BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
THIS is a great post from the WAR IS BUSINESS blog (click the header or use the permanent link it on this blog to go to it) about Rev Martin Luther King Jr and Pres Eisenhower.
Today is the 50th anniversary of US President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he popularized the concept of the “military-industrial complex.” It is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Eisenhower and King would doubtless disagree on many, many issues. The danger of unaccountable power accumulating within the military bureaucracy and its private adjuncts was one matter about which they agreed.
Yet there’s currently a great deal of revisionism and obfuscation going on around these two historical figures, particularly concerning their views on war and economics. Last week, the Defense Department’s top lawyer argued that King, who attacked the Vietnam War as an imperial enterprise and urged young American men to become conscientious objectors in a time of active conscription, would support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation’s military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack,” [Defense Department general counsel Jeh C. Johnson] said.
Johnson’s remarks have blown upacrossthe internet, so I won’t spend too much time picking apart his conclusions. Briefly, though, here is a snippet of a King speech on Vietnam:
For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam… Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization. …
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Colonialism. “Spiritual death.” Pretty strong words, there. But 40 years later, Johnson would have us believe, the Rev. Dr. King would have come around to the Joint Chiefs’ way of seeing things.
That quote of King’s segues nicely into the debate over today’s other American honoree, Eisenhower, a consummate military man who famously dreaded the Pentagon’s growing influence. To hear some tell it, though, Eisenhower’s spiel about the military-industrial complex was a kind of public brain fart. At the National Review, Vincent J. Cannato uses quotes from less iconic parts of Eisenhower’s farewell address to argue that the president was “a complex and sometimes contradictory” figure who was “hardly…upset over Cold War militarism.”
The subtext, for NR readers, is, “Don’t worry about those anti-war lefties and the isolationist ‘Old Right’—we can still claim Ike would side with us in favor of permanent wars executed by private interests.”
For their part, Eisenhower’s descendants seem to think the farewell address was something more than an aberration. In another speech he made at the start of his term as President, Eisenhower offers an even more detailed critique of runaway militarism:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Slate history columnist David Greenberg offers a more capable contrarian argument about Eisenhower’s farewell address, although he fails to fully support his contention that it “has been completely misunderstood.”
Greenberg offers a brief recap of the so-called “Merchants of Death thesis,” which emerged after World War I to explain that complex and devastating conflict. The problem with scapegoating arms traders, Greenberg writes, is that the Merchants of Death thesis “allow[s] proponents to retreat into an unearned innocence: a grand theory of global conflict that pinned the blame for wars that go badly on forces outside the public’s control, rather than on the American people and their elected leaders.”
Greenberg’s point about the exculpatory nature of conspiracy theories is well taken. There is little doubt that a majority of the American public supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, at least initially.
Unfortunately, Greenberg goes on to more or less conflate critics of the arms trade and the military-industrial complex with Holocaust deniers, Nazi appeasers and conspiracy-minded cult members. He concludes:
If the farewell address is invoked merely to argue against extravagant military spending or to stand up against limits on civil liberties in the name of war, then count me as a fan. When it’s used—as it all too often is these days—to build the case for a conspiratorial, demonic system that bulldozes the American people into going to war or malevolently prolongs the fighting for reasons of profit, then it should be called out for what it is: the seedbed of some of the nastier rhetoric to infect our politics in recent times.
Is Greenberg suggesting that the profit motive never plays a role in starting or prolonging wars? That is clearlyfalse. Is he implying that discussion of wartime profits should be off the table, because it can be used to supplement “nasty” rhetoric? By that logic, religious differences ought not to be discussed, either, because they can lead to hate speech. Just because some conspiracy loons rail against war profiteers, real or imagined, does not mean that anyone who speaks of war profiteering is a conspiracy loon. Nor does it follow that because certain conspiracy theories are ugly and false, the rampant conflicts of interest throughout the defense industry have no pernicious effects on policy.
I’ll give Greenberg the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he inadvertently overstated his case. Obviously, if it is taboo to discuss the economic processes through which “unwarranted influence” is accumulated, then the public has no way to guard against what Eisenhower called “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
As a journalist who seeks to encourage reasoned debate around these issues, I find it personally frustrating that discussions of the arms trade and war profits inevitably attract conspiracy loons of the sort Greenberg decries. Let me be clear: There is no secret “Death Merchant” cabal in Arlington, Virginia or anywhere.
Indeed, the truly dangerous thing about the profit motive, where it overlaps with matters of war, is that no conspiracy is required for a few to gain at the expense of many. Rather, countless individual economic interests organically combine to create a system that favors war over peace, and emphasizes capital-intensive weapons production over less-intensive but more beneficial projects, such as education.
This is a reality far more difficult to accept than some dark fantasy about the Bilderbergers.
The premise of this website is that arms dealers and military contractors ought to be covered at least as thoroughly any other Washington, DC special interest group. Yet over the past several decades, the arms industry has not received the scrutiny it deserves. In part, that’s because few other lobbies can so effectively wrap themselves in the flag. This chart was made by Christopher Preble at the libertarian CATO institute. It shows how US military spending has grown as a share of the national economy over the past decade, while in other NATO countries, it has declined. In previous posts, I’ve detailed how an increasing percentage of that military spending is directed toward private contractors, while the funding for uniformed soldiers remains stagnant. The owners of these companies, many of whom face little personal risk in America’s current conflicts, are on the receiving end of what amounts to a massive wartime wealth transfer. If that’s not an accumulation of unwarranted influence, what is?
ON MLK DAY this year we also remember Pres Eisenhower's 'Beware The Pentagon Speech' and are reminded that the constant struggle for social justice, civil rights, human rights, as well as moral local, state and federal budgets that provide more for health care, housing, nutrition, education, sustainable communities and renewable energy than prisons and weapons systems is the right thing to do and we must never give up! I added the Pink Floyd video 'Dogs Of War' to the beginning of this story from NPR with Pres Eisenhower's speech following....
"Beware of the Military Industrial Complex" ~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address speech. Military-industrial complex (MIC) is a concept commonly used to refer to policy relationships between governments, national armed forces, and the industrial sector that supports them. These relationships include political approval for research, development, production, use, and support for military training, weapons, equipment, and facilities within the national defense and security policy. It is a type of iron triangle.
The term is most often played in reference to the military of the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address speech of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure.
It is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as institutions of the defense contractors, The Pentagon, and the Congress and executive branch. This sector is intrinsically prone to principal-agent problem, moral hazard, and rent seeking. Cases of political corruption have also surfaced with regularity.
A similar thesis was originally expressed by Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business, about the fascist government support to heavy industry. It can be defined as, an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs
Lyrics:
Dogs of war and men of hate
With no cause, we don't discriminate
Discovery is to be disowned
Our currency is flesh and bone
Hell opened up and put on sale
Gather 'round and haggle
For hard cash, we will lie and deceive
Even our masters don't know the web we weave
One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world
Invisible transfers, long distance calls,
Hollow laughter in marble halls
Steps have been taken, a silent uproar
Has unleashed the dogs of war
You can't stop what has begun
Signed, sealed, they deliver oblivion
We all have a dark side, to say the least
And dealing in death is the nature of the beast
One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world
The dogs of war don't negotiate
The dogs of war won't capitulate,
They will take and you will give,
And you must die so that they may live
You can knock at any door,
But wherever you go, you know they've been there before
Well winners can lose and things can get strained
But whatever you change, you know the dogs remain.
One world, it's a battleground
One world, and we will smash it down
One world ... One world
**"Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."**
EnlargeBill Allen/AP In his final speech from the White House, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that an arms race would take resources from other areas — such as building schools and hospitals.
Bill Allen/AP
In his final speech from the White House, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned that an arms race would take resources from other areas — such as building schools and hospitals.
On Jan. 17, 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower gave the nation a dire warning about what he described as a threat to democratic government. He called it the military-industrial complex, a formidable union of defense contractors and the armed forces.
Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general, the man who led the allies on D-Day, made the remarks in his farewell speech from the White House.
As NPR's Tom Bowman tells Morning Edition co-host Renee Montagne, Eisenhower used the speech to warn about "the immense military establishment" that had joined with "a large arms industry."
Here's an excerpt:
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist."
Since then, the phrase has become a rallying cry for opponents of military expansion.
Source: YouTube
Eisenhower gave the address after completing two terms in office; it was just days before the new president, John F. Kennedy, would be sworn in.
Eisenhower was worried about the costs of an arms race with the Soviet Union, and the resources it would take from other areas — such as building hospitals and schools.
Bowman says that in the speech, Eisenhower also spoke as someone who had seen the horror and lingering sadness of war, saying that "we must learn how to compose differences not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."
Another concern, Bowman says, was the possibility that as the military and the arms industry gained power, they would be a threat to democracy, with civilians losing control of the military-industrial complex.
In his remarks, Eisenhower also explained how the situation had developed:
"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions."
The difference, Bowman says, is that before the late 1950s, companies such as Ford built everything from jeeps to bombers — then went back to building cars. But that changed after the Korean War.
Bowman says that it's important to note that during the Cold War, the U.S. military didn't draw down its troops like it did after World War II.
"It kept a large standing army after the Korean War," he says.
America's new reliance on sophisticated weapons technology also helped bring about what Bowman calls "a technology race with the Soviets."
And that meant that weapons manufacturing became more specialized.
"So [for] a company like Ford, going from cars to jeeps is one thing; cars to missiles is quite another," Bowman says.
In an effort to control the expansion of the military-industrial complex, Eisenhower consistently sought to cut the Pentagon's budget.
The former general wanted a budget the country could afford, Bowman says. He upset all the military services with his budget cuts, especially the Air Force.
Citing another quote from Eisenhower — this one from another speech on military spending — Bowman says, "The jet plane that roars overhead costs three quarters of a million dollars. That’s more than a man will make in his lifetime. What world can afford this kind of thing for long?"
In today's government, Eisenhower has a fan in his fellow Kansan Secretary of Defense Robert Gates — who keeps a portrait of the former general in his office at the Pentagon, Bowman says.
Speaking at the Eisenhower Library last year, Gates talked about America's insatiable appetite for more and more weapons:
"Does the number of warships we have, and are building, really put America at risk, when the U.S. battle fleet is larger than the next 13 navies combined — 11 of which are our partners and allies?
Is it a dire threat that by 2020, the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?
These are the kinds of questions Eisenhower asked as commander-in-chief. They are the kinds of questions I believe he would ask today."
But, Bowman says, it has only become more difficult to control the size of the nation's military industry.
First, "there are only a handful of defense giants," he says, "which means you can't shop around for a better price."
And companies such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are also adept at both lobbying and marketing to promote their interests.
Bowman says, "they also spread the jobs around the country, to lock in political support."
Gates has also discussed the difficulty of cutting military spending:
"What it takes is the political will and willingness, as Eisenhower possessed, to make hard choices — choices that will displease powerful people both inside the Pentagon, and out."
Bowman says that some industry observers believe that "the one thing that could create that political will is the nation's huge deficit." Only that might force cuts in the overall defense budget.
Transcript of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address (1961)
My fellow Americans:
Three days from now, after half a century in the service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor.
This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen.
Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all.
Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on issues of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the Nation.
My own relations with the Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and, finally, to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years.
In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the Nation should go forward. So, my official relationship with the Congress ends in a feeling, on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together.
II
We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.
III
Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.
Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology-global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle-with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.
Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small,there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research-these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we which to travel.
But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs-balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage-balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between action of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.
The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.
IV
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United State corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been over shadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system-ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
V
Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we-you and I, and our government-must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
VI
Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.
Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.
Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war-as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years-I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.
Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.
VII
So-in this my last good night to you as your President-I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find somethings worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future.
You and I-my fellow citizens-need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nation's great goals.
To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing inspiration:
We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love.
Today is the 50th anniversary of US President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, in which he popularized the concept of the “military-industrial complex.” It is also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Last week, the Defense Department’s top lawyer argued that King, who attacked the Vietnam War as an imperial enterprise and urged young American men to become conscientious objectors in a time of active conscription, would support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To hear some tell it, though, Eisenhower’s spiel about the military-industrial complex was a kind of public brain fart. At the National Review, Vincent J. Cannato uses quotes from less iconic parts of Eisenhower’s farewell address to argue that the president was “a complex and sometimes contradictory” figure who was “hardly…upset over Cold War militarism.”
This chart was made by Christopher Preble at the libertarian CATO institute. It shows how US military spending has grown as a share of the national economy over the past decade, while in other NATO countries, it has declined. In previous posts, I’ve detailed how an increasing percentage of that military spending is directed toward private contractors, while the funding for uniformed soldiers remains stagnant. The owners of these companies, many of whom face little personal risk in America’s current conflicts, are on the receiving end of what amounts to a massive wartime wealth transfer. If that’s not an accumulation of unwarranted influence, what is?
