JANUARY 30, 2009
Harry Targ
In the Beginning
After suffering the greatest economic depression in United States
history, this country participated in a war-time coalition with Great Britain
and the former Soviet Union to defeat fascism in Europe and Japanese
imperialism in Asia. As a result of the economic mobilization for war, the
United States economy grew to become the most powerful one by war’s end. By
1945, Americans were responsible for three-fourths of the world’s invested
capital and controlled two-thirds of its industrial capacity. Near the end of
World War II, General Electric CEO Charles Wilson recommended that the U.S.
continue the wartime partnership between the government, the corporate sector,
and the military to maintain what he called a “permanent war economy.” He and
others feared the possibility of return to depression.
To justify a permanent war economy-ever increasing military expenditures, bases
all around the world, periodic military interventions, and the maintenance of a
large land army, navy, and air force-an external threat was needed. In 1947
President Truman told the American people that there was such a threat,
“international communism.”
Many liberals and conservatives remained skeptical about high military
expenditures. But, just before the Korean War started, permanent war economy
advocates threw their support behind recommendations made in a long- time
classified document, National Security Council Document 68, which recommended a
dramatic increase in military spending. NSC-68 also recommended that military
spending from that point on should be the number one priority of the national
government. When presidents sit down to construct a federal budget they should
first allocate all the money requested by military and corporate elites and
lobbyists concerned with military spending. Only after that should government
programs address education, health care, roads, transportation, housing and
other critical domestic issues.
Some influential Americans raised criticisms of the new permanent war economy. For example, while he subsequently complied with many of the demands for more military spending, President Eisenhower declared in one of his first speeches in office that “every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” After eight years in the White House Eisenhower gave a prescient farewell address in which he warned of a “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” which was new in American history. And, he proclaimed; “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Incidentally, his original draft spoke of a “military-industrial-academic complex.”
Seven years later, in the midst of the Vietnam War, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken.”
The Permanent War Economy (2009)
So we find ourselves in the midst of two wars today-Iraq and Afghanistan-that are already more costly than any war except World War II, against an enemy magnified, demonized, and mythologized as much or more than the cold war enemy to justify a $3 trillion price tag, the deaths of more than 4,000 soldiers, ten times that number of disabled veterans, and casualties and deaths of Iraqis and Afghanis probably approaching a million people. 9/11 afforded the Bush Administration the opportunity to launch a “war on terrorism” and the justification of preemptive war on any human target defined as a possible threat to the United States.The “terrorists” became the post-Cold War “international communists.” This is what the permanent war economy has come to.
Did the vision of Charles Wilson and the framers and advocates of NSC 68 bear fruit in terms of the domestic economy? The answer to this question is complicated but in the end clear. The U.S. economy is subject to cycles of growth and decay; expansion and recession; and periods of increased consumerism and low unemployment versus periods of declining product demand, lower wages, and high unemployment.
Looking at the period since World War II, bursts of increased military spending brought the U.S. economy out of the recessions of the late 1940s and 50s. The 60s economy boomed as the Vietnam war escalated before the economic crises of the 1970s. The so-called Reagan recovery was driven by dramatic increases in military spending. 1980s military spending equaled the total value of such spending between the founding of the nation and 1980.
In addition, military spending has benefited those industries, communities, and universities which have been the beneficiaries of such largesse. In our own day, Halliburton, Bechtel, and Kellogg, Brown, and Root have done quite well. For example, when Dick Cheney left his post as Secretary of Defense in 1993 to become the CEO of Halliburton, its subsidiary, KBR jumped from the 73rd ranked Pentagon contractor to the 18th.
Military spending pumped money into the economy to the advantage of selected multinational corporations and some communities. Usually recipients of defense dollars were part of what C. Wright Mills called, “the power elite,” those powerful individuals who, at the apex of government, corporate, and military institutions, influence policy. On the other hand, most citizens have not been beneficiaries of military spending.
“Indirect effects” of military spending, overwhelm the short-term stimulative effects of such spending. Military spending is “capital intensive,” that is the investment of dollars in military goods and services require less labor power to produce than the investment of comparable dollars in other sectors of the economy. Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier refer to spending on Iraq as a “job killer.” They estimate that $1 billion spent on investments in education, healthcare, energy conservation, and infrastructure would create anywhere from 50 to 100 percent more jobs than comparable spending on the war. They say, “Taking the 2007Iraq war budget of $138 billion, this means that upward of one million jobs were lost because the Bush Administration chose the Iraq sinkhole over public investment” (The Nation, March 31, 2008).
Further, military spending requires government to borrow money from private sources. Consequently, the more borrowing for the military, the less funds are available for non-military economic activity. Non-military spending gets “crowded out” by investment in arms.
Paralleling this, expanding investments in military reduce the resources of society that can be allocated for the production of goods and services that have use values. Military spending constitutes waste in that the resources that go into armies, navies, air forces, and weapons of human destruction cannot be put to constructive use. Looking at government spending alone, the 2008 federal budget increased by $35 billion in military spending, bringing the total to $541 billion. At the same time federal aid to state and local governments fell by $19.2 billion. The war on Iraq has already cost $522.5 billion and it was projected by distinguished economists that the total cost for the war, including paying debts, veterans benefits, and replacing destroyed equipment, will top $3 trillion (Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, Washington Post, March 9, 2008, p.B01).
As a new administration enters office in the context of a deepening depression, 2009 military spending for two wars, over 700 military installations, and contracting with private armies operating everywhere, will push towards a trillion dollars. This prospective allocation of scarce government resources has to be evaluated in the context of President-elect Barack Obama’s call for a massive green-jobs economic stimulus package and bailout programs for some 40 states suffering from their own budget deficits.
The Permanent War Economy in One State (2009)
Citizens of Florida so far have spent $36 billion on the Iraq war. And, the National Priorities Project (www. national priorities.org) estimated that for one year of Iraq war expenditures the state of Florida could have provided 12.7 million people with health care, 25 million homes with renewable electricity, 575,000 music and arts teachers, 11.2 million scholarships for university students, and 613,000 elementary school teachers.
Looking at Broward County, taxpayers have paid $3.9 billion for the war so far. Instead of expenditures for the Iraq war, this money could have provided for one year the following:
-1,385,189 people with health care or
-2,760,979 homes with renewable electricity or
-90,432 public safety officers or
-62,714 music and art teachers or
-1,224,540 university scholarships or
-28,953 affordable housing units or
-2,169,806 children with health care or
-535,663 head start places or
-66,937 elementary school teachers
Andrew Bacevich summed up this tradition of permanent war in reviewing a biography of 1940s Secretary of Defense James Forrestal in The Nation (April 23, 2007):
“From Forrestal's day to the present, semiwarriors have viewed democratic politics as problematic. Debate means delay. To engage in give-and-take or compromise is to forfeit clarity and suggests a lack of conviction. The effective management of national security requires specialized knowledge, a capacity for clear-eyed analysis and above all an unflinching willingness to make decisions, whatever the cost. With the advent of semiwar, therefore, national security policy became the preserve of experts, few in number, almost always unelected, habitually operating in secret, persuading themselves that to exclude the public from such matters was to serve the public interest. After all, the people had no demonstrable ‘need to know.’ In a time of perpetual crisis, the anointed role of the citizen was to be pliant, deferential and afraid.”
It is the task of the peace and justice activists today to build a mass movement, mobilizing the citizenry to reject the role of “pliant, deferential,” and fearful citizens. The people must insist that President Obama say “no” to the semi warriors.
From the Cost of War Project 2022
SUMMARY OF
FINDINGS
Some of the Costs of War
Project’s main findings include:
- At least 929,000 people have died due
to direct war violence, including armed forces on all sides of the
conflicts, contractors, civilians, journalists, and humanitarian workers.
- Many times more have died indirectly in
these wars, due to ripple effects like malnutrition, damaged
infrastructure, and environmental degradation.
- Over 387,000 civilians have been
killed in direct violence by all parties to these conflicts.
- Over 7,050 U.S. soldiers have
died in the wars.
- We do not know the full extent of how many
U.S. service members returning from these wars became injured or ill while deployed.
- Many deaths and injuries among U.S. contractors have not been reported
as required by law, but it is likely that approximately 8,000 have been
killed.
- 38 million people have been displaced by the
post-9/11 wars in Afghanstan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia
and the Philippines.
- The U.S. government is conducting
counterterror activities in 85 countries, vastly expanding this war
across the globe.
- The
post-9/11 wars have contributed significantly to climate change. The Defense Department is
one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters.
- The wars have been accompanied by erosions
in civil liberties and human
rights at
home and abroad.
- The human and economic costs of these wars
will continue for decades with some costs, such as the financial costs
of U.S. veterans’ care, not peaking until
mid-century.
- Most U.S. government funding of reconstruction efforts in Iraq and
Afghanistan has gone towards arming security forces in both countries.
Much of the money allocated to humanitarian relief and rebuilding civil
society has been lost to fraud, waste, and abuse.
- The cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere totals about $8 trillion. This does not include
future interest costs on borrowing for the wars.
- The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been
significant, including job loss and interest rate increases.
- U.S. policymakers scarcely considered alternatives to war in the
aftermath of 9/11 or in debating the invasion of Iraq. Some of those
alternative paradigms for addressing the problem of terror attacks are
still available to the U.S.
SOME DOMESTIC IMPACTS
- War spending created fewer jobs than similar
spending investment in clean energy, public education, and health care.
- Federal investment in military assets during
the wars made for a lost opportunity to significantly boost capital
improvements in core infrastructure such as roads and public transit.
- War
spending financed entirely by debt has contributed to higher interest
rates charged to borrowers such as new homeowners.
"Every gun
that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the
final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold
and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is
spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of
its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school
in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of
60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50
miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half
million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that
could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of
life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of
life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is
humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Address
"The Chance for Peace" Delivered Before the American Society of
Newspaper Editors, 4/16/53 [AUDIO]
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CCDS
Peace & Solidarity Move the Money Task Force will present a Zoom
webinar to address the widening "guns v. butter" trade-off.
"What's
War Got to Do With It? Fund Human Need Not Pentagon Greed"
On Monday, November 28,
2022, 8:00 pm EST, the CCDS Peace & Solidarity Move the
Money Task Force will present a Zoom webinar to address the widening
"guns v. butter" trade-off. This will consider military and
national security state expenditures and their effect on domestic social
program funding and underserved human needs. As then-President Eisenhower
famously expressed it in 1953: "Every gun that is made, every warship
launched, every rocket fired signifies...a theft from those who hunger and are
not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed...". Emphasis will be
placed on the significance of these expenditures with regard to contemporary
poverty, inequity, and deprivation in the United States.
Presentation speakers will be Sandy Eaton of CCDS
and the Massachusetts Care Single-Payer Network and Deborah Weinstein,
Executive Director for the Coalition of Funding Human Needs.
Deborah Weinstein has served as the executive director of
the Coalition on Human Needs since June 2003. Prior to coming to CHN, Weinstein
served for nine years as director of the Family Income division of the
Children's Defense Fund, where she worked to lift children and their families
out of poverty, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), child
support, jobs and wages, housing, nutrition, unemployment insurance, and equitable
tax policy. From 1983 to 1993 Weinstein was executive director of the
Massachusetts Human Services Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy organization
focusing on people's needs, especially those with limited income
Co-sponsors include: CCDS Socialist Education Project,
Massachusetts Peace Action, Wisconsin Peace Action, and the Online University
of the Left.
This will be live streamed on the Online University of the
Left Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/OULeft.org
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