On Tuesday, June 11, 2002 at 21:24:19 (-0700) Sabri Oncu writes: >... >Very interesting document. Apparently, another key component is >"Emergency Preparedness and Response", whose central component >will be FEMA or Federal Emergency Management Agency, which also >will become a central component of the Department of Homeland >Security, as the above document indicates.
Integrating the entire economy under the Pentagon has a certain logic. Chomsky covers this ground in an interview with Tor Wennerberg in February 1999 (http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/feb99wennerchom.htm): It was understood --- you didn't have to read Keynes to figure it out --- that you could stimulate the economy in a lot of different ways. You could stimulate it with social spending or you could stimulate it with military spending. There there was a perfectly sane discussion, in Business Week, of which to do. The conclusion was: well, social spending is not a good idea and military spending is a great idea. The reason is that social spending has a downside. Yes, it can pump the economy. But it also has a democratizing effect, because people are interested in social spending; they want to know where you're going to build a hospital or a road or something, and they become involved. They have no opinions about what jet plane to build. Social spending also gives people more security and better conditions, better education, more means of communicating, more ability to withstand threats of unemployment. It makes people, workers, more powerful, and thereby better able to win higher wages and better conditions. Social spending has a democratizing effect, and it's not a direct gift to corporations. Military spending, however, has none of those defects; it's non-democratizing --- on the contrary, people are frightened and they seek shelter under the umbrella of power. While it aids corporations it doesn't directly improve the lot of workers; rather it tends to reinforce workplace discipline. So it's a direct gift to corporations. It redistributes upward and it's easy to sell if you terrify the public. So what emerges is a Pentagon-based industrial policy program, one which is now buckling a bit, due to the excessive liberalizing of capital movements, and thus, one which has to be repaired a bit, so that it once again benefits the rich, as intended. Bill
