Tag: Corporate Power

Book cover: title 'Beyond the Midas-Mars Trap' with a split scene of destruction and lush growth, symbolizing security and renewal.

Beyond the Midas–MARS Trap: Life-Coherent Security, Economic Conversion, and the End of Claim-Protected Militarism | ChatGPT-5.5 Thinking and NotebookLM

Humanity is living through a convergence of militarized insecurity, ecological breakdown, widening inequality, public-budget distortion, technological misrelevance, and financial claim-sovereignty over the life-ground. These crises are usually analyzed separately: as problems of war, capitalism, empire, extractivism, public finance, national security, or collective psychology. This white paper argues that they are better understood as expressions of a deeper conserved civilizational coupling: the Midas–MARS Trap.

The Midas Trap names the drift by which money-value, asset-value, debt-value, and corporate claim-value become sovereign over the living conditions from which all real value arises. MARS — Militarized Asset-Resource Security — names the organized protection of assets, resources, routes, markets, extractive concessions, geopolitical access, and corporate claims through military power, public subsidy, intelligence systems, sanctions, coercive diplomacy, bases, surveillance, and war. Together, the Midas–MARS Trap describes a civilization in which claims are protected more reliably than persons, communities, ecosystems, civil commons, and future generations.

The empirical pattern is stark. World military expenditure reached $2.887 trillion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive year of real growth, and global military spending rose 41% over 2016–2025 (Liang et al., 2026). The United Nations reports that military spending reached $2.7 trillion in 2024, while only one in five Sustainable Development Goal targets was on track and the annual SDG financing gap stood at approximately $4 trillion (United Nations, 2025). The same report estimates that $93 billion per year could help end hunger by 2030, $114 billion per year could provide universal safe drinking water and sanitation in 140 low- and middle-income countries, $3.7 trillion over ten years could provide basic healthcare to all in low- and lower-middle-income countries, and $5 trillion over ten years could fund 12 years of quality education for every child in low- and lower-middle-income countries (United Nations, 2025).

Drawing on John McMurtry’s critique of the military paradigm, Johan Galtung’s analysis of collective subconscious pathologies, Joan Roelofs’s mapping of the military-industrial-congressional-almost-everything-complex, Mason Gaffney’s critique of “defense” as a falsely universal public good, and the author’s life-coherent framework of conserved drift, this paper argues that civilizational repair requires more than anti-war critique. It requires the conversion of a whole dependency ecology. McMurtry helps distinguish persons from the destructive patterns they bear; Galtung shows how violence becomes pre-reflectively felt as necessary; Roelofs shows how militarism embeds itself into livelihoods, universities, nonprofits, pensions, and civic respectability; and Gaffney exposes how public military expenditure can function as a subsidy for private overseas claims (Gaffney, 2018; Galtung, 1996; McMurtry, 1989, 1991; Roelofs, 2018).

The paper proposes a life-coherent alternative: security as the shared capacity of persons, communities, institutions, ecosystems, and future generations to continue living, repairing, learning, adapting, and flourishing under conditions of uncertainty, difference, and constraint. The way beyond the trap is not anti-security, anti-economy, anti-technology, or anti-defense. It is the disciplined conversion of security, money, law, investment, science, technology, and public power back into service of life-capacity.

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“Corporate Power and Expansive U.S. Military Policy” by Professor Mason Gaffney

Abstract

Military defense is generally treated in economics texts as a “public good” because the benefits are presumed to be shared by all citizens. However, defense spending by the United States cannot legitimately be classified as public good, since the primary purpose of those expenditures has been to project power in support of private business interests. Throughout the course of the 20th century, U.S. military spending has been largely devoted to protecting the overseas assets of multinational corporations that are based in the U.S. or allied nations.

Companies extracting oil, mineral ores, timber, and other raw materials are the primary beneficiaries. The U.S. military provides its services by supporting compliant political leaders in developing countries and by punishing or deposing regimes that threaten the interests of U.S.-based corporations. The companies involved in this process generally have invested only a small amount of their own capital. Instead, the value of their overseas assets largely derives from the appreciation of oil and other raw materials in situ. Companies bought resource-rich lands cheaply, as early as the 1930s or 1940s, and then waited for decades to develop them. In order to make a profit on this long-range strategy, they formed cartels to limit global supply and relied on the U.S. military to help them maintain secure title over a period of decades. Those operations have required suppressing democratic impulses in dozens of nations. The global “sprawl” of extractive companies has been the catalyst of U.S. foreign policy for the past century. The U.S. Department of Defense provides a giant subsidy to companies operating overseas, and the cost is borne by the taxpayers of the U.S., not the corporate beneficiaries.

Defining military spending as a “public good” has been a mistake with global ramifications, leading to patriotic support for imperialist behavior.

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