Defense spending is higher now than it was during the Korean or Vietnam conflicts and may soon be twice the Cold War average. The end of the Cold War resulted in that rarest of all things: real cuts in the Pentagon budget.
The Pentagon is using a moral panic over “fake news” to gain influence over the domestic news landscape
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Military leaders literally don’t know what they’re doing with our money, but they want more. People on the left and right have had enough.
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The essence of the Pentagon’s scheme for making America safe for a never-ending policy of war preparations (and war) is to organize as much of the economy as possible around the needs of military production.
There's no guarantee that machine learning will save lives rather than end them.
What company gets the most money from the U.S. government? Weapons maker Lockheed Martin. It took in $35.2 billion from the government, or close to what the Trump administration is proposing for the 2019 State Department budget. Boeing, in second place, with a mere $26.5 billion. When it comes to the Department of Defense, perhaps we should retire the term “budget” altogether, given its connotation of restraint. Can't we find another word entirely? Like the Pentagon cornucopia?
Seymour Melman believed that both political and economic decline could be reversed by vastly scaling back the U.S. military budget which represented a gigantic opportunity cost to the national economy. He believed in a a revolution in thinking and acting centered on the reorganization of economic life and the nation’s security system. The core alternative to economic decline was the democratic organization of workplaces.
It may be good for a few big corporations’ bottom lines, for the Pentagon’s relevance in the region, and for local security forces and their political patrons, but don’t expect this militarized approach to development to solve the ongoing crises in Central America.
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