Until we start manufacturing something that's not WAR/GUNS - things ain't gonna turn around.

[kpete]

Casual Observation
by BooMan
Wed Jan 30th, 2013 at 01:24:09 PM EST

The last quarter saw a 22% reduction in defense spending, which is the largest quarterly drop since 1972, during the wind-down of the Vietnam War. That, combined with mayhem caused by Superstorm Sandy, caused the economy to contract at a 0.1 annual rate. Basically, the Bush wars have been serving as a form of economic stimulus. Massive government spending on war has kept people employed. This is nothing new. The economies in England and the U.S. contracted when World War Two ended. And then they took off.

Anyone who is complaining about a disappointing fourth quarter should ask themselves if they want to live in a country where economic growth is dependent on a permanent state of war.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-30/economy-in-u-s-unexpectedly-shrinks-as-defense-spending-plunges.html
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/1/30/13249/4228

[rocktivity]

1. As long as war is more profitable than peace, debt is more profitable than solvency

petroleum is more profitable than non-petroleum, and non-environmentalism is more profitable than environmentalism, there's no incentive for the people profiting from them to turn things around.


rocktivity

[Fight2Win]

4. we the people have to work for peace, for free

"They got folks out there working for war"

One way to start would be to expose that the government is giving 60 % of our tax dollars to the Pentagon with no accountability.

We need to expose and end that shit, stop accepting such brazen arrogance of our rulers.

[freshwest]

2. That expertise can be turned towards green energy. climate migation and space exploration.

There are a lot of similarities of things on the technical side. Less high-tech things such as organizational skills, manpower and teaching - can be used for building physical and social infrastructure.

Obama has been thwarted by every forthright attempt to do this - but the MIC can see the writing on the wall. The world - and more importantly those Americans who did not vote for Romney and his already planned wars- are against continuing 'business as usual.'

It's time.

[cthulu2016]

3. Mostly agree, but there's a difference between defense spending and war

They are correlative, of course. In a war defense spending goes up.

And having a huge military is an attractive nuisance... it makes people likelier to get into wars.

Defense spending itself, however, is government employment and government purchasing. We cannot blithely cut the dollars in that spending. We can, and should, shift it to something more useful.

Funny thing... World War II would have been just as stimulative in ending the Great Depression if we had simply decided to draft everyone and pay them to listen to radio shows instead of killing folks, and built all those tanks and planes and ships, and then dropped them in the ocean.

It wasn't the killing that made WWII a full-employment event. It was the spending.

[Initech]

5. Which is exactly why the war machine is beating the drums for Iran.