Eisenhower’s worst fears have come true

The Iraq and the Afghan wars are costing America $3 billion a week. It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defense was made in 1961 by the US President Eisenhower. He was no left-winger, but a former general […]

Apathy the greatest enabler of the military industrial complex

The latest and greatest $8.3- million-a-day war for peace, Libya — is your single greatest expense as a citizen. Indeed, over half of federal discretionary spending — what Americans will pay for with their incomes taxes — goes to the armed forces and their legion of private contractors. Now imagine what that money could do […]

The extraordinary prestige of the military-industrial-congressional complex or Iron Triangle

Fifty years ago, President Eisenhower warned of the danger of the “military-industrial complex”. The huge budget and reach of America’s modern defense industry has proved him correct. Adjusted for inflation, US national security spending has more than doubled since Eisenhower left office. Year after year, the defence budget seems to rise – irrespective of whether […]

Real power rests with the corporations

Power does not rest with the electorate. It does not reside with either of the two major political parties. Power rests with corporations. And corporations gain very lucrative profits from war, even wars we have no chance of winning. The effort to return the US Congress to Democratic control in 2006 and end the war […]

Fascism through corporate control of government

Though the precise definition of Fascism may be argued, I am talking here of Fascism as defined as the corporate control of government. Or as the Godfather of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, once summed it up: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” In the early […]

Will U.S. status as world’s top arms and weapons seller come back to haunt America?

The United States has again topped the list of global arms sellers, with Israel, UAE and India purchasing the bulk of arms including fighter jets, says a think tank, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The independent Swedish institute has also warned that the spiraling sales of fighter jets could further destabilize many parts […]

The economic crisis creates major demand for change

Years of government and media propaganda in America has given the people in America a false vision of what democracy should look like. At this particular point in U.S. history, most of the people in this country are not sharing in the wealth of our immensely rich nation. Eighty percent of our population jointly shares […]

Will America’s military behemoth ever be dismantled?

An article in last Sunday’s New York Times provided an interesting analysis of the Egyptian military, one that holds some important lessons for America. The article described the military in Egypt as “the single most powerful institution in an autocratic state facing its toughest test in decades, an imminent presidential succession.” The military, which has been the […]

Why would anyone want to cut the U.S. military budget?

With $549 billion requested for basic military expenditures, and another $159 billion requested for U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—the record $708 billion military spending called for by the Obama administration for fiscal 2011 will be nearly equivalent to the military spending of all other nations in the world combined. And when it comes to […]

Voluntarily lowering the flag on the American Empire

An excerpt of an article by Chalmers Johnson [America finds itself in] August of 2010 with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan, even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq. I wish I had a crystal ball to peer into and see what historians will make of August in 2060. Let […]