06.06.11
The war boom was very good for them
UPDATED
A web article here showed census results on the five wealthiest counties in the US.
No surprise, the top three of the five were in northern Virginia, made so by the war and homeland security boom over the last ten years.
In recent decades northern Virginia has become an economic dynamo, driven by a private sector that feasts on government contracting. These counties are also home to corporate lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who work in or around the nation’s capital, soaking up federal government spending. And government-related hiring manages to keep the unemployment rate in places like Falls Church City down to 5.7%.
The places are Loudoun and Fairfax counties and the area around Falls Church.
Any place with a heavy concentration of military and security contracting has not suffered during the Great Recession.
San Diego, for example, has been largely spared much of the pain from the crash of 2008 do to the large amount of taxpayer dollars poured into military bases and the arms manufacturers and contractors in the region.
In a related piece, Kristof at the New York Times compared Pakistan’s priorities with those of the Tea Party in the US.
It’s an obvious picture — bloated military spending, state religiosity, abhorrence of homosexuality, very little taxation, little or no decent public education. And the right was probably howling about it all Sunday.
I’ve always made fun of these countries, but now I see echoes of that pattern of privatization of public services in America. Police budgets are being cut, but the wealthy take refuge in gated communities with private security guards. Their children are spared the impact of budget cuts at public schools and state universities because they attend private institutions.
Mass transit is underfinanced; after all, Mercedes-Benzes and private jets are much more practical, no?
“I sometimes see shiny tanks and fighter aircraft,” Kristof adds.
It’s not a coincidence that the “shiny tanks and fighter aircraft” of the pantywaist militaries of these nations are almost all American made.
It used to be the old Soviet Union that armed half of them. But our weapons shops and wars demonstrating the excellence of the goods drove them from the business. That was some progress,
From a scholarly paper a couple months ago, not specifically about the war boom riches but accurately describing the phenomenon in countries where inequality is entrenched:
Where growth is isolated and incomes are concentrated, those who are not directly involved do not benefit. On the contrary, growth necessarily entails environmental degradation and waste, and it is on the poor and the excluded that these burdens necessarily fall.
The spoils of growth — all concentrated in a few industries: financial, military, some but not all aspects of technology. Everything else is left to rot.
From yesterday:
” … [A] weird guilt-tripped reflexive genuflection to soldiering on holidays, remains.”
Today’s most noted D-day anniversary noted in the news: Pennsylvania’s odious ex-Senator, Rick Santorum, draping himself in war memory as he announces his GOP presidential aspiration.
This bit from Santorum a few months ago, after a rant about the creeping menace of sharia law to the American legal system, having to do with public schools being a socialist plot for brainwashing children into the liberal fold. Santorum home-schools his children which perhaps means only that they’ll be a bit more likely than not to be as stupid and nasty as he is someday:
“Just call them what they are. Public schools? That’s a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools,??? he said.
Santorum brought up the Head Start program, charging that the program is ineffective even as Democrats object strongly to congressional Republicans’ proposal to cut funding for it.
“They fund it more,??? he said of Democrats. “Why? Because it brings more children into their domain. It brings more children out of the household … Their agenda is to socialize your children with the thinking they want in those children’s minds.???
Santroum, who home-schools his own seven children, said he supports voucher programs that would allow parents to send their children to private schools.
D-day anniversary or not, Santorum would still be a joke candidate, an
unelectable pariah in any general election.
No amount of his quote about fighting to save America will erase this:
