By Michael Gillespie

The first part of this series (The War Alarm: Waking Up from Reagan’s Nightmare,
The Independent Monitor, December 2010, page 2) examined Ronald Reagan’s attempt
to rewrite history by eliminating the extraordinary success of President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (FDR)’s wartime economic policies, which included massive and systematic
government intervention in and well-nigh complete control of the nation’s industry and
commerce. Roosevelt’s economic policies, including rationing and wage and price
controls, were instrumental in and essential to the U.S. military’s greatest triumphs,
the Allies crushing defeat of the fascist Axis powers less than four years after Japan’s
December 7, 1941 surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the
USA’s emergence as the world’s economic and military superpower during and after the
war.

This article explores the rise of what President Dwight David Eisenhower referred to
as the “military-industrial complex” and the effects of “a permanent armaments industry
of vast proportions” on American life and culture. Though it fields the most expensive
and technologically sophisticated military force on the world stage, the U.S. government
has not decisively won any major military conflict since 1945. Understanding these
developments is necessary if Americans are to effectively address their nation’s
economic decline and cultural deterioration.

Eisenhower’s credibility can hardly be challenged. As FDR’s choice for the
position of Supreme Commander of Allied forces in Europe, he was responsible for
planning and supervising the invasion of France and Germany from the west. FDR
had such confidence in him that Eisenhower sometimes worked directly with Soviet
leader Joseph Stalin to the chagrin of bypassed British leaders. He served as the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s first supreme commander in 1951. As president
(1953-1961), Eisenhower concluded negotiations with China to end the Korean War,
maintained pressure on the Soviet Union, and avoided hostilities during two terms in the
nation’s highest office, a time of peace. Eisenhower’s election as a Republican ended
two decades of New Deal Coalition in the White House, but as president he continued
New Deal policies, expanding Social Security and signing into law in 1956 the National
Interstate and Defense Highways Act, then the largest public works project in American
history. Though he chose not to publicly criticize Sen. Joseph McCarthy, he helped
remove the pathologically partisan Republican demagogue from power. Historians
typically rank “Ike” among America’s 10 greatest presidents. (Wikipedia)

In his farewell address to the American people, broadcast live from the White House
on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower focused specifically on and warned against the dangers
attendant upon the unprecedented development of a permanent armaments industry and
war machine. In part, he said:

“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 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 alone more than the net income of
all United States corporations.

“Now 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 Statehouse, 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 the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our
peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

Noting that technological developments were, “largely responsible for the sweeping
changes in our industrial-military posture,” Eisenhower warned against the “prospect
of domination of the nation’s scholars by … the power of money” and the “danger that
public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,” saying
that, “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.”

It was imperative, Eisenhower declared, that “we – you and I, and our government …
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.

“During 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
differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.”

Not since our first president, George Washington, addressed the nation as he left
office had a president delivered so prescient a speech. Yet the decades since have seen
many of Eisenhower’s greatest fears confirmed and most of his sage advice ignored as
subsequent leaders and policy makers have thrown caution to the wind, acting too often
without wisdom or restraint. The immense, unwarranted and still metastasizing influence
of what has become a Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence
complex destabilizes the nation and the world, sapping economic vitality, demoralizing
politics at all levels, warping religious impulses and traditions, and hindering spiritual
growth.

At the center of the nation’s economic difficulties is the unrestrained power of
corporations, private legal entities that have usurped the Constitutional rights of
individual citizens and gained all but total control of “government of the people, by
the people, for the people” (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address). In their relentless pursuit
of greater profitability, U.S. corporations have largely ignored or denied the serious
environmental damage and change their activities cause while exacerbating the transition
difficulties necessarily associated with the development and introduction of labor-saving
technologies. A November 1946 article in Fortune magazine titled “Machines Without
Men” addressed the issue of automated industrial production and a consequent reduction
in the number of manufacturing jobs. Authors E.W. Leaver and J.J. Brown minimized
concern that, “the automatic factory may well loose waves of temporary unemployment.
“So potentially efficient a production system makes the two-or-three-day [work] week
economically feasible. Its cheaper costs could be passed on to in higher wages to the
worker and in greater value to the consumer. It must, therefore, balance out at a higher
level of living than ever before. The new machines can emancipate the worker forever
from stultifying, monotonous toil,” declared the corporate propagandists.

A full-page ad in the January 1949 issue of American magazine, “A message prepared
by the Advertising Council, a non-profit organization supported by labor, business,
and the public, Published in the Public Interest by General Electric,” bragged that “our
American way … works better because … we are more inventive and we know how to
use machine power to produce more goods at lower cost. We have more skilled workers
than any other country. And we Americans save – and our savings go into new tools,
new plants, and new and better machines. Because of this, we produce more every
working hour and can buy more goods with an hour’s work than any other people in the
world. We can make the system work even better … by working together to turn out
more … through better machines and methods, more power, greater skills, and by sharing
the benefits through higher wages, lower prices, and shorter hours.”

By the mid-1950s industrial designer Brook Stevens had popularized the term “planned obsolescence,” and in 1960 cultural critic Vance Packard published The Waste Makers, an exposé of “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals.” The race to the bottom was well and truly on, and soon American corporations would begin the mass relocation of millions of American manufacturing jobs to countries where labor is cheaper and regulation lax or non-existent, in order, corporate spokesmen would claim, to remain competitive. Republican and Democratic leaders and law makers alike conspired with business and financial interests – corporations – to eviscerate the nation’s sound, vital, and diversified manufacturing base, which of course had been absolutely essential to victory in WWII.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat with ties to Brown and Root, Inc., a Texas engineering and construction company, escalated the Vietnam War after the fictitious Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The Pentagon awarded Brown and Root contracts for major construction projects in Vietnam. (As KBR, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, headed by Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000, was awarded lucrative contracts for a variety of services in Iraq after the Bush administration ordered the invasion of that country in 2003. Numerous scandals and investigations resulted from Halliburton’s and KBR’s actions in Iraq.) On May 15, 1969, then- Governor Ronald Reagan, a former spokesman for General Electric, the nation’s largest “defense” contractor, ordered some 800 California law enforcement officers to break up a peaceful protest by about 6,000 people at the University of California at Berkeley. Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies firing shotguns loaded with ‘00’ buckshot charged and then chased retreating protesters. Buckshot fatally wounded James Rector, a bystander, and permanently blinded carpenter Alan Blanchard. About 130 people sought treatment at local hospitals for head trauma, buckshot wounds, and other serious injuries. Reagan, who had referred to the Berkeley campus as “a haven for communist sympathizers, protesters and sex deviants,” then ordered the National Guard to occupy the entire city of Berkeley despite the Berkeley City Council’s vote against the occupation.

About year after the police riot and bloodshed, Reagan defended his actions publicly
saying, “If it takes a bloodbath, then let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” Less
than a month later, on May 4, 1970, violence erupted at Ohio’s Kent State University
when National Guard troops opened fire on anti-war protesters killing four students and
seriously wounding nine. As president, Reagan broke the back of organized labor in the
USA when he fired striking Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO)
workers in 1981 and had the union de-certified.

Corporations are able to put the rapacious pursuit of profit before the national
interest and workers’ rights only because they have become powerful enough to
control the nation’s political institutions and processes. Nowhere are the crimes and
excesses of corporations more evident than in the armaments, security, and intelligence
sectors. Unlike the companies and corporations that FDR mobilized during WWII,
most of these corporations have few or no profitable products or services to offer in
peacetime. Because the end of hostilities necessarily means a substantially reduced
need for the increasingly expensive weapons, weapons systems, and services (mercenaries, security, espionage, intelligence, propaganda, disinformation, psychological operations, etc.) that these corporations provide, they have no interest in our government – or rather their government – ending or even winning the wars that they foment. We have endless war because endless war best suits the needs of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-intelligence complex.

By retaining arms industry research, development, and manufacturing jobs in
the U.S. and locating their facilities in key Congressional districts spread across the
country while other manufacturing jobs and facilities were “off-shored,” so-called “defense” industry giants gained enormous political influence. These huge
corporations, which exist to profit from the production of expensive, increasingly
sophisticated and destructive high-technology products, weapons and weapons systems designed to kill human beings – to destroy life – conspire to make government policy that suits their needs, while they prevent the formulation and implementation of policies that
conform to legitimate national interests and to the principles upon which our nation
was founded. So-called “defense” industry corporations have the active support and
cooperation of interlocking media, security, and intelligence sector corporations. Taken
together their share of the nation’s total economic activity is such that it is impossible
to overestimate their power on Wall Street and in official Washington. As much as
President Barack Obama might have wished to end the immoral, budget-busting, counter-
productive wars in and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, to have done so and thus
eliminated “defense” industry jobs in the midst of an economic crisis might well have
precipitated the complete economic collapse he was struggling to prevent. The “defense”
industry, the war machine, and its various components and enablers are “the power of
money” and the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” made manifest, just as Eisenhower feared.

Some may find it comforting to believe the sophistries of apologists for Wall Street,
the financial services industry, and totally ineffective government watch dog – or lap
dog – agencies, including the notion that the economic crisis of 2008 surprised everyone.
Others note that creating an economic crisis that further damaged an already structurally
unsound economy may have been a shrewd way of assuring a steady supply of cannon
fodder for an all volunteer military neck deep in criminal wars of aggression, an utterly
immoral and extraordinarily risky way to run a country. War is not the answer to America’s problems; rather, it is a chief cause of many of them and it makes the just resolution of others all the more difficult. A run-amok arms industry and war machine do not a sound manufacturing base or a credible foreign policy make, nor will such abominations support a thriving economy or foster the vital cultural development and spiritual growth for which “Ike” expressed such grave concern.

The noxious effects of the Congressional-military-industrial-media-security-
intelligence complex on religion threaten to take the nation and the world back to a
more primitive era, during which a new “dark ages” of the interregnum of wisdom
will bear witness to the inexorable restoration of the imbalance between self-liberty
and self-control. Following the U.S. military’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam, many
conservative American Christian leaders looked to scripture for support and embraced
Christian Zionism, which conflates Old Testament theology and the modern nation state
of Israel to arrive at the notion that, as the late Grace Halsell put it, “every act taken by
Israel is orchestrated by God and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the
rest of us.” Vengeful militant Christian Zionists have promoted a chiliastic or millenialist
theology that foresees their own rapture before a final, apocalyptic world-ending battle
between the forces of good and evil at Megiddo in Israel, known as Armageddon in the
New Testament.

Jewish religious fundamentalists are at least as influential in politics in Israel as
Christian religious fundamentalists are in the USA. The vast majority of American
politicians and bureaucrats at the federal level, including those at the highest levels of
the federal government, live and work at the end of a very short leash held firmly by
Israeli leaders who exercise influence primarily through Israel’s powerful lobbying
group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), an ethnic special interest group masquerading as a civil rights monitoring
organization, and legions of pro-Israel operatives within government and in media
organizations. The special relationship between Israel and the USA, regularly re-
affirmed at AIPAC conventions, has long been based on AIPAC-organized political
support for and generous campaign contributions to American politicians, and Israeli
leaders’ ability to command generous, well-nigh slavish, and almost unconditional
military, diplomatic, and economic support from the U.S. government.

Israeli political leaders at the highest levels have long welcomed and rewarded the
support of militant American Christian Zionists leaders who seek to make an idol of the
state of Israel. For decades, Christian Zionist leaders and their political organizations
have lobbied heavily and persistently for U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic support for Israel while donating millions of dollars of their own money in support of Israel’s
systematic program of land theft and ethnic cleansing in illegally occupied Palestine.
Some Christian Zionist leaders have even actively supported Israeli Zionists who plan
to re-introduce ritual animal sacrifice to worship in the temple in Jerusalem, which has
raised concerns that ritual animal sacrifice in worship could be re-legitimized and become
a more widely accepted practice. Jesus’ introduction of the symbolic use of bread and
wine in the remembrance supper, with the spread of Christianity, largely removed blood
sacrifice from religion, a singularly remarkable and important act of social engineering
that has undergirded human religious, social, cultural, and spiritual progress for some
2,000 years.

If the paramount mission of religion as a social influence is to stabilize the ideals of
mankind during dangerous times of transition from one phase of civilization to another,
from one level of culture to another, clearly Eisenhower’s concern for the economic,
political, and spiritual wellbeing of Americans was well founded indeed.

America’s recovery from the economic crisis requires reform, restoration of the
imbalance between the power of government “of the people, by the people, for the
people” and the power of corporations. Moving beyond rigid ultranationalism, religious
extremism, and racial bias requires a renewed emphasis on the ethic of reciprocity and
rejection of the ethic of revenge, a renewed emphasis on education along with viable
plans and concerted efforts to address the root causes of social unrest and political
disaffection, primarily poverty, exploitation, and oppression. Corporate America’s civic
religion of “the free market” based on ruthless competition, mindless consumerism,
and short-term profits must be countered by a well-educated, well-informed, and
empowered citizenry committed to enduring values and working toward common goals
that represent the best interests of all the people. The most sophisticated system of
mass communications the world has ever seen could serve as an effective antidote to
the poisons of ultranationalism, religious fanaticism, and racial animosity, were the
imbalance of power restored and corporations, restrained by the rule of law, required by
government to act responsibly in the public interest for the common good.

Will growing evidence of national decline and the dual threat of global economic and
environmental catastrophe have the effect of focusing our leaders’ attentions and efforts
on essential reforms and laudable, achievable common goals?

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