Hi Michael. My book "Solving the Climate Crisis" has a chapter there was not room in the printed book that is on-line only. "Cutting Military Spending for a Stronger Safer America". http://stcc.be/mil.doc
It contains the following toward the end of that long chapter on page 38: >There is also an implication here that is dead wrong, that our nation continues to grow richer by pressuring others into trading on U.S. dictated terms and following U.S. dictated orders, and that we would grow poorer if we stopped. This may have been true once. I have little doubt evidence exists that not just the very rich, but most white Americans benefited from slavery, and from grabbing land from Indian nations and Mexico. I think the same argument could be made for the bullying of Latin America. (I’m not sure any of these arguments are completely true; but I’m sure good cases can be made.) After the First World War, I’m very doubtful. Past WWII, I’m certain that only rich and powerful interests in the U.S. came out ahead from our foreign policy. >Two things changed. >One is that partisan warfare during WWII taught people all over the world how a weak nation can make life hell for a powerful invading one. In spite of Vietnam, I’m not asserting that poor nations can always drive out rich invaders or overthrow their puppets. In fact, I think you can point to more cases where poor nations ended up with exactly the government the great powers chose. But the price for the powerful rose, in almost every case. >Secondly, the benefits a rich nation can gain by investing money at home instead of bullying other nations have risen. Part of this is that technology has improved to the point that there are huge marginal benefits in general to be gained from innovation. As or more important is that greater intensity of resource use is combined with a breakneck speed of change. This makes suboptimal uses of resources almost inevitable, which opens opportunities for huge returns to social investment made at just the right places. For example, in 1943 Buckminster Fuller proposed a successor to his failed Dymaxion Car design of 1933. Instead of a top speed of 120 mph, and the ability to comfortably seat 11 people, he designed a five bucket seat model that would have run at an efficiency of 40-50 mpg. Unlike his earlier prototypes, it steered easily and safely in high winds and at high speeds (Baldwin, 1996). Similarly, he formed an alliance with the International Machinists Union (IAM) ( Rybczynski, 1992), to produce the Dymaxion house, an inexpensive mass produced thousand square foot water and energy efficient home that was luxurious by the standards of the day. It included central heating, cooling, and vacuuming. It was designed so that the entire house could be cleaned in half an hour (Baldwin, 2010). (Buck¬minster Fuller was one of the few men of his generation to take housework seriously.) “Wichita,” proclaimed IAM president, Harvey Brown, "can become the Detroit of housing." >One of the titans of the labor movement of the post-World War II period, Walter Reuther, supported conversion from a wartime economy to publicly funded housing, education, and healthcare (Bluestone, 1998). The labor movement in general at that time supported public financing to produce less expensive housing and transportation. Look at what percent of our income we U.S. consumers spend on housing and transportation today, and the cost of healthcare in this country, and tell me we would not have been better off if labor had won on those issues, and money had gone to these purposes instead of the Cold War. >Similarly, in the 70’s Barry Commoner pointed out that instead of burning fuel separately to produce high temperature heat for electricity and low temperature heat for water and space conditioning, we could decentralize power plants, and use the waste heat from electricity production for low temperature uses (Commoner, 1976). This combined production of heat and power is widely used in Europe today. He also recommended a policy for the U.S. government to buy solar cells in any application where the life cycle cost was lower than that of fossil fuels. That increased market probably would have resulted in faster development of photovoltaic (PV) technology, and lower priced solar cells than we have today. Can anyone doubt that that the nation’s money would have been better spent on these than, say, the last 10% of our investment in the nuclear arms race? >From these concrete examples, we see that honest social investments can now produce better returns than cornering other nations in dark alleys, knocking them over the head, and rummaging through their pockets. One other thing I should have pointed out in that chapter. I could have taken the example of fear of communism used to defeat single payer in the 50s. More important than competition for resources is the way military dominance competes for mind share. Fear is stronger than good sense. Attention conservation notice - most of this chapter is a more concise presentation of a lot of what Noam Chomsky says - an introduction to a critique of U.S. foreign policy for those unfamiliar with that critique and perhaps a useful review or reference. But for most Pen-L readers more likely to be something you want to refer others to than read yourself, because it probably has little new to you. There are minor details here and there that may be unfamiliar because I delved into some commonly cited examples to find out what exactly was going on in those periods. But you would have to wade through a lot you know to find little nuggets you don't. On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 2:16 PM, michael perelman < [email protected]> wrote: > Vincent Portillio and I are hard at work putting together our new book > provisionally entitled: The Matrix: The Intersection of War, Economic > Theory, and the Economy. We are going to post the ms. on line as we > go along. Here is our first installment, which will probably change > in light of comments that you might make. > > Thanks for your interest. > > > http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/the-matrix-the-intersection-of-war-economic-theory-and-the-economy/ > > > -- > Michael Perelman > Economics Department > California State University > Chico, CA > 95929 > > 530 898 5321 > fax 530 898 5901 > http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Solving the Climate Crisis web page: SolvingTheClimateCrisis.com Grist Blog: http://grist.org/author/gar-lipow/ Online technical reference: http://www.nohairshirts.com
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