I was reading an account of Laxmi Mittal, the Indian entrepreneur who now sits atop a far flung steel empire in four continents the other day.He acquired many steel companies on the verge of bankruptcy in the old Soviet Union,Trnidad,Indonesia, Europe and the U.S. at a time when the steel industry was facing a crisis of low demand, low prices and high costs.The booming demand in construction and in manufacturing unleashed by China’s emergence as a center of manufacturing made it possible for Mittal Steel to meet that demand.As a result, all the investment has now paid off for Mittal and he is now considered one of the wealthiest men in the known universe.
I recalled that story to show that as we launch one war after another, another player emerges challenging our supremacy in specific industries.Thus, the shipbuilding industry in Japan owes its existence to the Korean War,the steel and auto industry in Japan owe theirs to the Vietnam War and now, I believe with the Iraq War, India will emerge as a major center of research in IT and biotechnology.Not to mention the formidable challenge of China in many fields.
This correlation of our wars with the emergence of challengers on the economic front is not coincidental.The structural costs accompanying the launch of wars remain well hidden by tax policies designed to shield politicians like Bush,Johnson and other imperialists;but the bills do come due.The forms they take vary and in the instances I have provided, they come in the form of complete disintegration of the economic base of our country, impoverishment of our people, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few who can benefit from the spoils of war.
As more and more people, especially in the segments of our population that was known as the Middle Class before the Bush era begin to feel the effect of warmongering,this connection between a warlike foreign policy and the impoverishment of our people needs to be brought to light for many of us by the Democratic Party. They have failed miserably at this job as they come to spout the same nonsense the Republicans keep repeating.
A dose of historical economic sense might do our politicians some good,if they are still in the business of public service.I am coming to doubt that.
No, America is going down: The party of looting by those with power in the corporate world tells you all you need to know.
The sheeple still think everything is fine. Or almost fine–if all those pessimists and naysayers would just shut up.
There is a phrase: “Washed out by proven failure.” That’s what it will take to get rid of America’s political and economic elites.
A vicious cycle has come to dominate our political and economic landscape.War making seems to be the only industry that we seem to thrive in and, that is what we get from our politicians and businessmen.As warmaking becomes the major activity, it supplants all peaceful occupations.Because the economy gets skewed toward warmaking, the costs of maintaining the Wehrmacht mount.It becomes impossible to make money by honest means.This is why there is an exodus of businesses to India, China and the like.
I call this process the Deliberate Impoverishment of our people.And because the bills don’t come due until much later, everyone escapes accountability leaving our communities and commons people high and dry.
You are definitely on to something here.
Every dollar we spend on a war is money not going to educate the next generation of medical and scientific researchers and engineers that will create the industries of tomorrow like solar energy conversion and wind power.
The best students from the developing world that want to learn highly specialized technical skills are going to countries like Canada for their education, and the ones that come to the US are increasingly deciding to go home where the business opportunities are greater rather than stay here where they are viewed with suspicion for being young, foreign and brown.
The Administration will point to statistics and say that immigration to the US remains high, but the demographics have shifted away from the future engineers to the folks who will take jobs picking crops. Not to denigrate those folks in the least – my father’s whole family spent time picking crops in New Jersey in the 1940’s – but they are hoping for a brighter for their children through the path of American educational system, and that path is being eroded from beneath them as they try to follow it, for the sake of another war to secure an artificially cheap oil supply for the big petroagrochemical corporations and their stockholders.
The path of empire and milking political or economic colonies leads to a rich-and-poor social structure. A strong middle class is fostered by policies like investing in education, research, and internal development of the nation. Those policies are being followed now in the nations of Asia that you cite, which is why they are developing a middle class and having major economic growth, while we follow the path Britain did in the days when the US was the up-and-coming developing economy.
And there is no better modern example of what happens when you try to maintain an empire beyond your means rather than face economic realities than the USSR. We are on the path of internal dry rot as a nation that will lead to our sudden collapse at some point in the future, just as happened to them. The Russians are not a stupid people by any means, nor lazy. They just had greedy, self-serving, power-hungry ruling class that drove their nation into bankruptcy and their people to cynicism and despair.
And one day their nation collapsed like a giant but hollow tree, and the people gathered ’round and said in amazement: “Look, it was hollow and full of rot on the inside, and we were afraid all these years. Who would have thought?” Just as will be said of us if we do not change the path we are on.
The word you are looking for is kleptocracy:
It is what the USSR was before it fell apart also.
Kleptocracy does not quite describe the kind of society we have become.I think the corrosive influence of money and the aura of success it confers drives everyone in our society into a feeding frenzy.This applies to all strata of our society.At the top,it makes it necessary for a corporate CEO to have earnings that are thousand times that of the ordinary worker.The trappings of such wealth make it necessary for men like Dennis Kozlowski to order gold plated trash cans and gold laced shower curtains and spend millions of dollars for a birthday party in Sardinia for his wife.
I think we in this country have come to accept extreme
cosnpicuous consumption by the top tier as an indicator of competence, efficiency and success.This makes us vulnerable to being overtaken by societies like Japan, China and India where such conspicuous consumption and flaunting of one’s personal wealth, even if one achieves success in business, is disdained.
I think that enables a Toyota,a Mittal Steel,a Honda to invest in the future and forego accumulating personal wealth.
In the face of this challenge,I am not sure that we have an answer other than behavior modification classes for our CEOs.
The USSR kleptocracy yielded fairly modest returns to those in power. A nice place to live, private school for the children and perhaps an automobile.
It was still a kleptocracy and, therefore, economically inefficient. What has happened in the US, as you indicated, is that money is being spent for useless items at the expense of infrastructure development. Whether you consider this kleptocracy or not, I think we are in agreement on the ultimate outcome if things don’t get turned around soon.
After I posted my previous response, I had a chance to read James Wolcott’s diary today titled Sunday Sermonette in which he talks about how wars and the heroes such wars produce have come to occupy a central place in our mythologies.This is one reason why it is possible for us to spend a trillion dollars on a war based on lies and continue to spend half a trillion dollars a year on our “defense” budget while we cannot find the will or the money to spend on healthcare for the elderly or the needy,not to mention on the education of our young.
Wolcott also mentions that in creating our war mythologies, we forget that for each hero that we remember for his transcendental act of courage, millions more die.They are the forgotten ones.Thus we have the 25 million dead Russians in WWII, the millions of Koreans and Chinese dead in the Korean War and the countless numbers of Americans and Vietnamese dead during the Vietnam War.It is only when we get rid of the evil addiction to war that the lives of ordinary people will return to normalcy and stability.