The Military-Industrial Complex is Ruining the Economy

[swag]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/01/guest-post-the-military-industrial-compex-is-ruining-the-economy.html

Everyone knows that the too big to fails and their dishonest and footsy-playing regulators and politicians are largely responsible for trashing the economy.

But the military-industrial complex shares much of the blame.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says that the Iraq war will cost $3-5 trillion dollars.

Sure, experts say that the Iraq war has increased the threat of terrorism. See this, this, this, this, this, this and this. And we launched the Iraq war based on the false linkage of Saddam and 9/11, and knowingly false claims that Saddam had WMDs. And top British officials, former CIA director George Tenet, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and many others say that the Iraq war was planned before 9/11. But this essay is about dollars and cents.

. . .

[DainBramaged]

1. And in other news, man discovers the root of all evil.......

[Captain Hilts]

2. Don't let this argument take your eyes off the greed of financial speculators and corrupt Congress.

[Demeter]

3. Often, they are Co-conspirators

[Raster]

6. Congress = collaborators and accomplices.

[Vidar]

4. Financial specualtors have been part of the the military-industrial complex

since the Civil War at least.

[girl gone mad]

5. More of Washington's piece..

From Dean Baker:

A few years ago, the Center for Economic and Policy Research commissioned Global Insight, one of the leading economic modeling firms, to project the impact of a sustained increase in defense spending equal to 1.0 percentage point of GDP. This was roughly equal to the cost of the Iraq War.

Global Insight’s model projected that after 20 years the economy would be about 0.6 percentage points smaller as a result of the additional defense spending. Slower growth would imply a loss of almost 700,000 jobs compared to a situation in which defense spending had not been increased. Construction and manufacturing were especially big job losers in the projections, losing 210,000 and 90,000 jobs, respectively.

The scenario we asked Global Insight to model turned out to have vastly underestimated the increase in defense spending associated with current policy. In the most recent quarter, defense spending was equal to 5.6 percent of GDP. By comparison, before the September 11th attacks, the Congressional Budget Office projected that defense spending in 2009 would be equal to just 2.4 percent of GDP. Our post-September 11th build-up was equal to 3.2 percentage points of GDP compared to the pre-attack baseline. This means that the Global Insight projections of job loss are far too low…

The projected job loss from this increase in defense spending would be close to 2 million. In other words, the standard economic models that project job loss from efforts to stem global warming also project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to 2 million jobs in the long run.

[pansypoo53219]

7. don't forget the health industrial complex.

add health insurance and rampant reaganism/grover norquist anti-tax govt bad meme.

[glitch]

8. Check the boards of most of these large corporations and you'll find the same board members. nt

[swilton]

9. I would say it another way

- the military industrial complex enables capitalism (rule by big oil, big pharma, the might makes right mentality) to flourish - it's not a case of ruining the economy - it's a case of the economy and the military industrial complex being one and the same at the expense of

health care

the environment

social relationships

communities