When the war will come home, or some reasons why the war is not affordable

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Walter... you wrote:

"The Bush plan, who knows, could sink he entire economy of the US."

With a bit of lip, I would reply as follows, for what it is worth: this is
an unlikely event, which just scares people in the wrong way. The reality is
more scary, actually: if we do get real blockheads in the US Government,
there's enough resources around to fight a few more wars, and the problem of
these wars is, that they will solve nothing, there are no big gains to be
made out of that, either macro-economically or in terms of the greatly
desired social stability, which is why it ought, in my opinion, to be a UN
priority to shift the geopolitical conflicts from military conflicts which
kill on a large scale and consume large amounts of resources to fights which
are non-military and kill as few people as possible (preferably none, but
that is utopian I guess). People need to get used to the idea that you don't
need killing technology to solve problems, that there are other ways to
fight and argue. Europe provides plenty examples that this CAN be done.

The ultimate absurdity of modern warfare really is that you spend an
enormous amount of society's resources to assert control over other
countries with as few deaths as possible. And the US Armed Forces can do
it... except you get whole populations working against you for many, many
years, and soldiers do get killed... whereupon at some point, the soldiers
do retaliate... and then you get more and more killings again, even although
that was not the initial objective. Then you get more war costs... somebody
has to pay for it... and then you get a whole new regimentation of the
social fabric so that people cough up the cash. And generally, the ultimate
psychological effect of war economy is that people do not care anymore, i.e.
beyond a certain critical casualty threshold, people only care about
themselves (survival instinct), and once you have that sort of dynamic, you
can kiss your pension goodbye, never mind socialism. A sociologist once
called this phenomenon "pyramids of sacrifice", a reference to mystical
monuments built by slave labour.

The issue is not that of sinking the US economy, this is not an immediate
prospect, rather it is WHO PAYS FOR THE WAR IN REAL TIME AND SPACE. I have
already noted on this list, that some very interested financial
constructions can be devised to distribute the fiscal burden of the war in
time and space, and there exists a lot of experience now with debt
management (even if you just look at the current accounts of the developed
capitalist countries, you will see that considerable revenue is obtained
simply as net income from debt management). The overall effect must be to
depress the economy insofar as ordinary wage and salary earners are
concerned, which means a hike in social inequality, but what you need to
watch is how this burden is actually distributed.

Wall Street is solidly behind Bush, because Bush is the guarantor of the
profit earnings of publicly listed companies in the US. You need that market
confidence, you have all these pension funds, and so on. The whole point is,
while American investors get terribly worried about their stocks slipping
down the charts on the basis of fluctuating confidence levels, the real
worry here is that Joe Taxpayer is not having the same concern about his
taxes, which are a deduction of real income. From a Dutch perspective, this
is a bit like saying "I am going to buy 10,000 dollars worth of blue chips
fixed for ten years, and then I am going to throw my certificate in the
rubbish bin and forfeit my net income from that investment as well as the
asset itself".

If Mr Moneybags owns ten million and loses one million, maybe he doesn't get
to sleep with the wife that night. But if Joe Taxpayer gets a cut in his net
income of $30,000 by, let us say, a couple of thousand dollars for a few
years, PLUS no wage rises because companies cannot afford them, PLUS a
rising cost of living, that has a lot more social effect, and the lower your
personal net income, the bigger the effect. The more dependents you have,
the bigger the effect. The more fixed outlays you have, the bigger the
effect. And then, if they dream up scenarios about "permanent war", that
means among other things a whole generation of Americans will be cut off
from opportunities in a big way, and there aren't even social systems in
place to deal with that, other than police and military. People complain now
about being cut off from opportunities, but next thing is that the tunities
drop off.

So really the best way to understand the logic of the permanent war idea is,
that if the US Government pursues it, then the USA will get a permanent war
at home, in its own territory. So really what we are talking about in terms
of Anti-War protests is not simply that American soldiers get killed in some
faraway country, it is that these protests mean a defence of the positive
values of American society, a way of life, and if you don't defend that,
things could get mighty tough when you get into the job market, when you
retire and your kids don't have much to look forward to either if you have
them.

I was just in Frisco (you know San Fransisco ?) recently, and one thing I
like to do initially on my trips is to gauge the expression of people's
faces in town, how many are looking happy, how many are smiling or laughing,
what are their body movements like, and so on. Okay, that's just a surface
impression, I didn't get around everywhere or anything, but, there just
ain't a lot of smiles around. Fantastic weather, greater facilities, great
opportunities even, but few people are smiling, and it isn't just me they're
staring at or something. And why is that, you might say ? Is there some
profound psycho-sexual explanation for that ?

Well I suspect a good part of it is the "I am working my butt off already
but not getting anywhere". I am deliberately mentioning this, because Frisco
is on the whole pretty wealthy, relatively speaking, and you can have a
pretty good life there, you have a relatively good council infrastructure,
and so on. Even the subway is clean, which is more than I can say for my own
city most times. Okay, so they're not laughing now, but how about a few
years down the track ? How about towns that just don't have that kind of
money or facilities ? You're not just going to have a whole mass of people
jammed into lifestyles they don't like, you're going to have a mass of
people that have nowhere to go. And what do you think they are going to do ?

If you protested against this war, then you can say honestly: I am not
responsible for any of the costs of this war, I opposed it all along, and
therefore, those people that supported it should pay for it. Of course, in
reality your taxes are paying for it, it's not like you are buying stocks
where you can decide to sell, and the only thing you can do there
realistically, is to elect a different government; even so, the debt will
still be there. But at least you can say: I am not responsible for this
mess, and I want some real responsibilities seen to in America. And if you
protested, then you know that something can be done, because lots of other
Americans feel the same way as you do.

Jurriaan



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