The Peace Economy

America has the largest war economy in the history of the world. After being warned by the outgoing Pres. Eisenhower about the dangers of allowing the military to permanently join forces with corporations, we went ahead and plunged into just that scenario. As a result, we have remained on a war footing since the day after Pearl Harbor, some 64 years ago.

Two generations of Americans have forgotten that it's normal to be at peace and abnormal to keep a huge standing army at the ready. The main reason for this is economic. War has always been good business. So there's zero chance of dismantling the military-industrial complex until peace is good business, too. Fortunately, it already is. The U.S. exports entertainment to the world, we dominate in software and information technologies, we retain an edge in construction, scientific R and D, higher education, medicine, banking, communications, and advertising. But for how long?

These are all "soft" alternatives to our other great exports, aerospace technologies, weapons, foreign military bases, and war itself. Since 1960 the U.S. has adapted to losing its smokestack industries (primarily steel), its energy base (oil), and now its large-scale manufacturing (automobiles). Change is hard, but if we can adapt to those things, we can adapt to becoming a global "soft" economy.

Peace is soft. It doesn't hide in fear behind borders. It accepts influences from outside. It makes friends of foreigners. GM knows that it can't survive without making cars in China, so that step has been taken. The oil industry realized that it had to concede the lion's share of energy revenues to Middle Eastern regimes (unthinkable at the end of World War II), so that has happened as well.

The economics of peace consists in giving the military-industrial complex a new role. Step by step the military boondoggle must be diverted into such peaceful uses as rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, funding a future for the poor, providing meaningful jobs for the elderly after they retire, and feeding the world. The Soviet Union had such a devastated infrastructure that it was like a Third World country with a space program. We are well on the way to becoming a military empire with impoverished masses at home.

The right-wing cant about free markets is a sham. Free-market forces didn't operate in the build-up of the military-industrial complex. It's completely subsidized and planned by the government. So don't buy into the argument that the free market won't support peace. We could pay arms makers to send every worker to Africa to fight AIDS. Such a project would be just as subsidized as atom bombs but far more humane. We could feed the Third World and hire every person back to make goods for us. We could explore for oil in every corner of the globe with a tenth of our current expenditures on advanced Stealth fighters, missiles, and future technologies of mechanized death.

We don't lack imagination. Peaceful projects seem unworkable because we are addicted to a way of life funded by the military and their corporate partners. But the economics of peace works (look at the totally unmilitary economies of Japan and Scandinavia, for example) if only we have the will to try.

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