[quote=permabear][quote=SD Realtor]I don’t want to bang on health care. I guess I am just kind of awed by the reach of the govt. When does it stop and where does it end?[/quote]

I stopped worry about the reach of government once I learned that our attack… er, defense… budget is bigger than the rest of the world’s combined.

We send troops overseas against the will of our Constitution by naming our invasions “missions” rather than wars, enabling us to sidestep our checks and balances. Then we use our wonderful Executive branch dictatorship to strongarm other countries into undermining key peace treaties and environmental regulations, so our corporations can profit at the world’s expense.

But you’re right, those pesky social programs that help people are the big problem. As long as we focus on killing them, it’s ok.[/quote]

The military-intelligence complex has always been the spreader and enforcer of capitalism and ‘privatization’. If bribes, election tampering, funding of “friendly” opposition does not work then we always can send in the troops. It’s all about business.

The mistake that most make is looking at ‘government’ and private industry as separate entities. They never have been, ever. Not in Europe when feudalism collapsed, not in America when we settled the country. Early European capitalism was studied as the “political economy” it took a century before they separated the studies to economic and political sciences seemingly forgetting it’s inception. The first 100 years of american-style capitalism was marked by the largest government handouts in history. The giving away of hundreds of thousands of sq miles of land for farms and railroads as well as free plentiful resource deposits. Of course, we had slave labor as well. Then came capitalism’s next big break in the late 19th century. Which was oil and the industries and technologies it spawned. Not to mention the ability to do tremendous amounts of ever increasing work from ever increasing amounts of energy.

Now that colonialism is over(land theft and slavery) as well as ever increasing amounts of energy(the ability to do more and more work) – the US Empire is entering late stage capitalist imperialism and all that entails: export the proletariat for cheap labor, constant resource wars, more and more militarization of the economy and society, rapid growth of a bloated and corrupt financial capitalist over-class and maintenance of a heavily propagandized police state( a police state is a huge industry btw) with constant economic crisis and the commoditization of everything.

Eventually the system will alienate the majority of the population under it’s current logic, one way or another. From a consumption standpoint the top 20-30% of the population drives the economy anyway.