No subject

the military, more than half of this under the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations - the period during which the [Pentagon-dominated] state
management was established as a formal institution. This sum of staggering
size (try to visualize a billion of something) does not express the cost of
the military establishment to the nation as a whole. The true cost is
measured by what has been foregone, by the accumulated deterioration in many
facets of life by the inability to alleviate human wretchedness of long
duration. 

In an important exegesis on Melman's relevance to the current American
economic situation, Thomas Woods writes: 

According to the US Department of Defense, during the four decades from 1947
through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion in capital resources.
In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the value of the nation's
plant and equipment, and infrastructure, at just over $7.29 trillion. In
other words, the amount spent over that period could have doubled the
American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.

The fact that we did not modernize or replace our capital assets is one of
the main reasons why, by the turn of the 21st century, our manufacturing
base had all but evaporated. Machine tools - an industry on which Melman was
an authority - are a particularly important symptom. 

In November 1968, a five-year inventory disclosed (page 186) "that 64% of
the metalworking machine tools used in US industry were 10 years old or
older. The age of this industrial equipment (drills, lathes, etc.) marks the
United States' machine tool stock as the oldest among all major industrial
nations, and it marks the continuation of a deterioration process that began
with the end of World War II. This deterioration at the base of the
industrial system certifies to the continuous debilitating and depleting
effect that the military use of capital and research and development talent
has had on American industry. 

Nothing has been done in the period since 1968 to reverse these trends and
it shows today in our massive imports of equipment - from medical machines
like proton accelerators for radiological therapy (made primarily in
Belgium, Germany and Japan) to cars and trucks. 

Our short tenure as the world's "lone superpower" has come to an end. As
Harvard economics professor Benjamin Friedman has written: 

Again and again it has always been the world's leading lending country that
has been the premier country in terms of political influence, diplomatic
influence, and cultural influence. It's no accident that we took over the
role from the British at the same time that we took over ... the job of
being the world's leading lending country. Today we are no longer the
world's leading lending country. In fact we are now the world's biggest
debtor country, and we are continuing to wield influence on the basis of
military prowess alone.

Some of the damage done can never be rectified. There are, however, some
steps that this country urgently needs to take. These include reversing
Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthy, beginning to liquidate our
global empire of over 800 military bases, cutting from the defense budget
all projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the
United States, and ceasing to use the defense budget as a Keynesian jobs
program. If we do these things we have a chance of squeaking by. If we
don't, we face probable national insolvency and a long depression. 

Chalmers Johnson is the author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic, just published in paperback. It is the final volume of his
Blowback Trilogy, which also includes Blowback (2000) and The Sorrows of
Empire (2004). 

(For those interested, click www.tomdispatch.com/p/chalmers_video to view a
clip from a new film, Chalmers Johnson on American Hegemony, in Cinema Libre
Studios' Speaking Freely series in which he discusses "military
Keynesianism" and imperial bankruptcy.)