Modern capitalism is a massive racket, and it is about to get much worse
What the military-industrial complex is setting up for us...
Modern capitalism is thoroughly a racket. By racket, I mean creating problems and then selling solutions, the latter of which then create new problems that beget new markets for new solutions, in an endless cycle.
For example...
Fossil energy consumption leads to climate change which creates a lucrative market for "green capitalism."
Reliance on monoculture cash crops leads to processed foods, obesity, soil depletion, and risk of blight, which creates a market for fancy organic foods, weight loss gimmicks, fertilizer, and pesticide (respectively).
Genetically manipulating viruses leads to lab leak pandemics which creates a lucrative market for new kinds of vaccines and treatments.
Real estate speculation leads to rising housing costs and homelessness which creates a lucrative market for mass policing and the homeless industrial complex.
There are an infinite number of ways to profit off our misery. And it builds out into a complex network in which all of these rackets become intertwined, feeding into and out of one another in a giant tangled mess of inverted capitalism, generating profits for the few via the cultivation of endless crises for the many. In such a regime incentives are reversed, where we see failure they see success, because success for them is measured by profit alone. They don't even have to know what they are doing, in fact incompetence breeds profits as surely as malice.
One of the worst rackets is the military industrial complex, which funds "think tanks" that hijack foreign policy and stoke conflicts around the world to create lucrative markets for weapons. The proliferation of weapons leads to wars, which then lead to depletion of weapons and more demand. The weapons industry has never been more profitable than the present day, with saber rattling in Asia, conflict in the middle east, and war in Ukraine it is growing by leaps and bounds. However, this is only the beginning...
...following a half century of de-industrialization, US+NATO industrial capacity fell precipitously. Even former industrial giants like Germany are struggling after being cut off from cheap Russian energy. The war in Ukraine serves as a mechanism for US+NATO to deplete their supply of armaments, creating a critical shortage and a profit opporunity for the MIC. However, lacking industrial surge capacity, the US+NATO cannot meet this emergency demand. Supplying Israel's carpet-bombing of Gaza makes matters even worse. In fact, the MIC would need to dramatically expand in scope to fill the void they are creating.
How much will the MIC need to expand? In congressional testimony last year, General Milley, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that the US defense budget would need to "double" in the wake of the Ukraine conflict. His is just a rough estimate, but it rounds off to about an additional $1 trillion a year (likely more than the revenue taken by big pharma during the pandemic), and which will need to persist for at least a decade or more if the US wishes to catch up with rivals like China...but NOT catching up will be a perpetual reason to continue pouring more cash into MIC coffers. In other words, the US will need to fully mobilize industrially for war anew, without every actually being able to fight a war toe to toe, tooth to tooth, eyeball to eyeball, with our chosen enemies.
If public support for this dramatic expansion of the MIC wavers, then they will find a way to ensure that an event occurs that better motivates the public and enables them to railroad emergency measures through congress. In the best case scenario, they will manufacture fictional "casus belli" through their mass media megaphones, such as the sinking of the USS Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin, Saddam's WMDs, Assad's gas attacks, etc.. In a worse case, it will be actual events like the attack on Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 attacks, etc....but we could easily imagine events far worse than those examples. Again, the MIC doesn't actually need to do these things themselves, simply behaving recklessly as they have already been doing will be enough to create an opportunity...that the market will be eager to exploit.