How do we maintain a military to fight the enemies of Capitalism?

[niallmac]

We offer socialist benefits like equal access to housing and health care that our
Capitalist society seems incapable of providing.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-enlist21may21,0,3677295.story?coll=la-home-headlines

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Uh - the cold war is over.

There are no 'enemies of capitalism' with armies worth fighting. Instead we maintain a huge military in order to dominate the triumphant new capitalism of the post cold war world, and create new enemies to justify the corruption and malfeasance our bloated military represents.

[ugarte]

2. Truer words were never spoken

There is no threat to the USA, except the internal fascist one.

[niallmac]

3. Enemies of Capitalism

Loss of hegemony over our foreign energy supply.
Any state of peace that distracts from the distraction of
an eternal Orwellian enemy and an eternal Orwellian war.
Me.

[Warren Stupidity]

4. I think we are mostly in agreement but...

it is your use of the term 'capitalism' here, as in 'enemies of capitalism' where instead I would put 'neocon imperialism' or just 'imperialism' that I find confusing. Even the Chinese are ardent capitalists now, so we are ruled everywhere, with minor exceptions' by 'capitalist regimes'.

[niallmac]

5. Perhaps I should refer to U.S. 'Corporatism' instead.

True enough capitalism is everywhere. I was thinking of our own capitalist institutions. The ones that demand unlimited
access to the rest of the world. Populism, true democracies have never been conducive to this end.
We create Saddams and Pinochets and Noriegas to keep a lid on the people and invariably the Saddams and Pinochets and Noriegas get out of control.
Capitalism is a pretty powerful economic engine but it needs constraints like a fire needs a perimeter.
I still find it ironic that we reward our capitalist sponsored fighting men and women with the socialist rewards we otherwise shy away from:
Veterans Administration Health Care e.g. A health care system that for my money would be a good single payer model for the rest of the country.

[Warren Stupidity]

6. Indeed.

And note that the discredited marxists of the last century analyzed this development of the capitalist system correctly. Their beehive solution was totalitarian and replaced one set of elites with another, but their analysis of the inevitable failure of this system was accurate.

We are in the end game of the the Big Crackup, corporatist power centers are forming and are starting to fight each other over the planet's dwindling resources, their unsustainable system requiring ever greater rates of consumption to keep it afloat while the energy resources that power the growth starts to be unable to keep up and the planet's ecology stops being able to absorb the abuse it is taking.

The collapse is not going to be pretty.