Doing Business, As Usual

THE AMERICAN military industrial complex, the one referenced by President Eisenhower very shortly before he left office, is alive and well. Just thought you'd want to know. Eisenhower was wise, if a bit cowardly, for bringing attention to it only on his last day in office, but, hey, we all want to keep our jobs, and we all want to avoid being assassinated by special ops black forces. We tend to tell the truth only when we are sufficiently removed from its consequences to avoid them. Back in Abilene, Kansas, IKE was safer, if not entirely beyond the ken of the complex. Defense contractors spend big money contributing to the election campaigns of politicians, explained Eisenhower, who, once elected, repay their corporate benefactors for the kindness of having assisted in the purchasing of their office. They repay the defense contractors by pushing through legislation which results in massive spending of tax payer money on weapons systems which will never be used, many of which are of no interest to Pentagon officials themselves. Like Senator Arthur Vandenburg of Michigan said to President Truman: "if you want to spend all this money on the military, you'd better scare the hell out of the American people". Truman indeed wanted to spend all this money, possibly because he felt that the communist Soviet Union was a direct threat to his haberdashery back in Missouri. Either that, or he wanted to appease, you guessed it, the military industrial complex. Hence, the National Security Act of 1950, which gave us, generously, our national security state, with all its assorted accoutrements, among them, constant surveillance of the American citizenry, and our recent severe curtailment of civil liberties of the sort which annoys our corporate masters, such as habeas corpus. For the national security state to perpetuate itself, it is necessary for the United States to be continuously at war, with someone, anyone. The Cold War, in which the Soviet Union had no interest of participating, was a clever device to this end, as were Korea and Viet Nam, which began as civil wars, but ended as business ventures. Then, it was on the Iraq and Afghanistan. First, invite Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, then, appear appalled, and retaliate. Very clever, convenient, and efficient. Now that we appear to finally be running out of convenient wars, we will simply have to find others. Waiting in the wings are Iran and North Korea, both of whom are frightened, with justification, of American military power. We should all be.