IMAGINE a conveyor belt in a First World factory. Not a lot of people work there because it’s mostly automated and the parts assembled there are outsourced to cheap foreign labor. The factory itself may be in another country than the one that owns it.

It manufactures things; cars, say, that are the cutting edge of technology, slick, appealing, durable, efficient and made to last… sort of.

Cars are “Good for the Economy” because people borrow money to buy them under the “Second Most Valuable investment you will make outside of your house” paradigm.
People therefore compete for them, value them highly in terms of price (in the past, size mattered) and they are profitable to everyone from factory to dealerships across the nation, from maintenance and repair shops to second-hand car sales, they are part of the moving economy.

In the Capitalist paradigm (that’s the way it is), however, there’s a little cheating. There’s what’s known as ‘built-in obsolescence” in that these cars wear out sooner than they could.

   Some of Henry Ford’s Model T’s are still around and running and can be maintained by the average DIY-er. So what’s the deal here?

Well, there is a public relations or opinion-shaping campaign that has lasted from the last boom time, the ‘Swinging Sixties’ when a new car every year was almost a necessity in order to stay inside the “you have to keep up with the Joneses because that’s the way it is paradigm” which includes the fine print that said, “they only last five or six years and then they’re clunkers anyway”.

Is that a flaw (and possibly a deliberate one) in an industry that can’t make cars to last longer than a Model ‘T’ Ford?

Now imagine another factory with lots of people employed, not only in the factory, but in all the stages of its product’s use, from manufacture to maintenance… but without the second-hand aspect because there is no market for second-hand armed, High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles.

Facing a tight withdrawal deadline and tough terrain, the U.S. militaryhas destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment as it rushes to wind down its role in the Afghanistan war by the end of 2014.

The massive disposal effort, which U.S. military officials call unprecedented, has unfolded largely out of sight amid an ongoing debate inside the Pentagon about what to do with the heaps of equipment that won’t be returning home. Military planners have determined that they will not ship back more than $7 billion worth of equipment — about 20 percent of what the U.S. military has in Afghanistan — because it is no longer needed or would be too costly to ship back home – unless you hired U.S. jobless at minimum wages? – T.D.

Now, the Humvees this factory makes are not made to last, because they probably won’t make it past a few weeks or months where their intended use is and the ruling ‘insider’ paradigm is, if it has a flat tire or breaks down, “leave it on the side of the road or maybe even destroy it, because it’s “not going back home anyway”
I use the word intended, because the word sums up the basic nature of Capitalism: As much profit by whatever means, using the cheapest resources, including human resources, also known as ‘collateral’.

Collateral is an asset you put up against a loan – you cannot borrow money to run a war without the people, the collateral assets with which to play that game of profit “by instant obsolescence” in which all assets are by definition, created, manufactured or hired to be destroyed, including people aka ‘collateral assets’ usually from ‘friendly fire’.

War is the logical conclusion to the Capitalist paradigm, which is why banks are quite happy to lend money to all sides in war – and today, “that’s just the way it is, folks” – Tom Dennen

Now read on…

From “Common Dreams”

‘Shock Doctrine’ Americana: Endless War as the Ultimate Business Model

Disaster Capitalism on the battlefield and in the boardroom

by William Astore

There is a new normal in America: our government may shut down, but our wars continue. Congress may not be able to pass a budget, but the U.S. military can still launch commando raids in Libya and Somalia, the Afghan War can still be prosecuted, Italy can be garrisoned by American troops (putting the “empire” back in Rome), Africa can be used as an imperial playground (as in the late nineteenth century “scramble for Africa,” but with the U.S. and China doing the scrambling this time around), and the military-industrial complex can still dominate the world’s arms trade.

In the halls of Congress and the Pentagon, it’s business as usual, if your definition of “business” is the power and profits you get from constantly preparing for and prosecuting wars around the world. “War is a racket,” General Smedley Butler famously declared in 1935, and even now it’s hard to disagree with a man who had two Congressional Medals of Honor to his credit and was intimately familiar with American imperialism.

War Is Politics, Right?

Once upon a time, as a serving officer in the U.S. Air Force, I was taught that Carl von Clausewitz had defined war as a continuation of politics by other means. This definition is, in fact, a simplification of his classic and complex book, On War, written after his experiences fighting Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.

The idea of war as a continuation of politics is both moderately interesting and dangerously misleading: interesting because it connects war to political processes and suggests that they should be fought for political goals; misleading because it suggests that war is essentially rational and so controllable. The fault here is not Clausewitz’s, but the American military’s for misreading and oversimplifying him.

Perhaps another “Carl” might lend a hand when it comes to helping Americans understand what war is really all about. I’m referring to Karl Marx, who admired Clausewitz, notably for his idea that combat is to war what a cash payment is to commerce. However seldom combat (or such payments) may happen, they are the culmination and so the ultimate arbiters of the process.

War, in other words, is settled by killing, a bloody transaction that echoes the exploitative exchanges of capitalism. Marx found this idea to be both suggestive and pregnant with meaning. So should we all.

Following Marx, Americans ought to think about war not just as an extreme exercise of politics, but also as a continuation of exploitative commerce by other means. read more about Combat as Commerce here: there’s more to that than simple alliteration, folks… it’s the New Paradigm.