by Summary:
No wonder the US is just a giant military-industrial complex that goes around threatening everyone in the world pretending to be the good guy getting the bad guys. This has been going on for decades with war after war. But who pays for all this, the average tax payer it seems? Plus they can send in their Western companies to pretend to rebuild the countries that they destroyed while opening up their markets and privatising so Western investors can get to own everything.The US will bring democracy to your country and set you free, and they will even elect your president for you.Why don't the Western aristocracy just ask for the money they want and leave everyone alone? 'War is a Racket'. Permanent war: the cost of doing business Dr Kadri says that free trade is ‘a poisonous concept’
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
No wonder the US is just a giant military-industrial complex that goes around threatening everyone in the world pretending to be the good guy getting the bad guys. This has been going on for decades with war after war. But who pays for all this, the average tax payer it seems? Plus they can send in their Western companies to pretend to rebuild the countries that they destroyed while opening up their markets and privatising so Western investors can get to own everything.The US will bring democracy to your country and set you free, and they will even elect your president for you.Why don't the Western aristocracy just ask for the money they want and leave everyone alone? 'War is a Racket'. Permanent war: the cost of doing business Dr Kadri says that free trade is ‘a poisonous concept’
Topics:
Mike Norman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
Matias Vernengo writes Milei’s Psycho Shock Therapy
Bill Haskell writes Population Growth Outcomes
Robert Vienneau writes Books After Marx
Joel Eissenberg writes Undocumented labor: solutions, not scapegoating
No wonder the US is just a giant military-industrial complex that goes around threatening everyone in the world pretending to be the good guy getting the bad guys. This has been going on for decades with war after war. But who pays for all this, the average tax payer it seems? Plus they can send in their Western companies to pretend to rebuild the countries that they destroyed while opening up their markets and privatising so Western investors can get to own everything.
The US will bring democracy to your country and set you free, and they will even elect your president for you.
Why don't the Western aristocracy just ask for the money they want and leave everyone alone?
'War is a Racket'.
Permanent war: the cost of doing business
Dr Kadri says that free trade is ‘a poisonous concept’ that requires a state of permanent war.
“In way we are caught in a catch-22 situation,” he says. “War is awful, but it does wonders for the macroeconomy.”
“One need only look at what has occurred in Yemen, Gaza, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq to discover the new shape of war and what happens to countries that attempt to control their own resources in an age where war and war spending have become all the more necessary to take the market out of its slump.”
Syria’s GDP was $73 billion in 2012, a 73% decrease in economic output from 2008, according to Statista. Cumulative GDP loss between 2011–2016 is estimated at $226 billion, according to the World Bank.
Why would the US be interested in billion dollar trade, when it has made more than a trillion out of war in Syria?,” he says. “If you want cash in against the Syrian government, you spend a trillion dollars mobilising intelligence in the west, another couple of trillion sowing dissent, saying Syria is bad, we have a bad guy in power, we should kill him and free this country, maybe bring in ISIS, al-Qaeda or some other obscurantist group. They’re willing to pay even tens of trillions, because they will earn back every penny.”
“If they spend ten trillion on this war, they’re going to earn $10–20 trillion back,” he says.
Around 30,000 people daily succumb to hunger and malnutrition. Not long ago, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food reported that one child perishes every four or five seconds from hunger and other preventable diseases.
“We live in a planet that must destroy its resources — including human resources,” says Dr Kadri. “This is what capital concedes: it requires death, either through severe austerity or through wars. There is nothing in the way they frame these concepts that is bereft of destruction.”
Either you’re in the pocket of the US or you are going to be destroyed. The point many people don’t see is that destruction and war is an end in itself.”
When war is more profitable than trade
The former UN economist says that free trade basically dislocates resources and never re-employs them back.
“It either drives resources out of business, or it simply destroys them,” he says.
“If you force governments in sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East to subsidise their agriculture, while the EU, for instance, spends a trillion euros a year subsidising its agriculture, you already have an economic imbalance in the way policy occurs.”
In many cases, war is actually more profitable than trade.
The Iraq war made Halliburton $20 billion in revenue. KBR, its controversial former subsidiary, (previously run by George W Bush’s Vice President, Dick Cheney) was awarded at least $39.5bn in federal contracts related to the Iraq war between 2003–2013.
Cheney himself profited handsomely from the conflict. Halliburton rose from the 22nd largest military contractor in 2000 to seventh in 2003 when Cheney took office. His financial disclosure statements from 2001, 2002 & 2003 revealed he received $1,997,525 from the company since becoming VP, along with stock options. Though Cheney resigned as CEO in July 2000 (to ‘avoid any conflicts of interest’), he walked away from the company with a retirement stock package worth $33.7 million.
The 100 largest arms producers and military services contractors recorded $395 billion in arms sales in 2012. Lockheed Martin, the largest arms seller, alone accounted for $36 billion in such sales during 2012.
“Iraq was willing to negotiate, and it would continue to sell its oil in the dollar, yet it got invaded and the costs of its war were nearly $6 trillion in some estimates,” says Dr Kadri.
“Had the US just traded with Iraq, which was a US $50 billion GDP country, it may have made off with say tens or a hundred billion. Without going further into details, the gains of war are tremendous.”
More here - and the rest is just as chilling.