Buy Our "Stuff"

Trey Smith

With the economy still struggling and the debates over how to fix the problem more intense than ever, one word still evokes bipartisan consensus: exports. “I want us to sell stuff,” said President Obama, summing up the bipartisan sentiment.

That nebulous word “stuff” is significant. It asks us to see all exports as the same and to refrain from making nuanced value judgments about what exactly we’re shipping overseas. In this coldblooded view, a job-creating export is a job-creating export, and that’s as far as any conversation should go.
~ from Our Guns and Butter Economy by David Sirota ~

So, what is this "stuff" we're marketing all over the world? As Sirota makes clear, we are the leading exporters of weapons and munitions! We sell more guns and bombs to the world than any other nation!!

So, how can our leaders stand before us to say that the thing America wants more than anything else is peace? How can we genuinely support peace when we're putting guns in everybody's hands?

The easy answer is that the US doesn't want peace. The military-industrial complex thrives on war and the potential for more war. What better way to guarantee that the potential for war lives on than by arming those who we can later attack?