Whatever Happened to the "Peace Dividend"?

[Yavin4]

Anyone old enough to recall the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent end to the Eastern bloc? Anyone remember the talk about the "Peace Dividend"? Anyone recall the super bright future ahead of us now that the scourge of humanity, Communism, was no more? How we were going to have so much money because we would not have to fight the "Cold War" any more?

What happened to our "Peace Dividend"? What happened to our bright future? Why are we living on the brink of economic ruin?

[csziggy]

1. Ronald Reagan gave it to the wealthy

Probably to make up for the war dividends they were no longer raking in (HAH!) from defense contractors. :sarcasm:

[Make7]

2. 9/11 ( n/t )

[Kennah]

3. It was converted to war debt, but the exchange rate was pretty good.

[bluestateguy]

4. Two things

1) Newt Grinch's Congress would not let Bill Clinton spend any money.

2) George W. Bush gave it all away on tax cuts for the wealthy.

[bananas]

5. Clinton used it to reduce the deficit

then Bush started two wars and sent us backwards.

[Puregonzo1188]

6. The fact that America is never at peace.

Even during the 90s.

[izquierdista]

7. Never even skipped a beat

Go look at the Pentagon budget. It sailed through 1989, 1990, 1991, and on through the Clinton years with not even the slightest of perturbations. Thanks to the military-industrial complex marketers and planners, there will always be military hardware to buy, systems to develop, and threats to analyze.*




* but not terrorists flying airplanes into buildings; I don't think anyone could have predicted that.

[Tesha]

8. We ended our brief flirtation with peace. (NT)

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. Check the bottomless coffers of the MIC for the answer to that puzzle.

[rbnyc]

10. After the cold war...

...there was a lot of pressure on companies with huge government contracts for defense to ease into the commercial marketplace. They didn't want to do this. Many of them actually conducted market research before the first war in Iraq to see what people would accept as a viable reason to continue massive defense spending. The Iraq/Kuwait scenario was actually one of their test cases.

[coalition_unwilling]

11. Actually, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm ended all

talk of a 'Peace Dividend,' at least as I remember it.

America was a nice idea while it lasted. The 'economic ruin' you posit is merely the destruction of liberal democracy and its replacement by neo-feudalism (where today's Microsoft operates like the Medicis back in Renaissance Florence),

I am pissed that my ancestors fought in the Union Army so that the Union might be preserved. I'm pretty sure this is not what Lincoln had in mind when he resolved at Gettysburg that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Well, as the young-uns say, "Whatevs."

[lib2DaBone]

12. Child labor.. prison labor..forced labor...

While the USA WELCOMES cheap Chinese goods flowing freely into our markets.

I wonder how many Fords or Chevys are on the road in China?

Free Trade is NOT free. NAFTA gave us the SHAFTA... our Congress is criminal.

[LeftyMom]

13. Have to have peace first.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US has been involved in the following conflicts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1990.E2.80.931999 I'd post the list but it goes over DU's copyright guidelines, which should suggest how crazy long it is.