American Exception
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Episode 78: NSC-68 and the Permanent War Panacea (EDS 13)
🕑 Added 2022-10-10 17:03:35 +0000 UTCCheck out the video version of this episode (featuring slides and such).
In this episode we look at the history behind NSC-68, the seminal document of the US military industrial complex.
This is the 13th installment of our Empire and the Deep State series--an in-depth exploration of my new book American Exception: Empire and the Deep State. I am again joined by series co-host Ben Norton of Multipolarista as well our own Seamus McGuinness who is producing the series.
The latter portion of this episode was already posted on YouTube because we thought it was so timely after the Nord Stream attack. I hope the larger, book-related portion of the episode also provides good context for this. Strangely enough, I added that extra material to the episode plan because I thought that all of the historical exegesis from the book was really relevant to our current moment. With the Nord Stream bombing, it turned out that I was more correct than I knew.
Check out the attached PDF to see the slides we refer to.
Special thanks to Seamus for the episode art and Dana Chavarria for the sound engineering!
Music: "Too Good Your Dreams Don't Come True" by Mock Orange
Comments
John
The economic and raw materials aspect of this are several magnitude more important than the political imho, glad they are discussed here. Energy is the life blood of our advanced industrial societies and when you factors like peak output, OPEC+ recent pivot away from the US, UK financial and Europe energy crisis we are fast approaching a very critical point in history.
Cultus Daemon
I just have to point out that the Soviets and communists in general figured all this stuff out many decades ago.
Jon Croteau
Winthrop Aldrich was the son of Nelson Aldrich (Sen.-RI) who shepherded Paul Warburg's privatised central bank through Congress. Thus, he (Nelson) was permitted to marry into the Rockefeller family.
Jon Croteau
It's hard to find stats, but the derivatives market hovers somewhere around $1.2 quadrillion. The is most likely comprised of and sustained by rollover endogenously-conjured private bank credit. It is not part of the productive economy. It mostly functions as a privately-controlled economic sword of damocles, which the money creating families can drop when they are ready.
Louis Waweru
Interesting, I never thought about how these documents were probably secret, before the FOIA and open government laws. Makes me doubt ever seeing something so matter-of-fact like NSC-68 again, if that is more-or-less how this happened.
Aaron Good
That is always attributed to deGaulle, but it was actually said by his finance minister who really said it, iirc
Angleton
Or as de Gaulle called it privilège exorbitant
Cultus Daemon
Exactamundo!
Cultus Daemon
I think I first learned about NSC-68 from a Soviet book from Progress Publishers put out in 1983 called CIA Target: The USSR. If you really want to understand American imperialism read Soviet books!
NYCM&AHole
Also given the subsidization of Eastern Europe by the USSR, it’s hard to characterize it as imperialist in terms of exploitation of the economies and persons
