Dwight D. Eisenhower, Republican President who today would be considered too liberal for the tastes of the Teahadist-Republican ultra right wing.
Score one for the rich, 0 for the rest of us.
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. - President Dwight Eisenhower.
Eisenhower also warned us about “The Military Industrial Complex” and how pervasive and hurtful it could grow and destroy our country. The CLASS WARFARE is real and so far the rich, the corporations have won.
I would like to post parts of this article written by David Mizner this past January 24th titled The Bloody Front in the Class War
“It seems that more and more progressives are focusing on the class war. That's the good news. The bad news: it seems that fewer and fewer progressives are focusing on class war's partner in crime, militarism. Make no mistake: Actual War = Class War. A good way to prevent war would be to win, or at least hold our own, in the class war, but we need to go at it from the other end as well: oppose the militarism that's gobbling up our resources, killing people from the unlucky classes, and helping to entrench the oligarchy.
The Budget Connection. This is the probably the most obvious link. More money for war and the machinery of war means less money for jobs, education, and everything else that constitutes a decent society. The military accounts for 54% of the country's discretionary spending, 19% of all spending, and 47% of all military spending worldwide. That's right: the U.S. spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined.
Much of that money goes not directly to wars but to weapons and to the maintenance of the American military empire. But the cost of our wars is staggering. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes put out a book arguing that the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would be three trillion dollars. Turns out, they were way off. It was too low. The new estimate is 4 to 6 trillion. (Wars are funded mostly through supplemental spending bills, which aren't included in the defense budget, and they also drain from the Department of Veterans Affairs and a range of other government sources.)
Four to six trillion for war while around the country states are unpaving roads, shutting off street lights, and shortening school years. It's hardly hyperbolic to say that the United States is destroying itself by maintaining its obscene military might. This is how powerful nations crumble.
The U.S. clearly has reached the point of imperial overreach. Military spending and debt-servicing are cannibalizing the U.S. economy, the real basis of its world power. Besides the late U.S.S.R., the U.S. also increasingly resembles the dying British Empire in 1945, crushed by immense debts incurred to wage the Second World War, unable to continue financing or defending the imperia, yet still imbued with imperial pretensions.
It is increasingly clear the President is not in control of America’s runaway military juggernaut. Sixty years ago, the great President Dwight Eisenhower, whose portrait I keep by my desk, warned Americans to beware of the military-industrial complex. Six decades later, partisans of permanent war and world domination have joined Wall Street’s money lenders to put America into thrall.”
The Corporate Connection. But where do all those dollars go? Many, if not most, go to contractors; oil companies benefit as well and then there is The Human Connection, Which is to say that people without much money are fighting and getting maimed and killing and dying and doing who knows what kind of damage to their psyches in wars that benefit rich people. And all this while we give the super rich and corporations obscene tax cuts.
And let’s not even talk about the oil interests. It has been abundantly clear that wars are good for oil companies. Unrest in the Middle East gives them just another excuse to jack up the price of oil…rather than doing so arbitrarily and without reason as they have done in the past. Oil companies are the main reason we will not be able to realize our dreams of becoming energy independent. Many really believe that we don’t have the technology or that it would take many years to accomplish; yet, a country like Brazil, third world-poor and backwards back in the 70s did just that when they converted all their vehicles to run on Ethanol and built the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. If Brazil could do it more than 30 years ago, why then couldn’t America do half of that?
The War on Drugs, the War on Terror, have become cottage industries that maintain an infrastructure of parasites that benefit from the jobs they do in these endeavors. “The Terror War is not an event, or a campaign, or even a crusade; it is a system. Its purpose is not to eliminate "terrorism" (however this infinitely elastic term is defined) but to perpetuate itself, to do what it does: make war. This system can be immensely rewarding, in many different ways, for those who operate or assist it, whether in government, media, academia, or business. This too is a self-sustaining dynamic, a feedback loop that gives money, power and attention to those who serve the system; this elevated position then allows them to accrue even more money, power and attention, until in the end -- as we can plainly see today -- any alternative voices and viewpoints are relegated to the margins. They are "unserious." They are unimportant. They are not allowed to penetrate or alter the operations of the system.”
The article further points out: “The rich must be overjoyed with the War on Terror, which has locked the country into a permanent state of war, a self-perpetuating upward redistribution of wealth. The rich make war to make money, and the war makes more war, which makes the rich more money.
PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.visitingdc.com/images/dwight-eisenhower-picture.