Bin Laden is Good!

What to do when the vital US Arms industry experience a significant drop in sales?

Many people employed in the business afraid of their jobs might go out on the street demanding "more wars now" and board meetings might get awash in cold sweat and a feeling of deep loss.


But who could replace the ideal foe ; the Red Plague, the Commie Threat, the Evil Empire - the Soviet Union - to justify a mammoth defense budget and boost the US arms exports again?

China?

Well, they are a bit of a commie dictatorship and have more or less all the scary looking characteristics of a world domination seeking James Bond villain.

But they have a natural resource almost as good as Saudi, Iran or Iraq - they have an unlimited underpaid workforce who are stripped of all workers rights, and a cold war with China would mean that americans flags again had to be manufactured by higher paid american workers who might even be organized in unpatriotic maffia trade unions. Hmmm..

Enter Bin Laden and September 11.

Perfect! (Or as Netanyahu put it - "Very Good!") There he is, the return of the world domination seeking villain. And voilá the worlds demand for american weapons are back to the good old cold war days again.

Its not that bin Laden as a person is important;

"'I don't really think about him very much. I'm not that concerned.' We need a president who stays deadly focused on the real war on terror."

(He is not even wanted by the FBI for 9/11)

He is more important as a symbol, he personifies the new threat, the militant islamist.

Now if people can get as frantic about muslim terrorists, as they were about communism, then oil and bank assets that otherwise might come in the hands of "world domination seeking terrorists", can preemptively be confiscated and there is an excellent excuse to spy on foreign business competition and persuade less than clever politicians to spy on their own populations phone and internet communication and hand the data over to the US.

So there are great synergetic domino effects in islamism!

And war creates a lot of jobs and wonderful business opportunities. And for the creative entrepreneur the privatization of everything from propaganda to prisons, torture and military operations, it is a multibillion dollar industry.

"The United States is by far the largest exporter of weapons in the world, with a sales volume that exceeds the next 14 countries combined. Military sales equate to about 18 percent of the Federal budget, far and away the greatest proportion of any nation.

John Ralston Saul states that the American government cannot reduce arms sales because of the consequent fall in GDP. "