The Cold War? Child’s play compared to what lies ahead, according to U.S. historian Robert Kagan. Trump, he says, is leading the world into the most dangerous era since 1945.
The Cold War? Child’s play compared to what lies ahead, according to U.S. historian Robert Kagan. Trump, he says, is leading the world into the most dangerous era since 1945.
We get the bill. We don’t get lower gas prices from Iraq. We don’t get free bananas either, the companies get to make money on selling the bananas.
None of or foreign wars have helped American taxpayers in any real way while costing fortunes. That’s just beyond dispute, hundreds of billions of dollars, or more, in afghanistan and Iraq. No benefit from Vietnam, no real benefit from the cold war coups in latin america.
Big business made money, getting markets, that they sell here at the highest price they can get for it.
In your analysis, do you bother looking at the working and living conditions of the western countries versus the global south, or are you just looking at the wars themselves and only from the perspective of taxes? How do you think the inequity of those conditions are maintained?
You’re denying the thing by only looking at part of the thing. Obviously the capitalists aren’t doing any of this for the public good. Capitalism needs a consumer class. That class resides within the imperial core. But for instance, the idea that making the #1 and #2 largest OPEC countries US vassal states has nothing to do with energy prices is just goofy.
I would add that the high standard of living being taken away for the last half century had nothing to do with imperialism, it triumphed despite imperialism, that standard of living was from Organized Labor, and from the New Deal and the Great War that allowed the government to put the bosses on their back foot, to make them pay progressively more taxes after obscene amounts, for taxes to be paid by corporations more than personal taxes. The top rate for income was 90% after they got a large amount at lower rates.
And the new deal put checks on business, it prevented the banks from systematically cheating everyone. Preventing them operating in more than 3 states, keeping them small, seperated commerical and investment banking, and made a writer of a security hold a percent of that until maturity, making sure they wrote good loans and didn’t write bad ones, fob them on investors.
Preventing the rich from being super rich and becoming too powerful is one big deciding factor in standard of living. Labor, and the New Deal, is what led to high wages, in spite of the cold war, not because of it. And that cold war hurt us, it didn’t help us, in every way you look at it.
I wish I didn’t just read all of that to get to the end and you just brush off the argument completely.
Was that line a troll? After literally not looking at it at all, you say that? And I guess we’re talking about the cold war, and not imperialism now?
Here’s my question in response to all of that: Why did the US get the New Deal and not the Jakarta Method?
Not at all, looking at the totality of these things it’s even worse for working people, as it gives power to illiberal forces in society, it creates killers that can be used to assassinate civil society leaders, most of all it enriches and makes powerful the oligarchs that are subverting our governments, using corrupt influence to exloit us, moreso than already, and to crush dissent and organized labor and the like.
The more you step back, the more the accounting shows a deficit for working people on all scores.
You are again shifting the argument from the existence of a labor aristocracy. If you want to defend the concept of the imperial boomerang, go find someone who is disputing it.