Tag Archives: military spending

And Babies? Uvalde = My Lai. This is not hyperbole. War crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war. Mass shootings are an inevitable byproduct of militarism and a militarized culture.  The same political process that led to and perpetuated the war in Vietnam continues to perpetuate the slaughter of innocents in American schools, supermarkets, nightclubs, subways, and synagogues. It is not just the “extreme right” doing this. It is the...

Black budget. Defense One As Secret Pentagon Spending Rises, Defense Firms Cash in Marcus Weisgerber Economics IntersectThe World's Biggest Arms-Producing CompaniesNiall McCarthy

Douglas Macgregor is a military policy realist. He analyzes the US military and its operational strategy (in contrast with grand strategy as implementation of policy). Reminiscence of the FutureDouglas Macgregor Hits It Out Of The Ball ParkAndrei Martyanov

"Private enterprise" and "the free market" at work. Ain't capitalism grand.CounterpunchVicious Cycle: The Pentagon Creates Tech Giants and Then Buys their Services T. J. Cole

Russia is adding warships to its navy faster than the US. The reason for that is simple, while the US is pouring $14 billion into the USS Gerald Ford carrier the Russians are building corvettes. A class of warships between 500 and 1,000 tons. Not only are they small, they are cheap. The newest class, Karakurt, sets back the Russian budget 2 billion rubles or just over $30 million at the exchange rates. These sound like puny vessels, except here is the thing: they can hit an enemy surface...

PPP, scope, and efficiency, e.g., exploitation of asymmetry. Military spending can be deceptive depending on measurement. Comparing military spending based on PPP rather than dollar equivalence results in a very different picture. The gap in spending is not as huge as it seems.  Moreover, Russia and China only aim at defense, while the scope of the US is global, with the ability to fight two and half wars simultaneously — the European theater, the Western Pacific, and the Middle East,...

While military spending subsidizes a certain lifestyle for some, it also contributes to trends that put the rest of the country at risk. Excess expenditure over the requirements of purpose is wasteful and constitutes a subsidy.While the economics of the article is out of paradigm with MMT, the author is a professor of politics and economics is peripheral to his argument.He doesn't mention the push from the right to increase military spending for "national security" reasons, followed by an...

Sputnik International interviews Michael Hudson. Audio and transcript.Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of NeoliberalismSuper-Imperialism at the PentagonMichael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

The British military industrial complex needs to get its story straight. The Russian threat keeps changing from week to week, as more and more potentially nation-destroying dangers emanating from Moscow are revealed. The only thing that all the scary stories about Russia have in common is that they repeat the mantra that Russia is dangerous, very dangerous, and that the UK should therefore spend more on defence. The BBC notes in an article about Gavin Williamson’s statement that, ‘It comes...

Marshall Auerback partners with Chuck Spinney on this article. Interesting.CounterpunchBoss Tweet’s Generals Already Run the Sho Marshall Auerback – Franklin C. Spinney