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Imagine the Department of Defense as a proxy for class warfare
Class wars only work if the lower classes keep working.
I’m a fan of economist and historian Michael Hudson for a number of reasons, but the primary reason is that he’s an economist who can find the nugget in a problem and make it easy to understand. On July 4th, he did just that in a discussion about America, NATO and Europe. On that day, he laid out a startling argument. He said that defense spending is a proxy for class warfare. From the interview:
The very first choice of Europe is going to be, well, if America is not going to pay for NATO, are we really going to rearm all the armaments and the tanks and the missiles and the weapons and the airplanes that we’ve depleted our stocks and sent them to Ukraine? Are we really going to rebuild that and remilitarize? Or are we going to have a peace dividend where we can rebuild our economies? And the parties are unanimous. We don’t want a peace dividend that would raise wages. Labor would be employed, wages would go up, and we, the financial sector, would lose the class war. [emphasis mine]
We have political parties like that. Both are in thrall to the bankers. Both have voted in favor of forever wars. Both parties have no problem using private banks to finance public debts. Both parties are engaged in a…
