I bet they'd be doing a lot better if the US hadn't stolen $7B USD from their central bank, or you know, bombed the country into oblivion for two decades, or armed and trained the Mujahideen (including Osama) against the Soviets when they wanted to assist Afghanistan's socialist development. No, blame it all on the Taliban, an organization that profoundly reflects US involvement. That way Western capitalist press can manufacture consent for more US involvement. I'm sure Afghani people are hoping we'll "help" more. There is no price too great, if we can raise revenue for US arms manufacturers.
pudcollar
joined 1 year ago
The US foreign policy serves to create a demand for their arms industry. It's counterproductive to maintaining peace. Drastic changes would need to take place for this to be a possibility. I'm in favor of those changes. The American military industrial complex is a bigger threat to Americans than Putin is. It's certainly a bigger threat to other countries. The US has had no need to be involved in a conflict it's been in for almost 80 years. The military has literally done us no good since Arpanet.
Anthony Blinken said "If you're not at the table, you're on the menu.". The US sure lives by the law of the jungle in international relations. Although this has been the case for centuries, this style of foreign policy really got going with WWII. Our country's war materiel production was behind what was necessary at the time to participate in a 2-front global war. Soldiers were training with cardboard weapons, but because we hadn't outsourced our production offshore, we created an economy based on war that was so lucrative for business that that economy has lasted to this day. Such is it that a war economy itself can conquer a nation. Eisenhower warned about this in his farewell address.
There's protecting a country from invasion, and then there's basing a country's whole economy on a continuation of arms sales. The latter provides a perverse incentive to destabilize regions in order to maintain demand for the American arms industry. In the case of defense of the US against invasion, are you honestly suggesting that the country with the highest private gun ownership rate in the world has that to fear in any scenario? Even if we did need a military at all, one that could appropriately be called a department of "defense" would be a tenth of its current size.
Bottom of the ocean. Better yet, recycling plant.
I mention the space industry because there's a lot of overlap between that and the defense industrial complex in engineering terms. NRO had a couple hubble-sized telescopes laying around they built and didn't use. USAF has their own space shuttle. They're currently planning to update all of our ICBMs. They could move other payloads to orbit. We don't even need ICBMs, with submarine-launched missiles, even the new ones will be obsolete bulls-eyes for nukes in the midwest.
Speaking of deceased sex traffickers, the anthem for the Nazi SA was memorializing a dead pimp, Horst Wessel. They named a boat after him. It's now a US Coast Guard training ship.
Christ they're gonna be 10 miles offshore, who the hell cares. NOAA says there's no known link between offshore wind and whale death.
The animal industries have their own lobbying and disinformation campaigns. The pro-corporate media environment is an inextricable part of capitalist society. Their CEOs and those of Exxon et al are all basically saying "we're doing what we're permitted to do, it's your job to reign us in for any social good whatsoever". Any rational actor in a society that permits this will do this if given the opportunity. They're products of their environment. Sometimes they'll get ratioed on X, and agree to some small concession, a mere unconscious twitch of the power of the people causing multibillion $ companies to yelp in terror.
We made an automaton clerk. It has neither arms nor body, but it works all day translating physician's documents, so they may be stored with uniformity in a library that has neither shelves nor paper.