Surviving Capitalism (Not) : A Family Business of Perpetual War

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, March 21, 2015

A Family Business of Perpetual War

Click here to access article by Robert Parry from ConsortiumNews.

Neoconservative pundit Robert Kagan and his wife, Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, run a remarkable family business: she has sparked a hot war in Ukraine and helped launch Cold War II with Russia – and he steps in to demand that Congress jack up military spending so America can meet these new security threats.

This extraordinary husband-and-wife duo makes quite a one-two punch for the Military-Industrial Complex, an inside-outside team that creates the need for more military spending, applies political pressure to ensure higher appropriations, and watches as thankful weapons manufacturers lavish grants on like-minded hawkish Washington think tanks.

However, I think that Parry puts much too much emphasis on these individual actors at the expense of a deeper analysis to reveal that what is happening is a class war between an advanced capitalist class that looks to imperialism to solve its inherent problems of debt and economic stagnation and a working class that is deceived by this ruling class into passivity toward their imperialist adventures.

Yet, if it weren’t for Nuland’s efforts as Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, the Ukraine crisis might not exist.

Do you really think that removing this "family business" would really change anything? Still, Zionist influence does help to see this how this faction's influence does magnify the huge problem of the Empire's trajectory toward conflicts that could easily result in a nuclear war.

To his credit Parry concludes his essay with a more balanced statement:

To be fair, the Nuland-Kagan mom-and-pop shop is really only a microcosm of how the Military-Industrial Complex has worked for decades: think-tank analysts generate the reasons for military spending, the government bureaucrats implement the necessary war policies, and the military contractors make lots of money before kicking back some to the think tanks — so the bloody but profitable cycle can spin again.

The only thing that makes the Nuland-Kagan operation special perhaps is that the whole process is all in the family.