Michael Gillespie / Op Ed News – 2011-01-08 00:12:34

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Road-to-Recovery-Heed-by-Michael-Gillespie-101221-528.html

(December 25, 2010) — The first part of this series, The War Alarm: Waking Up from Reagan’s Nightmare, examined Ronald Reagan’s attempt to rewrite history by eliminating the extraordinary success of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (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 US 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 US 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 US 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, US 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 1960s, corporations had begun the mass relocation of millions of American manufacturing jobs to countries where labor is cheaper, 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 and vital 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.

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. [The Free Speech Movement.]

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 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 US and locating their facilities in key Congressional districts spread across the country, “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 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.

A run-amok arms industry and war machine do not a sound manufacturing base and 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 US 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 promote 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 US 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 US 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. This has raised serious concerns that blood sacrifice in religion might thus be more widely re-legitimized.

It was Jesus’ introduction of the symbolic use of bread and wine in the remembrance supper that, with the spread of Christianity, effectively 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 grave 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.

Recovery from 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 and comprehensive 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?

Michael Gillespie is a contributing editor at The Independent Monitor, the national newspaper of Arab Americans. He writes regularly for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. His reportage has been broadcast internationally by Swiss Radio International. He has served as Executive Director of the Tennessee Writers Alliance, and as vice-chair and chair of the Ames (IA) Interfaith Council.

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