The U.S. imperial triangle and military spending

Monthly Review

Volumn 60, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 1-19

  Foster, John Bellamy ^a   Holleman, Hannah ^a   McChesney, Robert W ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 54849412161     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-060-05-2008-09_1     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Office of Management and Budget, Budget for Fiscal Year, 2009, Historical Tables, Table 3.2;
2. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 2008: Summary, http://yearbook2008.sipri.org/files/SIPRIYB08summary.pdf, 10-11;
3. SIPRI, Military Expenditure Database (United States), http://milexdata.sipri.org/result.php4. SIPRI data on U.S. military expenditures (drawn on here for estimates of increases in real military spending and for international comparison) are only marginally (about 5 percent) higher than the acknowledged national defense figures contained in the Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables, and are clearly based on these. While the Office of Management and Budget lists $552.6 billion in total national defense for the United States spending in 2007, SIPRI provides a figure of $578.3 billion. It should be noted that SIPRI data, athough based on the same or similar nominal figures as the acknowledged U.S. national defense spending, registers a higher rate of increase in U.S. military expenditures than "reported in official U.S. data because of the method of conversion into constant dollars. While SIPRI uses the consumer price index (CPI) for price conversion for all countries, the US official figures are converted using military-specific deflators. Thus, the SIPRI data show the trend in the purchasing power of the military budget had it instead been spent on typical consumer goods and services, while the US official data show the trend in its purchasing power for military goods and services. The nominal change is the same for the two series." SIPRI Yearbook, 2007, 275.
4. Michal Kalecki, The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 96.
5. Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War, and Global Supremacy (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 57-59.
6. C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 198. It should be noted that Hobsbawm is not alone in promoting what can be called the "cabal theory."
7. See the discussion of this in John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 13, 18, 107-08, 117-20.
8. "WPB Aide Urges U.S. to Keep War Set-Up," New York Times; January 20, 1944;
9. Charles E. Wilson, "For the Common Defense," Army Ordnance 26, no. 143 (March-April 1944): 285-88;
10. Fred J. Cook, "Juggernaut: The Warfare State," special issue, The Nation, October 28, 1961, 285;
11. Johnathan Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 149-50.
12. Charles E. (General Electric) Wilson did not literally use the term "permanent war economy," widely attributed to his January 19, 1944, speech. Rather, he spoke, of a "program of industrial preparedness" for war that would be "permanent and continuing." On the end of the Second World War and military spending
13. see Robert L. Heilbroner, The Making of Economic Society (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), 160.
14. Joan Robinson, Contributions to Modern Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 8-9.
15. For an account of the role of military Keynesianism in successive U.S. administrations see Lynn Turgeon, Bastard Keynesianism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996).
16. Kalecki, Lost Phase, 75-83, 95-97;
17. Kalecki's analysis of military spending derived originally from his analysis of the importance of armament expenditures in Nazi Germany's economy and then the basic argument was extended to the role military spending was to play in post-Second World War capitalist economies.
18. Ibid.; Cook, "Juggernaut," 292.
19. Kalecki, Lost Phase, 97;
20. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 185.
21. These five reasons, presented in essentially this order, were provided by Baran and Sweezy to account for the growth of militarism in their classic chapter on "Militarism and Imperialism" in Monopoly Capital (New York Monthly Review Press, 1966), 178-217. It is worth noting that their argument was geared primarily to military spending for empire and turned to its macroeconomic benefits in absorbing surplus and staving off long-run stagnation only at the end. The same structure to the argument on military spending (empire first, economy second) can be seen in Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 198-212. Hence, critics, such as Larry Griffin, Joel Devine, and Michael Wallace, who later attempted empirically to test the Monopoly Capital argument, which they characterized as a "'naive' model...which suggests that the degree to which national output is absorbed by military spending should be dependent on aggregate economic conditions such as unemployment," were clearly attacking a "naive model" of their own devising. Ironically, after rejecting this naive model, these same authors ended up concluding that in the face of declining monopoly profits the U.S. state intervenes to absorb surplus through increases in military expenditures - a view much closer to Baran and Sweezy's own argument, but lacking its emphasis on empire over macro-economics.
22. See Larry J. Griffin, Joel A. Devine, and Michael Wallace, "Monopoly Capital, Organized Labor, and Military Expenditures in the United States, 1949-1976," American Journal of Sociology 88 supplement (1982): S113-S153.
23. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 159, 161, 177, 208-11. Baran and Sweezy's contention more than four decades ago that civilian government purchases had about reached their outer limit as a percentage of GDP by 1939 was to be borne out in subsequent developments. In 1939 civilian government purchases were B percent of GDP; from 1960 to the present they have averaged 14 percent of GDP (and were also 14 percent in 2006). Economic Report of the President, 2008, 224, 250.
24. The foregoing quotes from Slichter, Luce, U.S. News and World Report, Lawrence, and Harris are all taken from Cook, "Juggernaut, " 285, 300-01.
25. See also Fred H. Cook, The Warfare State (New York: Collier Books, 1962);
26. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 207-13
27. U.S. National Security Council, NSC-68, April 1950, "Section D: The Remaining Course of Action," http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsc-hst/nsc-68. htm;
28. James M. Cypher, "The Basic Economics of 'Rearming America,'" Monthly Review 33, no. 6 (November 1981): 12-13;
29. Noam Chomsky, "The Cold War and the Superpowers," Monthly Review 33, no. 5 (November 1981): 4-5.
30. Charles Erwin Wilson quoted in Cook, "Juggernaut," 277, 299.
31. Eisenhower, quoted in Cook, "Juggernaut," 276-79.
32. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 205.
33. The classic argument on how nuclear weapons were continually used by the United States as direct threats to achieve its ends was made by Daniel Ellsberg, "Call to Mutiny," in E. P. Thompson and Dan Smith, ed., Protest and Survive (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), i-xxviii.
34. Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York Random House, 2005), 3.
35. Jurgen Brauer, "United States Military Expenditure," in Wolfram Elsner, ed., Arms, War, and Terrorism in the Global Economy Today (Hamburg: LIT Verlag, 2007), 61-66.
36. The design format of this table was adapted from Cypher, "Basic Economics of 'Rearming America.'"
37. Benjamin A. Mandel and Mary L. Roy, "Federal Budget Estimates for Fiscal Year 2007," Survey of Current Business (Bureau of Economic Analysis), March 2006, 13.
38. Jurgen Brauer, "Data, Models, Coefficients: The Case of United States Military Expenditure," Conflict Management and Peace Science 24 (2007), 58;
39. also Brauer, "United States Military Expenditures," 67.
40. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook, 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 365;
41. Brauer, "United States Military Expenditure," 66, and "Data, Models, Coefficients," 56. Note: We have not included Homeland Security in our figures, in line with SIPRI and NATO's exclusion of civil defense programs.
42. SIPRI Yearbook 2008: Summary, 10-11.
43. James Cypher, "From Military Keynesianism to Global Neoliberal Militarism," Monthly Review 59, no. 2 (June 2007): 45-48;
44. Chalmers Johnson, "Why the U.S. Has Really Gone Broke," Le Monde Diplomatique, February 2008.
45. The complete set of data is not provided in this article, but follows the above method throughout.
46. For this general argument see Foster, Naked Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), especially 107-20.
47. Foster, Naked Imperialism, 55-66;
48. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2004), 151-85.
49. The military resurgence after periods of relative decline arose in both cases at the tail end of Democratic administrations: Carter in the late 1970s and Clinton in the late 1990s, and gathered momentum in the Republican administrations that followed: Reagan in the 1980s and George W. Bush at the beginning of the 2000s.
50. Robert W. McChesney, The Political Economy of the Media (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008), 105, 108.
51. Norman Soloman, "The Military-Industrial-Media Complex," Extra, July-August 2005, http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627.
52. Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 213-17.
53. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, "Preface," in Foster and McChesney, ed., Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 7-10;
54. McChesney, Political Economy of the Media, 491-500.