peoples.
Companies focused on providing services, support, and logistics to the US Military have dramatically grown and diversified their interestsin the United States over the last 50 years. Our standing Cold War army has created a logic of it’s own, a vast political influence of it’s own, and an American foreign policy that revolves around the projection of armed force. These companies of war are going to continue to push and support US military involvement around the globe, cause hey it’s the only thing keeping American business afloat right?
This of course isn’t actually very good for our vital American interests, for international peace, or for US security. Perhaps the biggest long term problem for the US is that this sort of logic has led to a strategic overextension of American might. With American power being projected and spent all over the globe, the US is forced to make tough spending decisions about education, science, and economic funding at home to preserve funding for these foreign adventures. These tradeoffs will continue to erode traditional American advantages in relative numbers of knowledge workers, scientific discovery, and technological deployment, while the flattening of the world makes low wage, low skill jobs easier and easier to off shore. The end result of this is that the US economic position is likely to become more and more unstable with a widening disparity between those who can acquirethe skills to be at the top of the global economic food chain and those who can not. The US may wake up one day and find out that it is becoming a Great Britain to China or Indian New America.
The United States is likely to see it’s relative military advantage erode over the next 20 years as well. As 2 more huge countries join the technological elite of the world (India & China) the relative cost and market for any great power to acquire complexnext generation weaponry will only increase, and ironically the US’s own lack of concern with its industrial base will probably lead US defense contractors to offshore a good portion of weapons manufacturing as well. As the relative wealth of major nations in the East catches up to that of the West you can expect more and more battles for influence around the Pacific Rim, while at the same time multinational corporations seek to diminish the power and influence of nation states.
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I have no idea when this was originally written since it just showed up on my Flist today, but it’s a very interesting look at the industry I’m in…and a fair one I might add. I look at my job as a way to do good science, and maybe to do some good acts along the way. But our country has toppled a little far to the military-industrial complex, and this is a problem that it doesn’t look like anyone will solve any time soon.