military inc.
- June 21st, 2007
- Posted in Books . Politics
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So another book has been written about the army. Its the first study of the various profitable corporations that the Pakistan Army runs. The last I can see is that the book was banned and taken off the shelves, its launching ceremony was cancelled and all other hotels and auditoriums in Islamabad refused to allow the book launch because “the authorities” told them to. Please go out and buy the book. If you don’t wish to, you can download it here. The book was shared by the author to get her version of the truth to you, but please encourage her efforts. What is the scale of the corporate interests of the Pakistan Military? Is the Pakistan military the only one in the world that indulges in what author Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa calls “Milbus†– A “Military Business”? What are the implications of the military economy for Pakistan as a whole including its political and social costs?
Though in his day Eisenhower wasn’t generally regarded as a Rocket Scientist, in 1961, when his 8-year presidency ended, he made a televised farewell speech to the nation in which he identified the single thing he believed boded worst for the nation’s future, and he coined the term for it: The military-industrial complex.
So this may be new bad news for Pakistan and its military, but this is 50-year-old news for the USA and its military’s ongoing in-bed relationship with private mega-corporations.
Colonels, generals and admirals who had been overseeing mega-billion industrial contracts for tanks, subs, missiles, helicopters, etc., retire and immediately go to work for the very companies whose need for greed, the year before, they had been protecting the military and taxpayers from. There are federal laws to prohibit this “revolving door” behavior, but they’re wimpy laws “more honored in the breach than in the observance.” Essentially the retired brass just changes into a civilian suit.
I suppose economists can take a broader view that any booming, profit-making sector of any economy is Good, it generates jobs (reduces unemployment), spreads wages and prosperity around, Everybody Happy — even though the loading docks are shipping missiles, land mines, artillery, smallarms, rather than housing, food or medicine.
My town’s biggest employer is a top-tier women’s college. My town’s second-biggest employer is Kollmorgen, which manufactures pericopes for submarines and tanks. The college has its ups and downs, but whenever Peace Breaks Out somewhere, or War breaks out — this happened in the Falklands — big military contracts get suddenly cancelled and Kollmorgen has massive layoffs and the whole town gets economically ill and unhappy.
Milbus or the Military Industrial Complex, there’s a fundamental artificiality and fragility to designing an economy around it. Nobody NEEDS this stuff the way everybody needs food, healthcare, housing, clothes, schools. But whenever Milbus booms, all these other Need Sectors get robbed and enfeebled. The whole society is educated decade after decade to respect these bizarre priorities and support taxation policies to keep the national economy on a perpetual war footing.
Uhh thanks for the headsup! Do you think I can buy this in physical booksore form in North Am?
Oh PS — u said your brother is a BOINC/Distributed Computing Stats Freakazoid … I still ain’t bought my new pewter … ask him what Hardware bells and whistles an obsessive Overclocker should cram into a new Dell, what the hot CPU chip is, etc.
i did the cover, baby! yeah!
wow.. thanks for the e-book. have alreayd heard quite a lot about the book