What Israel “does” is different because the US Congress appropriates “aid money” to Israel each year when it authorizes a new US budget. This isn’t actually contradictory because our foreign aid to Israel directly increases *our* GDP, since it’s split into little pieces that can only be spent on, say, components for the Iron Dome or the …
What Israel “does” is different because the US Congress appropriates “aid money” to Israel each year when it authorizes a new US budget. This isn’t actually contradictory because our foreign aid to Israel directly increases *our* GDP, since it’s split into little pieces that can only be spent on, say, components for the Iron Dome or the bombs that killed 15 children in the last few days, and Congress further specifies the exact weapons manufacturers Israel may redeem this coupon and that coupon with. It’s like we send them a bunch of pre-filled personal checks from the Treasury to Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, etc, with what kind of deadly product each check is for neatly typed on the notes section of the check. In a real sense these are American air strikes, in which the munitions have been selected by Congress and paid for with funds procured by Congress supposedly from American tax dollars (though of course that’s not how the federal government experiences manipulating its own currency). Effectively though it’s not wrong to call it tax money siphoned from Americans directly to defense contractors to subsidize GDP by exactly the amount Congress wishes. When you watch a video of an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in Gaza, you’re probably watching innocent people die, but you’re also viewing the result of an unthinkably depraved version of quantitative easing (which is already depraved enough IMO). Then the ruling class of America claps because the line on their stock portfolios goes up, and they’re fine with the consequences.
Note I’m not even getting into the most obvious difference, that Israel is an apartheid state literally founded alongside apartheid South Africa... It’s not worth wasting time explaining something so obvious, is it?
On the other hand, in Russia/Ukraine, Congress passed a new lend/lease act so Ukraine is receiving their deadly weaponry from the US defense industry like Israel except that it’s not at all like Israel because at some point they run out of stockpiles and start producing more and Ukraine legally by act of Congress and Biden’s signature sends them little IOUs with no expectation or real obligation or plausible ability to ever pay us back. Biden demands Congress provide more foreign aid to Ukraine for “defense” every couple weeks, but Zelensky doesn’t need to use it to purchase weaponry from the US. We can now “lend” the heavy equipment to Kiev... sorry, “Kyiv”... at no cost to them. I’m not sympathetic to capital, but the line on the élite’s portfolios doesn’t go up when Ukraine incinerates Russian infantry using our massively expensive drones strapped with explosives like kamikaze homing devices. You’d think capital would be more irritated by that--that when they see footage of Ukrainian heavy artillery it isn’t a visual of their wealth increasing in direct proportion to how big the smoke plumes are. It’s *not* quantitative easing with the unnecessary proxy war step included because our politicians think that’s sensible legislative text to include, the US is in a sense seizing profits and suppressing the contribution of the defense industry to GDP because Putin Bad, they’re nostalgic for the constant terror of the Cold War but don’t have much longer to live anyway so the risks aren’t real to them, whatever, take your pick, there isn’t a single rational choice theorist who can invent a plausible motivation for every DC Beltway ghoul on this one.
They’re very different! This is a rant about one facet of how different they are. Just... put the propaganda down and think for a second, seriously confused twitter user in Esha’s mentions! You’l come up with something from the dozens and dozens of differences, I believe in you.
Congress appropriated a flat $3 billion for Israeli military aid *every single year* from 1979 to 2019 (unfortunately, predictably, it was increased dramatically to $3.8b, not lowered). $3 billion in guaranteed annual padding to one industry, beginning at a time when America’s argument for global acquiescence to the so-called virtues of our rules based economic/imperial order relied on us being able to tout the “proof” of our defense industry posting profit after profit compared to the domestic economic conditions our Cold War foes faced as a result of us intervening in every way to kneecap their progress... this is a run-on sentence now, but 1979 wasn’t long after stagflation, and just about when we stopped pretending the UN had legitimacy to affect America’s bad behavior internationally, etc etc, it was a pretty telling year to institute a de facto mandatory $3 billion for Israel to pay right back to us in the NDAA every year. 1979’s American political & military leadership must’ve been remarkably insecure about the stability of their supposedly unshakable grand ideological project to do proto-QE 30 years before actual QE began, is all I’m saying.
Why all this talk about 1979? Well, people only know him nowadays for building houses for the poor & homeless and whatnot, but Jimmy Carter presided over a certain energy crisis that year sparked by the Iranian Revolution. He chose to address the ensuing recession with pretty radical (at the time) applications of neoliberal economic theory. The dude was in many ways the first neolib POTUS. Reagan and Clinton made it impossible to escape what Carter opened the door to, but yeah, $3 billion in military aid to Israel designed to return to American industry like a boomerang in 1979--when GDP was $2.6 trillion--was very significant and very corrupt and I don’t hear it brought up as much as it should be. It’s sort of a microcosm of a lot of things going wrong for the west and the first glimpse of the absolute cowardice we’ve maintained our illusion of a status quo with for so long. In actuality, lift the magic tricks of economists’ clever manipulation of data away and it’s all been in constant decay.
What Israel “does” is different because the US Congress appropriates “aid money” to Israel each year when it authorizes a new US budget. This isn’t actually contradictory because our foreign aid to Israel directly increases *our* GDP, since it’s split into little pieces that can only be spent on, say, components for the Iron Dome or the bombs that killed 15 children in the last few days, and Congress further specifies the exact weapons manufacturers Israel may redeem this coupon and that coupon with. It’s like we send them a bunch of pre-filled personal checks from the Treasury to Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, etc, with what kind of deadly product each check is for neatly typed on the notes section of the check. In a real sense these are American air strikes, in which the munitions have been selected by Congress and paid for with funds procured by Congress supposedly from American tax dollars (though of course that’s not how the federal government experiences manipulating its own currency). Effectively though it’s not wrong to call it tax money siphoned from Americans directly to defense contractors to subsidize GDP by exactly the amount Congress wishes. When you watch a video of an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in Gaza, you’re probably watching innocent people die, but you’re also viewing the result of an unthinkably depraved version of quantitative easing (which is already depraved enough IMO). Then the ruling class of America claps because the line on their stock portfolios goes up, and they’re fine with the consequences.
Note I’m not even getting into the most obvious difference, that Israel is an apartheid state literally founded alongside apartheid South Africa... It’s not worth wasting time explaining something so obvious, is it?
On the other hand, in Russia/Ukraine, Congress passed a new lend/lease act so Ukraine is receiving their deadly weaponry from the US defense industry like Israel except that it’s not at all like Israel because at some point they run out of stockpiles and start producing more and Ukraine legally by act of Congress and Biden’s signature sends them little IOUs with no expectation or real obligation or plausible ability to ever pay us back. Biden demands Congress provide more foreign aid to Ukraine for “defense” every couple weeks, but Zelensky doesn’t need to use it to purchase weaponry from the US. We can now “lend” the heavy equipment to Kiev... sorry, “Kyiv”... at no cost to them. I’m not sympathetic to capital, but the line on the élite’s portfolios doesn’t go up when Ukraine incinerates Russian infantry using our massively expensive drones strapped with explosives like kamikaze homing devices. You’d think capital would be more irritated by that--that when they see footage of Ukrainian heavy artillery it isn’t a visual of their wealth increasing in direct proportion to how big the smoke plumes are. It’s *not* quantitative easing with the unnecessary proxy war step included because our politicians think that’s sensible legislative text to include, the US is in a sense seizing profits and suppressing the contribution of the defense industry to GDP because Putin Bad, they’re nostalgic for the constant terror of the Cold War but don’t have much longer to live anyway so the risks aren’t real to them, whatever, take your pick, there isn’t a single rational choice theorist who can invent a plausible motivation for every DC Beltway ghoul on this one.
They’re very different! This is a rant about one facet of how different they are. Just... put the propaganda down and think for a second, seriously confused twitter user in Esha’s mentions! You’l come up with something from the dozens and dozens of differences, I believe in you.
Thank you for this interesting tidbit on the increased gdp. I had no idea Israel i "aid" was so profitable.
Congress appropriated a flat $3 billion for Israeli military aid *every single year* from 1979 to 2019 (unfortunately, predictably, it was increased dramatically to $3.8b, not lowered). $3 billion in guaranteed annual padding to one industry, beginning at a time when America’s argument for global acquiescence to the so-called virtues of our rules based economic/imperial order relied on us being able to tout the “proof” of our defense industry posting profit after profit compared to the domestic economic conditions our Cold War foes faced as a result of us intervening in every way to kneecap their progress... this is a run-on sentence now, but 1979 wasn’t long after stagflation, and just about when we stopped pretending the UN had legitimacy to affect America’s bad behavior internationally, etc etc, it was a pretty telling year to institute a de facto mandatory $3 billion for Israel to pay right back to us in the NDAA every year. 1979’s American political & military leadership must’ve been remarkably insecure about the stability of their supposedly unshakable grand ideological project to do proto-QE 30 years before actual QE began, is all I’m saying.
Why all this talk about 1979? Well, people only know him nowadays for building houses for the poor & homeless and whatnot, but Jimmy Carter presided over a certain energy crisis that year sparked by the Iranian Revolution. He chose to address the ensuing recession with pretty radical (at the time) applications of neoliberal economic theory. The dude was in many ways the first neolib POTUS. Reagan and Clinton made it impossible to escape what Carter opened the door to, but yeah, $3 billion in military aid to Israel designed to return to American industry like a boomerang in 1979--when GDP was $2.6 trillion--was very significant and very corrupt and I don’t hear it brought up as much as it should be. It’s sort of a microcosm of a lot of things going wrong for the west and the first glimpse of the absolute cowardice we’ve maintained our illusion of a status quo with for so long. In actuality, lift the magic tricks of economists’ clever manipulation of data away and it’s all been in constant decay.
Sorry for the walls of text. I’m sick and apparently, now that I see my own post, one of the symptoms is an inability to use the return key 😫
We like walls. We like texts. Wall of texts is fine.