1/10 If the Pentagon Budget were a country it would rank 20th in terms of world GDP, right behind Saudi Arabia and ahead of Switzerland and 191 other countries. worldpopulationreview.com/countries/coun…
2/10 Focusing on the connections between the latest Def Sect nominee and military contractors misses the forest for the trees. The US has had a political economy of war since 1950, with bases and military contractors in every one of 435 Congressional districts.
3/10 Any serious discussion about ending US militarism, as @mbrenes1 new book shows, must envision a reorganization of the US economy, and not just an end to Forever War, overseas base closures or troop redeployments. umasspress.com/9781625345219/…
4/10 Even otherwise laudable efforts by @QuincyInst and others to urge a more progressive foreign policy for the incoming Biden Admin have almost nothing to say about how the US might dramatically reduce military spending and the implications of doing so. quincyinst.org/wp-content/upl…
5/10 Reducing military spending means far more than simply shifting funds to better priorities. It means rewiring the US economy so that the Pentagon is not the chief source of R&D, relieving hundreds of communities and millions of people of dependence on military spending.
6/10 As the Cold War ended in the early 1990s progressive groups like @PeaceAction and scholars proposed blueprints for a "peace dividend" and a conversion economy. Serious conversion proposals are needed today more than ever. Who is producing them?prospect.org/culture/books/…
7/10 Proposals for dismantling the US war economy would require thinking clearly about how to build political support in hundreds of communities around the country for shuttering or converting thousands of defense contractors for non-military purposes. What would this look like?
8/10 The US economy and foreign policy are both in crisis, and Congressional leaders such as @RepBarbaraLee understand the need for dramatic change. But proposals for dramatically restructuring the US war economy require a level of sophisticated planning we have yet to see.
9/10 It seems to me that any vision for dismantling the US war economy must center on an ambitious global Green New Deal, the only conceivable vehicle for technological, industrial, ideological and *political* conversion of both the US economy and foreign policy.
10/10 This sort of planning requires, I imagine, systems level planning on the order of the Gar Alperowitz's old Future of Capitalism initiative, doubly more complicated now that so many information, AI, and other technologies and firms are so integrated with military spending.
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