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The United $tates has admitted to having 100,000 spies and an "intelligence" budget of $44 billion per year. That is 500 spies for every country in the world to spy on.(1)
The next time MIM says that international comrades should be paranoid about Amerikans, we hope they take the advice. By themselves, the U.$. intelligence agencies would rank 61st in annual income if they were one country. That would be ahead of Libya and 119 other countries.(2)
There are a total of 632,000 full-time professors in the united $tates.(3) However, that is to forget that many have to put time into subjects that do not ordinarily come up in spying. The combined social science PhD degrees since 1979 do not equal the employment of U.$. spies--and most social scientists do not have an international component to their research.(4) So what we are trying to say is that when it comes to discussion of international issues, there are more people involved in spying than in intensive study of international issues in the academic world. Likewise, the academic world cannot expect to generate its own influence when much of its international studies funding comes from suspect government and capitalist sources.
This is not to count returning soldiers from foreign countries as another source of influence on discussion of international issues in the united $tates. One in seven voting-age people in the united $tates have served in the military, about equal to the number involved in industry.(5) A large portion of the population also has a self-interest in hyping foreign security threats to justify its military pensions. This is another source of distortion in the country's political discussion.
We have to discredit those who say that Amerikan spying is not a problem or reflects a sense of the revolutionaries' overestimation of their own importance. Quite the contrary, it is the inflation of the Amerikan government's idea of the importance of spying that needs attention. By exploiting the world, the united $tates can hire too many people in professions that bring no positive benefit to the world.
When MIM speaks of imperialist militarism as a way of life sustained by a parasitic economy, we include spies. The Amerikan is a persyn increasingly removed from agriculture and industry, and what little "knowledge production" the Amerikan is involved in is highly distorted by militarism.
Notes:
1. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,192503,00.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nominal%29
3. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_236.asp
4. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d04/tables/dt04_302.asp
5. http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws- kerry05.html