Fifty-three
If I have even just a little sense,
I will walk on the main road and my only fear
will be of straying from it.
Keeping to the main road is easy,
But people love to be sidetracked.
When the court is arrayed in splendor,
The fields are full of weeds,
And the granaries are bare.
Some wear gorgeous clothes,
Carry sharp swords,
And indulge themselves with food and drink;
They have more possessions than they can use.
They are robber barons.
This is certainly not the way of Tao.
Over 4000 years ago a low to mid-level clerical worker/bureaucrat named Lao Tzu wrote down some of his most distilled and considered thoughts and observations on Life in a work known as the Tao te Ching - the Way of the Tao. Classic obscure and arcane verses purporting to pint to "higher truths" that cannot be expressed directly in words.
Much of his observation focuses on how human interference with the Tao - the way and flow of Life - creates the myriad problems of our times. Some of the biggest problems are very familiar to the ones we deal with today.
Distraction and the debt crisis.
The first part of this "chapter" or "verse" seems like your basic common sense admonition and something that was expanded on greatly with the Buddha: The way to go in Life is relatively straightforward but people loves them some distractions and fixations. There is treachery in getting distracted from one's main path and all that.
It can be argued that this preference for distraction has never ever been more true or pervasive than at this time in America.
Americans are gorged on material goods and addicted to oil. They are bathed in non-stop, high-powered propaganda, both military and corporate. They hold many false beliefs and act upon them which results in the mindless consumption of unnecessary items.
They are ending up in debt up to their eyeballs yet think of themselves as the free-est people ever.
The current American "way of life" is built on consumption of goods and services, credit, and an addiction to oil - cheap powerful energy that is now only going to be come and more expensive and which has prompted the invasion of Iraq by America to ensure stability of supply. America can afford neither oil addiction nor war.
Americans, by and large, are caught up in a system that encourages them to spend themselves deep into debt getting all sorts of things that placate them. They are trapped and most aren't really aware of it yet.
This American Consumer society cannot be sustained, as is being evidenced by the mortgage/credit meltdown and economic recession, and is also being sucked dry, primarily by war and "military spending" on other things. Your Tax Dollars.
And it's all crashing down now, which brings me to the second part of the verse.
Most Americans are indebted to the Robber Barons; glorified indentured servants who can pay their bills on time or risk being flushed out of society like toilet water. Lots of Americans are about to be flushed too.
The Military Industrial Complex famously described by President Eisenhower in a televised address to the nation in 1961 is what is making the robber barons of the 21st Century so vastly wealthy and powerful.
Imagine a President going on TV today to denounce the Military Industrial Complex the way Eisenhower did. It's an outrageous thought, right? The current Presidential candidates are not about to do this.
A generation before Eisenhower was General Smedley Butler, career Marine who sharply denounced war as a racket and warned of what Eisenhower warned of:
"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small 'inside' group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."
Today's Robber Barons are far wealthier and more powerful than the Robber Barons of Lao Tzu's time. They are far more powerful and global than Eisenhower may have imagined, yet both men would immediately recognize the dynamics.
Carrying a lot more than sharp swords
Chalmers Johnson presents some of the most recent and detailed descriptions of how the MIC is draining America dry.
The Pentagon Strangles Our Economy: Why the U.S. Has Gone Broke
It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.
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By 1990 the value of the weapons, equipment and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83% of the value of all plants and equipment in U.S. manufacturing. From 1947 to 1990, the combined U.S. military budgets amounted to $8.7 trillion. Even though the Soviet Union no longer exists, U.S. reliance on military Keynesianism has, if anything, ratcheted up, thanks to the massive vested interests that have become entrenched around the military establishment. Over time, a commitment to both guns and butter has proven an unstable configuration. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses. Devotion to military Keynesianism is a form of slow economic suicide.
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On 7 November 2007, the U.S. Treasury announced that the national debt had breached $9 trillion for the first time. This was just five weeks after Congress raised the "debt ceiling" to $9.815 trillion. If you begin in 1789, at the moment the constitution became the supreme law of the land, the debt accumulated by the federal government did not top $1 trillion until 1981. When George Bush became president in January 2001, it stood at approximately $5.7 trillion. Since then, it has increased by 45%. This huge debt can be largely explained by our defense expenditures.
Nick Turse fleshes Mr. Johnson's data out and makes it familiar. He names names.
At the time of Eisenhower’s farewell address, New York Times reporter Jack Raymond noted that the Pentagon was spending "$23,000,000,000 a year for services and procurement of guns, missiles, airplanes, electronic devices, vehicles, tanks, ammunition, clothing and other military goods." Today, that would equal around $200 billion. In 2007, the Department of Defense’s stated budget was $439 billion. Counting the costs of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number jumps to over $600 billion. Factoring in all the many related activities carried out by other agencies, actual U.S. national security spending is nearly $1 trillion per year.
Back in Eisenhower’s day, arms dealers and mega-corporations, such as Lockheed and General Motors, held sway over the corporate side of the military-industrial complex. Companies like these still play an extremely powerful role today, but they are dwarfed by the sheer number of contractors that stretch from coast to coast and across the globe. Looking at the situation in 1970, almost 10 years after Eisenhower’s farewell speech, Sidney Lens, a journalist and expert on U.S. militarism, noted that there were 22,000 prime contractors doing business with the U.S. Department of Defense. Today, the number of prime contractors tops 47,000 with subcontractors reaching well over the 100,000 mark, making for one massive conglomerate touching nearly every sector of society, from top computer manufacturer Dell (the 50th-largest DoD contractor in 2006) to oil giant ExxonMobil (the 30th) to package-shipping titan FedEx (the 26th).
In fact, the Pentagon payroll is a veritable who’s who of the top companies in the world: IBM; Time-Warner; Ford and General Motors; Microsoft; NBC and its parent company, General Electric; Hilton and Marriott; Columbia TriStar Films and its parent company, Sony; Pfizer; Sara Lee; Procter & Gamble; M&M Mars and Hershey; Nestlé; ESPN and its parent company, Walt Disney; Bank of America; and Johnson & Johnson among many other big-name firms. But the difference between now and then isn’t only in scale. As this list suggests, Pentagon spending is reaching into previously neglected areas of American life: entertainment, popular consumer brands, sports. This penetration translates into a remarkable variety of forms of interaction with the public.
Mr. Turse's article is lengthy and detailed and does name many names and how they are contracted with the DoD or Pentagon. Every brand name you can think of is contracted in some way with them.
While I do think some of it goes overboard in terms of what is purchased (sunglasses, for example: The Soldiers need sunglasses from somewhere...) but even that triviality underscores the message. It's like a virus that has invaded every last corner of the Consumer Society. There appears to be no escaping it. It is absolutely everywhere.
The purpose of all this is to perpetuate the scam, of course. To maintain the profiteering of the tiny few, the war scam has to be sold, repeatedly, to the masses and this has been done with amazing effectiveness.
The peaceful coexistence of humankind is the end of robber baron profiteering and the beginning of real justice - and that, of course, is simply out of the question.