Have you heard that war is good for the economy? Do you think that the people who repeat this propaganda phrase are lying to you in order to get you to support their war agenda? Me, too! Today on The Corbett Report podcast, let’s put this old, debunked economic argument to bed for good!
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TRANSCRIPT
JAMES CORBETT: Are you cowering in fear every time you go to fill up the gas tank?
Are you finding yourself cutting back and tightening your belt just to afford basic necessities?
In short: are you, like the majority of people right now, living paycheck to paycheck and struggling to make ends meet?
Well, don’t worry! President Donald Trump is here to announce that—due to the war in Iran and the attendant rise in oil prices—the economy is actually booming!
SHERILL HUBBARD: In a Truth Social post Thursday, President Donald Trump wrote, “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.”
DONALD TRUMP: No, I could just see the fake headlines. “President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump. That’ll be the headline. But I said, “I don’t give a damn. I’m going to say it.” We’re making a freaking fortune! Our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time.
Phew! I don’t know about you, but I was worried there for a moment. But hey, the man has a point. When oil prices go up, we make a lot of money!
I mean, you heard the man: we’re making a freaking fortune!
…But wait a second…
HUBBARD: “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” That was without explanation of who was meant by “we.”
Oof. You know you really stepped in it when the lying liars of the lapdog media are able to successfully call you out on your BS.
Yes, “Don’t worry, everybody! When oil prices go up, ‘we’ make a lot of money! When we run out of bombs and drones and need to buy more, ‘we’ make a lot of money! When we have to go into the country ‘we’ bombed to smithereens and reconstruct, ‘we’ make a lot of money! Yay!
But who is “we”?
And have you heard the phrase, “War is good for the economy”? Do you this there’s a similar trick going on with the deployment of that propaganda phrase? Yeah, so do I.
So, today on The Corbett Report, let’s put that myth to bed once and for all.
Are you ready? Let’s go.
CORBETT REPORT INTRO THEME
CORBETT: Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to The Corbett Report. I’m James Corbett of corbettreport.com, coming to you, as always, from the sunny climes of Western Japan, here in October of 2026, with Episode 510 of The Corbett Report podcast, “No, War is Not Good for the Economy.”
And stop me if you’ve heard that phrase before. “War is good for the economy, actually!” It seems like something that in 2026, we shouldn’t have to be continually dealing with. But here we are.
Yes, just when you think that old canard has finally been put to bed, here it is again, courtesy of our friends at that propaganda rag, The Wall Street Journal. Specifically, this article from Daniel Michaels and Tom Fairless, which came out just earlier this year: “Is War Good For the Economy? War is never a good thing—but it can reorient an economy in some positive ways”
Interesting hedging going on. So let’s see how they thread this needle, shall we?
That question might seem coldhearted. But as fuel prices soar and shipping bottlenecks create shortages in the near term, the long view shows something more positive: military spending can create jobs, spark new technologies and spur investment.
Hey guys, what the hell? I love war now!
Around the world, more countries are ramping up arms production and boosting investments in national security, if only to deter rivals. Those outlays promise to scramble government spending priorities and weigh on deficits and credit ratings.
And the article goes through how this is affecting Putin and Russia and Russia’s reorientation for the wartime economy.
Russia’s reorientation is extreme, but Moscow isn’t alone. From Washington and Ottawa to Europe and Japan, money is flowing into the apparatus of war and security on levels not seen in decades. Now, the consequences of war—shortages and inflation—loom for businesses and consumers globally.
To paraphrase Milton Friedman, we’re all wartime economies now.
Is that inherently bad? For Ukraine, Lebanon, Gaza and large parts of Russia, the result of conflict is horrific tallies of death, injury and loss. Iran now faces a painful recovery—whatever comes next—in a country already struggling under violent repression and economic collapse.
Further from the battlefield, though, the picture is less lopsided, particularly in Europe. For decades the continent minimized defense outlays, opting instead to fund lavish social-welfare programs and extensive public works. La dolce vita after the Cold War was sweet for some.
But economic growth also slowed sharply in Europe as military spending declined…
“Correlation is causation, I tells ya!”
…from 2 to 3% GDP growth in the 1980s and ’90s to around 1% in recent years.
Yes, we know exactly why, right?
Now European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization have pledged to spend 5% of gross domestic product on arms and security. That will require painful cuts in other spending, such as public healthcare, welfare and culture. But some economists see a silver lining—at least for business and jobs. Europe’s economy is languishing and its once-vibrant car industry is getting battered by Chinese competition. Military production can create jobs for laid-off auto workers and employ engineers who might otherwise design vehicles.
I have to laugh not to cry. This is so wretch inducing. I can barely get through it all.
I will, of course, provide the link in today’s hyperlinked transcript for today’s podcast so you can go and peruse this article to your heart’s content.
But yes, how sickening, how disgusting. Yes, bombs are dropping. Entire schools of schoolgirls are being slaughtered and destroyed. Blood is spilling. But, you know, “At least it’ll help save a few engineers at the car manufacturers who otherwise would be, I don’t know, designing vehicles! I mean, what’s with that? No, they could be manufacturing drones and tanks. Awesome, guys. War is good for the economy!”
I cannot believe that here we are in 2026 still dealing with the stupid canards of this phony and specious economic argument, specifically because that economic argument has been debunked over and over and over again for decades now.
Heck, I have a piece going back in my own archives 12 years debunking this economic illiteracy called, “No, WWII Did Not End The Great Depression.”
STEPHEN DAVIES: By definition, military production output is not real wealth. Wars destroy wealth rather than creating it.
In fact, if you look at the figures for American economic activity and you strip out the war effects, as people like Robert Higgs have shown, what you can only conclude is that in fact the Great Depression does not really end until 1947 or 1948, and that the war simply conceals or covers up the continuing low level of real wealth creating economic activity in the United States.
SOURCE: Top Three Myths about the Great Depression and the New Deal
CORBETT: The idea that the economic activity surrounding militarization represents a net economic gain is called the “broken window fallacy.” This fallacy was named and identified by French economist Frédéric Bastiat in his 1850 essay, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen,” in which he imagines the case of a shopkeeper whose careless son breaks a pane of glass in his shop window.
In Bastiat’s example, ‘that which is seen’ is that the glazier comes, performs the task of fixing the window, and receives six francs for his effort. Onlookers to the scene believe that the economy has actually been bolstered by this act of destruction, since six francs have been spent into it that otherwise would not have been.
But Bastiat notes that what is important is not what is seen, but what is not seen: “It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.”
Similarly, production for war is the broken window fallacy writ large. Economic “gains” produced by government spending on munitions and vehicle manufacture and supplying and equipping the troops are not gains at all; money has merely been diverted to the pockets of the defense contractors via the political cronies in their back pocket.
So why is this important? Because sadly, this myth is being played on by the warmongering class to once again push the idea that war is good and even necessary for economic progress. This time it is not just manufacture of supplies or munitions that are being touted, but war’s ability to justify government spending on investment. No matter how unlikely the threat, or whether it is indeed completely made up, this warped thinking holds that such lies and exaggerations are the answer to our current economic problems.
PAUL KRUGMAN: If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat, and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary uh place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, “Whoops! We made a mistake! There aren’t actually any space aliens—”
KENNETH ROGOFF: We need what Orson Welles, is what you’re saying.
KRUGMAN: No, that’s a that’s a—there was a Twilight Zone episode like this, in which scientists fake an alien threat in in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time we don’t need it—we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
CORBETT: That was a clip from “No, WWII Did Not End The Great Depression,” a presentation that I made in 2014. And if you found any value at all in that presentation, I would suggest you go back via the hyperlink in today’s transcript at corbettreport.com/wareconomy to that original report so that you can watch it in its entirety, where I go on to make some very specific economic points demonstrating that, no, World War II did not end the Great Depression.
But I hope that you get the core point, the core message there, namely the broken window fallacy.
Yes, hopefully you are familiar with the broken window fallacy and you know that it comes from the famous essay written by Frédéric Bastiat, the French economist there in the 19th century, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen,” in which he beautifully demonstrates the point that, no, you are not generating useful economic activity by going out and throwing rocks through a bunch of shopkeepers’ windows. All you’re accomplishing is taking money out of the shopkeepers’ pockets and putting it into the pockets of the glaziers who have to come along and fix those windows. But that is not a boon to the economy.
“Wow, you’re adding to the gross domestic product. You have increased economic activity!”
No. All you have done is transferred resources and wealth that could have been used for genuinely productive economic activity and put it in the hands of glaziers so they can fix what was previously not broken. And that’s what is not seen.
What people do not see is what those shopkeepers could have done with those resources had the windows not been broken. They could have invested it in capital. They could have invested it in the local economy through consumption, etc. It could have been used for something genuinely valuable, but no, no, it’s just being used to fix what was previously not broken. So it would be better if it wasn’t broken in the first place, right?
And I hope you can understand how this applies to the modern warfare paradigm. No, it is not generating useful, productive economic activity to go and bomb a country to smithereens and then pay the military industrial contractors to replenish stocks of missiles and drones or to pay some companies to go in and reconstruct the country that you’ve just bombed.
No, that is not useful economic activity. All you are doing is diverting money from, well, everyone in this case, to the “glaziers”—in this instance, the military industrial contractors.
So in order to understand, to demonstrate that point, to draw it out and its ramifications, I turn to my local friendly neighborhood retired economist, namely Ken Schoolland.
Hopefully you are familiar with Ken Schoolland because I have talked to him in the past. If not, I would suggest that you read The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, Schoolland’s book, which is a Gulliver’s Travels-like satire in which Schoolland demonstrates some of these economic points—like the broken window fallacy—in a series of snippets in this fictional journey of this fictional character in hopefully humorous, entertaining ways, but ways that make the economic point hit home. And so I will suggest that you read that book. I think it is worthy of your time and attention.
And while you’re on the subject, you can revisit my previous conversation with Ken Schoolland in which we talked about the origins of The Philosophy of Liberty. Of course, you know The Philosophy of Liberty at libertas.earth. There is a reason that that is the only thing that I link to on the sidebar of my website. It is because that short eight minute flash animation video is something that I think deserves to be seen by every human being on the planet. it. And as you will know from our previous conversation, Ken Schoolland was the author of the text that became the basis for that animation.
But once you’re caught up to speed with all of that, well, let’s listen to Ken Schoolland talking about the modern incarnation of this broken window fallacy in the fallacious economic reasoning of those who argue that war is good for the economy.
KEN SCHOOLLAND: I remember when 9-11 occurred—and you may have already talked about this with your audience—when 9-11 occurred, the Nobel economist Paul Krugman came out arguing, “Well, the silver lining behind the destruction of the World Trade Center is all the extra boon it is to the economy. Because now everyone will be spending money to replace all those buildings that were lost. And, oh, yeah, the lives were lost too, but we’ll have more money spent maybe on paying off insurance policies and whatever.”
And almost none of the free market economists could believe this is coming from the mouth of a Nobel laureate economist, who’s esteemed enough to be featured in newspapers and magazines all over the country.
But it is a common fallacy. Had the World Trade Center not been destroyed and then replaced with whatever else, it could have continued producing wealth as it was a home of so many businesses and investment companies and things that were producing wealth that was giving jobs and income to people in another way.
So, this is the fallacy: the idea that destruction is good for the economy only if you completely ignore opportunity costs.
CORBETT: You know, the broken window fallacy is so obvious once it is pointed out to you, and brilliantly so, as Bastiat does, that it really does raise the question: do you think Krugman is stupid enough to not understand that? Or do you think he is sociopathic enough to actually revel in the destruction of the economy?
SCHOOLLAND: I don’t know. I mean, it’s hard to say just stupid. But then again, I don’t think that it has to do with brilliance and stupidity. I think it has to do with philosophy.
You know, people say, “People should study more economics.” No, they need to study good economics. Logical, rational, productive free market economics. It doesn’t do any good to spend all the years in Harvard education or Stanford education if you’re getting garbage from nonsense economists. People who can be called and labeled “economists” because they’ve got economics degrees from other like-minded professors.
But that’s throughout history. I mean, we started off with the mercantilists and we’ve had the—well, not starting with the mercantilists. I mean, throughout history, we’ve had people that wanted to use economic logic just as a way of rationalizing power. And that’s basically how wars are often justified. You know, “we have to fight this war!”
Well, because politicians always offer solutions that increase their power. Politicians very rarely offer solutions that decrease their power. And so, the solution, as you were suggesting there, is to think of ways of getting people to not think that they can rely on government for their answers and solutions. That the government is, as L. Neil Smith pointed out, a disease masquerading as its own cure.
Every time you ask government to solve a problem, it creates more problems as a result.
CORBETT: Yes, it’s the Leviathan that grows with crisis and destruction and chaos. And I think that’s what you gesture towards with the philosophical underpinning of someone like Krugman, who genuinely believes in the value of the state and thus will find the silver lining in something like 9/11 or what have you.
But let’s let’s bring this down to a real-world example that I’m sure we have all heard throughout our lives, which is World War II. As we all know, World War II pulled the United States and the world out of the Great Depression. If it wasn’t for World War II, we’d probably still be in a Great Depression, wouldn’t we?
SCHOOLLAND: Yeah, I find that quite intriguing. But of course, from the Austrian economic school that I come from, number one, I’m critical of the origins of World War II, which I say is World War I. And how it was just part two of the foolish interventionism that Woodrow Wilson took America into in a very, very tragic war.
And as three major historians, A. J. P. Taylor, Wayne Callen Tansel, and Murray Rothbard pointed out, had the United States not entered into that war, World War I, Europe would have been left with a balance of power. A stagnant war would have just ended without American involvement. And the United States, in my opinion, had no business at all in the European war. There were powerful economic interests that wanted to grow with warfare. But America had no business doing that.
And therefore, by upsetting the balance of power and then creating this tremendous devastation of Germany and its resurgence to guys like Hitler, yes, we had World War II.
But the Great Depression itself was caused by government intervention, because with World War I [and] the Federal Reserve Board came enormous expansion of the money supply to—James, I’m just preaching to the choir here, I’m sure you know all about this. But in my opinion, the creation of the Federal Reserve Board and the income tax allowed the government to undergo this massive expenditure for warfare that they would not have been able to do had they had to just tax people for any wartime effort. People would resist the tax. But if you can hide the tax in progressive income tax and inflation, then all these governments [would be] able to go to war. I mean, England, Germany, France, all of them paid for war because it was hidden from the populace. You could amount all these fears about the Huns and the invasion and so on without actually having to have people suffer the cost, the true cost of it directly and visibly. It was hidden and obscured from them through inflation.
And so I would say the creation of the Federal Reserve Board, of course, mounted a huge increase in the money supply, which Murray Rothbard nicely points out caused the boom of the Roaring ’20s. And then when they contracted the money supply, it brought on the Great Depression. And there’s no doubt about that. I think most economists, even Ben Bernanke, acknowledged that the Fed created the Great Depression, was responsible for it. Everybody recognizes that now.
And okay, so then, yes, then they pumped up the money supply to pay for their war. But they could have just stayed out of the monetary business and had the gold standard. And you could have had—or, I prefer choice of currency, where you just choose and allow people to choose whatever works best for them. And then you have a stable money supply, stable economy and growth.
And imagine how much more prosperous the world could be with that engine of wealth and investment that could have come from a prosperous economy. Instead of building bombs and drafting and killing people, you would have had productive wealth and investment throughout the world.
CORBETT: Once again, that is Ken Schoolland. And once again, I would suggest that if you found insight and value from his insights there, please do read The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible. There are many, many other profound insights in that book.
But again, I hope that the fundamental underlying point is understood. No, war is not good for the economy. And it would be much better if there was not war, diverting energy resources and wealth from our pockets and putting it into the hands of military industrial contractors.
No. Imagine if we could invest in what we wanted to invest in. Imagine how much more productive wealth and investment would exist in the world.
So, the phony baloney GDP and stock market chicanery that is thrown around to convince us that, oh, it’s so much better when there’s war. It’s such a good thing for the economy is obviously smoke and mirrors. It is the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to convince us that war is a good thing and that we should go along with the latest war agenda.
But that does raise the question then: if the point of warfare is not to enrich society at large, what is the actual economic purpose of warfare? Now, the answer may be obvious, but let’s spell it out.
And in order to do so, I turn to another economist who I happen to know. He is the director of the Center for Research on Globalization. He’s also a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Ottawa, namely Michel Chossudovsky.
Once again, I hope you will be familiar with Michel Chossudovsky, not only from his work at Global Research, but at the very least from our many, many, many previous conversations. You can also find his work on Substack at michelchossudovsky.substack.com. All of that will be linked in the show notes as usual, of course.
I turned to Professor Chossudovsky to spell it out for us. What is the actual economic purpose of warfare? And where does that leave us in the bottom of the power pyramid in relation to this war economy?
MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY: Well, certainly war is a means of business, because it’s the selling of weapons by the military-industrial complex to the government. And there’s a massive market, and what these interests want to achieve is budgets which are tremendously large.
One example is $1.3 trillion assigned to nuclear weapons, And they’re not necessarily there to be used. Well, they could be used, yes, but they’re there to fill the pockets of a financial establishment which is in the process of enlarging itself. And there are all sorts of structures around this. The portfolios—if we think of Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street, and so on—they encompass tremendous amount of power.
But it’s the Secretary of the War Department, Hegseth, he actually says that war is a means to achieve peace. Well, that is a little bit—
But certainly, war is a very, very good thing to invest in. And that is why the Europeans are in the process of investing in the military sectors.
Now, the civilian economy is derogated from any kind of support. And we’re in a situation—I would say, we are in the most serious economic and social crisis in the history of humanity. That’s not an understatement.
And I recall that we spoke, it was about 18 years ago, and that was at the height of the 2008 crisis. And this is also important. It’s the extension of poverty and low wages to the entire planet. And there are certain mechanisms.
It’s not based on scarcity of resources. We could reverse the tide and create all the necessary commodities which are required to survive. So, that would be, for me, to say that “this is something which helps the economy” doesn’t help the economy at all.
Now, we have to distinguish between the real economy and the money economy, or the financial sector as such, which is very complex. But the real economy is, in fact—what this financial minority wants is to destroy the real economy and then pick up the pieces, so to speak. It’s triggered the small and medium-sized enterprises into bankruptcy. Triggered the collapse of airlines, and then you consolidate, and so on and so forth. That is really what we are living now.
But, I mean, here in Canada, the winter’s coming. And there are many people who don’t have a home, and these are not poor people. These are middle-class households who have lost their houses. They can’t pay the mortgage. They confiscate their house. They may go and sleep with a relative, but we have cases of that nature.
And at the same time, what I observe, and that has a lot to do with this relocation of economic activity. The US economy doesn’t produce anything anymore. Well, I don’t interpret it as such, but I recall 20 years ago, we could see American cars all over the place. We could see manufacturing. They don’t manufacture anything. They import from China, Vietnam, India, poor countries where the wages may be 20 or 30 times lower than they are in the United States of America.
So, that is the background.
CORBETT: And I think one of the important things that you’re gesturing towards is the fact that we have been told that “the” economy is, for example, the stock market or “the” economy is the big military industrial contract. etc. Whereas, of course, what most of us actually experience at the day-to-day level are the small and medium sized enterprises that are being consolidated in that great financial consolidation.
Can you speak to that and how this is about redirecting resources into specific sectors of the economy for the benefit of the very, very few?
CHOSSUDOVSKY: Well, the thing is that, If we look at the North American economy, but it’s also valid—in fact, it’s more valid, even, in Europe—is that there are the small and medium-sized enterprises. In the United States, they call that mainstream—I’m sorry, “Main Street” America. Main Street America. And you have local enterprises, you have farmers.
These are all, of course, small capitalist entities, but the thing is they are literally being wiped out. They’re literally being wiped out into bankruptcy, and at the same time, some of them are being taken over. But there’s a scarcity of commodity productions from these small and medium-sized enterprises.
And then it’s also farmers. So that there are scarcities which are being created in the supply of essential commodities, and this, in a sense, it’s engineered. It’s engineered.
I mean, the issue of debt and liability is fundamental. You get indebted, and you often get indebted by investing in the stock market. Now, there’s another element which is very important. It’s the manipulation.
Well, in my department, they’ll talk about “the market mechanism.” There’s no such thing as a market mechanism. There’s market manipulation.
Now, each time Donald Trump opens his mouth and makes a statement, the stock market will respond. But those who have prior knowledge of what he’s going to say and inside information, on that particular day will make billions. And the history—that goes back, I think we even discussed that 18 years ago.
The thing is that the enrichment of the sort of entrepreneurs—they’re not entrepreneurs, they’re speculators, but they’re speculators without having to speculate. They have foreknowledge. And this is, in a sense, is also a driving force. I would say, the last 20 years, there’s been a tremendous centralization of finance, and ultimately the disappearance of the whole urban landscape of restaurants and small shops where you can go and buy things and so on. And what you have—well, you have the shopping malls, and you go to the shopping malls, and they’re almost empty because people don’t have the money to buy.
And all this is ultimately conducive to poverty. Poverty and what I would call “third-worldization,” because the developed countries are now being transformed into third-world countries. And the homeless people in the streets.
Now, there’s another element. This recession, it’s engineered. And because it’s engineered, it is there to appropriate wealth. And it is there to impoverish people.
It’s not to say that there aren’t programs within the governments, etc., etc., that are addressing this. But the welfare state is more or less on the way out, certainly in Western Europe. And most probably—well, the United States never really had a welfare state.
But here we are. That’s what’s happening. And they’re very powerful.
Now, we talk about the banks. There are very powerful institutions within the financial apparatus which control this process. They are the portfolio giants, which I mentioned earlier, in other words, BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and they often merge together. And they control—we don’t know who, because they’re portfolio, but inevitably it’s very powerful interests which are investing in this portfolio, but they’re not necessarily visible. And people say these are enormous entities, and, in some regards, they’re even larger than an entire country, OK? Now, that means that the financial institutions are, in a sense, overshadowing and privatizing the nation-state. And I think that’s a very important concept.
Now, the question is, how do we tackle this? How do we tackle it? What are the solutions? And it’s not necessarily by street movements, because the street movements are also manipulated. They’re divisions. That has been throughout the post-World War II period, create divisions between different groups as a means to impose a government which is supportive of financial interests.
CORBETT: Once again, that is Michel Chossudovsky of globalresearch.ca and michelchossudosky.substack.com.
And yes, I think he raises some very, very good points. One is that the market manipulation that underlies all of this and that is directed by the big portfolio managers—the Vanguards and BlackRocks and State Streets of the world—is, again, a sign of the financialization of the economy. So, when they say “war is good for the economy,” well, it’s certainly good for the Vanguards and BlackRocks and State Streets and their investors and funders and owners, not so much for the average person. And that is, of course, part of the point.
The other point that he makes that I think is very important, and I’m glad he made it, is that, of course, in the modern iteration of this war economy, at least some significant portion of the money to be made on warfare is from the gambling, the speculation markets, most obviously manifested in things like Polymarket, which you will remember from my previous episode of this podcast about that subject. If not, go and refresh yourself with my podcast on Polymarket and what it is and how it works.
But, yes, there are insiders who can make vast amounts of money simply by knowing in advance when and where the strikes are going to occur, what country will go to war with what country and when. Lots of money to be made there. Is it useful, productive economic activity that redounds to the benefit of society? Of course it isn’t. But it certainly lines the pocketbooks of the well-connected. Right, Jared Kushner?
Anyway, these are all incredibly important points, and I’m very glad that Chossudovsky and Schoolland have been here to make those points and to draw out the lessons of today’s episode that war is not good for the economy. But I think we run the risk, like all such analysis of war and economics, of dehumanizing this issue. Because ultimately, as I have discussed before, the real cost of war, the real price of this warfare is not measured in dollars.
This isn’t about economic activity. This isn’t about how many zeros are in someone’s bank account. No, the real cost of war is measured in blood.
CORBETT: We all know by now that the real terrorists (the politicians in the suits and ties and the banksters that pull their strings) are waging their war of terror on multiple fronts for multiple reasons.
Domestically, it rallies the population around the flag, keeping the flock in check. At the same time it justifies the build up of the police state control grid to catch the thought criminals who resist.
It also writes a blank check for the illegal wars of aggression abroad. Simply place your terrorist boogeyman in the square of the chessboard you’re looking to occupy and — hey presto! — you’ve got yourself an excuse to invade. (Even if you “accidentally” end up supporting them, right Uncle Sam?)
But of course the politicians, their string pullers and their fellow travelers benefit from the war of terror in a more straightforward sense. They get to use the terror scares that they themselves create to drum up billions upon billions in the name of fighting the boogeymen.
We’ve all heard of the $640 toilet seat and other ridiculous examples of Pentagon “overspending,” but these stories tend to trivialize the abuses by the military-defense contractors whose entire industry is built on providing overpriced solutions to made up problems. After all, the Pentagon itself just admitted it could cut $2 billion from its budget by shutting down some of the needless bases and defense facilities that have been built around the globe in the name of the American empire.
But $2 billion is chump change.
In the 15 years since 9/11, $1 trillion has been spent building up the police state in the American “homeland” itself.
Meanwhile, the Defense Department has been spending over $600 billion per year maintaining the American military in the post-9/11 era. $4 to $6 trillion of that was spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone, the most expensive wars in US history.
Combined defense spending, including Homeland Security, DoD, State Department, defense related debt interest and other defense costs, has reached the highest levels in modern history over the past decade. From a Cold War era high in the 1980s of $3500 for every man, woman and child in the United States to a 1990s low of $2500, that figure has since breached $4000. Just look at the chart; it isn’t hard to see exactly when the trend reversed and the good times began to flow for the military-industrial contractors: It was 9/11, the birthday of the war of terror and the new era of homeland security.
There are other numbers we could throw in here:
- The billions upon billions in military aid sent to the co-perpetrators of the war of terror, including the $38 billion that has been promised Israel over the next 10 years.
- The $1.5 trillion joke known as the F-35 fighter jet.
- The $6.5 trillion of “year-end adjustments” in the ongoing, never-ending saga of the Pentagon’s missing trillions.
But we have to be careful not to fall into the psychopaths’ trap. The real costs of the war of terror cannot be measured in dollars and cents. They are not tallied in a ledger. They are not about money at all.
The real cost is paid in blood. The blood of a million dead Iraqis. The blood of the hundreds of thousands murdered men, women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The blood that is being shed right now in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, and in all of the countries that have crossed through the crosshairs of the NATO, American and Israeli terrorists.
It’s measured in the devastation of towns and cities that once bustled with life. In the families torn apart by drone bombings. In the havoc of the hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes, leave their families and their homeland and their former life behind as everything they knew is torn to shreds.
It’s measured in the blood of the servicemen and women themselves. Lied to, propagandized and indoctrinated their entire lives, given a ticket out of grinding poverty by the military, shot up with experimental vaccines and shoved into the meat grinder for tour of duty after tour of duty. And then, upon returning home, left to rot in rundown hospitals and ignored by the glad-handing politicians and their military-industrial cronies as a suicide epidemic gradually thins their ranks.
This is the true cost of the war of terror, and it is incalculable. And none of it, absolutely none of it, will come to an end until the public stops believing the false narrative of the war of terror and the lies that have brought it about.
Much like Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, the real terrorists can only survive if you believe in them.
SOURCE: The REAL Cost of the War of Terror
CORBETT: Do you believe in Santa Claus? Do you believe in the Easter Bunny? Do you believe President Trump and MAGA? “Don’t worry, guys. We’re making a fortune on this rise in oil prices!”
Don‘t fall for it. When we start to parrot or fall for these phony, flimsy, demonstrably false economic excuses for the shedding of blood, then we have blood on our hands. To the extent that we get caught up in the war hysteria, to the extent that we start parroting these propaganda lies, then we become morally culpable for the wars that are waged in our name and with our support
So, obviously, on a personal level we have the moral responsibility to inform ourselves what is really happening and to wholeheartedly withdraw our support from any part of this agenda. No, “we” are not making some wonderful, brilliant economic maneuver. We are not even sacrificing economically in order to stop those damn Iranians from getting the bomb. No, we are just participating in the slaughter and bloodshed of civilians to the extent that we believe or parrot those lies.
Of course, that does bring us back to the question that Michelle Chossudovsky raised there earlier, which is what is the answer to this? And it seems evident that the just parading out in the streets probably is not, the answer to this because of the divisions that are formed between different sectors of society in order to keep us divided and conquered. And because, demonstrably, you can get millions—literally millions, record breaking crowds of people—out marching in the street saying, “Hell, no! No war in Iraq!” as we saw in 2003. And it changed absolutely nothing.
Of course, the people who stand to benefit to the tune of billions or trillions of dollars from this military adventurism,are not going to start considering and taking second thoughts. “Oh, there’s a million people marching in London. Oh, there’s there’s millions of people out in the streets in the United States. We better not do this, guys.” No, they’re going to go ahead with it anyway.
So that does leave us in the very unfortunate position of not having the power to be able to stop these wars with the snapping of our fingers. And we should not delude ourselves into thinking that that is going to happen.
But we can, at the very least:
A, as I say, withdraw our own personal support for these wars and the lies that surround them.
And B, Inform others about this topic, because there are still far, far too many people who believe or at the very least parrot these lies. And we can do something towards informing more of the public about what is really going on.
And in that regard, I need your help. I need your support. Not only, of course, your monetary support. But I know that times are getting tough and tougher for more and more of the public. And probably the last priority that people have in their spending discretionary spending budget is to support a podcaster that they enjoy. So, to the extent that people can support me monetarily, of course, I truly and sincerely thank you for that. This work would not exist without you.
But if you do not have the means to support me financially like that, at the very least, please support by getting the word out about this information, whether that means passing along this transcript or this video or the audio or even just the ideas themselves. I think we need to temper people’s war hysteria that they can get so easily swept up into by propaganda and lies and let them know that the real price of this warfare is not even the extra dollars they have to pay at the gas pump. It’s the blood that will be spilt in their name. Let’s bring it to an end.
On that note, I want to thank you sincerely for spending your time in today’s exploration. As I say, all of the links to everything that I’ve talked about today will be in the hyperlinked transcript at corbettreport.com/wareconomy.
In the meantime and in between time, I am James Corbett of corbettreport.com, looking forward to talking to you again in the near future.
Money. It is the economic water in which we live our lives.
We spend our lives working for it, worrying about it, saving it, spending it, pinching it.
But what is it? Where does it come from? How is it created? Who controls it?
Century of Enslavement: The History of the Federal Reserve.
Watch the documentary for free and access the transcript at corbettreport.com/federalreserve or support the filmmaker and purchase a DVD copy at newworldnextweek.com.
