ABSTRACT

Federal, state, and local governments spend about $350 billion annually on the military and crime. The main differences between milex and crimex follow: Milex are financed by the federal government, whereas most of crimex—almost 90 percent—are the responsibility of states and localities; and milex are about three times crimex. Support for milex and crimex is a consequence of a long-sustained discourse mixing nationalism with economic, ideological, military, and racial fears in a rapidly changing and confusing world at home and abroad. Decades of large-scale militarized production required not only a militarized economy but also a society whose attitudes have become significantly militarized, whose responses to complex problems have come increasingly to be military responses. In the military-industrial complex, as in the rest of the corporate economy, profits and chief executive officers’ incomes are coming to be inversely related to the jobs and incomes of workers: Like a seesaw, the former go up as the latter go down.