And they're kicking all our asses in the war. And they own very good propaganda outlets to obfuscate this fact from some, and indoctrinate others. Cf. Venkat Rao's Sociopaths, Clueless, Loser's triangle from the Gervais principle
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Okay,
@nosilverv , thanks for reading, I'mma bring this home. The weird-ass role of the Military - Industrial Complex (MIC) in the US and the West's political economy. Crucial document here is the Republican President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address. He promulgated the1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
phrase MIC...and Ike actually wanted to make it the military-industrial-congressional complex, to highlight the role that pork-barrelling &c played in the dynamics, but he was advised to cut it out. Vast, vast, vast amounts of money were spent by the Federal government on mil
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expenditures. There is a fine tradition among some right-Libertarians of critiquing this, and of course on the Left, too. The speech is well worth reading in full here: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript …
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Eisenhower, SACEUR, one of the liberators of Europe, realistically wanted to find a way to pursue peace and disarmament with the Soviet Union. It is possible, particularly in light of the death of Stalin, that with skillful diplomacy on both sides, such a policy could have beenpic.twitter.com/MM1GjYJq0A
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pursued But the huge armaments ("defense") industry had to be fed. It would take a book to break down how it warped capitalism. But it really, really did. Vast amounts of public wealth were spent designing weapons. To help those companies make even more money, OECD countries
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hawked, and continue to hawk to this day, their weapons to some of the worst régimes in the world. I don't know if I really advanced a cogent argument in this here thread, but that's an unpacking of the three elements in my above tweet.
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I guess the last part is Adam Neumann, who's in the news with WeWork. It is such an absurd and grotesque outcome that this grifter has just made off with 1.7 billion. Adam Smith, important capitalist theorist and author of Theory of the Moral Sentiments, would be completely
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disgusted with this outcome.
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Fin / end of thread Hey, sorry
@vgr for spamming yr mentions. I shoulda created a new thread fork instead of replying here.5 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
No worries, leave as is
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