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By Zeev Sternhell
By Orhan Pamuk
$15.03
$23
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Tag: Military-industrial Complex
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When female writers disappeared from the Wikipedia heading “American novelists,” more than a few eyebrows were raised; Pvt. Bradley Manning being revoked as grand marshal of the San Francisco Gay Pride parade proves that the military-industrial complex rules all; meanwhile, another price-fixing scandal reminiscent of Libor is about to explode. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on May 1, 2013
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AP/Matt Rourke
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By Robert Scheer — Election night was a heck of a party, but morning in America already feels too much like a hangover.
Posted on Nov 9, 2012
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U.S. Navy/Chief Mass Communication Specialist Keith Deviney
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By Robert Scheer — Obama, the naive community organizer, thinks the foreign policy debate is about national security, but Romney, the quintessential vulture capitalist, knows that it’s always been about maximizing profit.
Posted on Oct 26, 2012
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Photo by Peter Pearson (CC-BY-SA)
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By William Pfaff — From the beginning of the Arab Awakening (“Arab Springtime,” as it was, but alas two springtimes have already passed), my opinion has been to stay out of these events, as far as possible, and certainly not to attempt to control them.
Posted on Oct 16, 2012
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Taking a page right out of “Star Wars,” California-based aerospace manufacturer Aerofex has released video showing a kind of “hover bike” maneuvering through the desert in scenes that resemble Luke Skywalker’s dashes through the Tatooine wilderness on his X-34 Landspeeder.
Posted on Aug 23, 2012
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U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Eric Harris
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By Bill Boyarsky — President Barack Obama is making sure that foreign policy will remain in the hands of the military-industrial complex. Whoever is in charge, the military, the intelligence spooks and the war industries always seem to co-opt the president.
Posted on Jun 20, 2012
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White House / Pete Souza
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By William Pfaff — European missile defense against the threat of hypothetical Iranian nuclear missile attack is a make-work project for the American aerospace industry and always has been.
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Lillian Thurston
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By Scott Tucker — Stewart Alexander believes fair elections are worth a fair fight and he’s asking for your vote. The Occupy Wall Street movement encouraged a more honest discussion of class and capitalism in this country, but Alexander is not simply a critic of big banks and high finance.
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AP / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama will be re-elected not as a vindication of his policies but because the Republicans are incapable of providing a reasonable challenge to his flawed performance.
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AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — What’s alarming is the ease with which an otherwise deadlocked Congress that can’t manage minimal funding for job creation passes a bill that threatens the foundations of our republican form of government.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Christopher Boitz
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Iraq has made a down payment of $1.4 billion to the United States on 18 F-16 fighter jets that are intended to protect Iraqi sovereignty when the U.S. is gone. But the planes will not be delivered for years to come, and U.S. forces are required by the status-of-forces agreement to withdraw by the end of December. (more)
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DoD
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The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction (also known as the “supercommittee,” because it is made up of equal parts Republican, Democrat, House and Senate) was set up to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget. Though military enthusiasts make a great show of worry for defense spending, they have little to fear ... (more)
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Flickr / Andrew Rusk
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This Thursday, Seven Stories Press will release a 10th anniversary reissue of Noam Chomsky’s book on the World Trade Center attacks titled “9-11: Was There an Alternative?” and TomDispatch has an exclusive excerpt from the new preface. (more)
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Nick Turse — If you follow the words, one Middle East comes into view; if you follow the weapons, quite another.
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AP / Reed Saxon
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By Bill Boyarsky — With a liberal, anti-war candidate, Marcy Winograd, in the race, the vote to replace Rep. Jane Harman in Southern California is likely to be the year’s first national electoral test of support for the Afghanistan War.
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U.S. Air Force / Master Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald
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With the U.S. already maxing out the credit card with roughly a trillion dollars a year on defense spending, America’s weapons industry has been forced to look elsewhere for buyers. Luckily for the military-industrial complex, there’s an eager salesman in the White House.
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By Amy Goodman — Egypt has been the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid for decades. Where has the money gone? Mostly to U.S. corporations.
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By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch —
In defense circles, “cutting” the Pentagon budget has once again become a topic of conversation. Americans should not confuse that talk with reality.
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By Eugene Robinson — Republicans who feign attacks of the vapors and fainting spells over the big, scary deficit would be more convincing if they didn’t begin with the insane premise that defense spending should be sacrosanct.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Michael B. Keller
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The Pentagon’s budget is only about half of what the U.S. spends on war and defense. If you add costs like nuclear weapons and the medical care of wounded soldiers, the figure tops $1 trillion. Robert Higgs has the math to prove it.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Andy M. Kin
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“If the Pentagon wants something, the logic goes, then it must be necessary,” writes Gregg Easterbrook in a recent examination of military waste. As a result, military spending has jumped 119 percent since 2001, 68 percent if you exclude the two wars fought in that time.
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By Eugene Robinson — I come not to bury the manifesto issued last week by President Obama’s debt-reduction commission, but to praise the most welcome of its ideas: Slash defense spending along with everything else.
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Royal Air Force / Cpl. Paul Saxby
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The United States spends more on its military than every other country in the world combined. That’s not likely to change, with British Prime Minister David Cameron announcing plans to cut military spending by 8 percent over four years. (continued)
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U.S. Air Force / Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock
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By Amy Goodman — Getting out of the red is the new black. Deficit hawks have swooped down on the U.S. budget. This week, they attacked unemployment benefits.
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AP
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By Robert Scheer — Peace has descended on the most contentious point of conflict between East and West for the past six decades—but don’t expect the folks at the Pentagon or their military contractors to celebrate.
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By Joshua Holland, AlterNet —
The bill would cut the DoD’s budget and use that money to make the first $35,000 each American earns tax-free.
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AP / J.P. Karas
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By Robert Scheer — There is no “war” against terrorism. What George W. Bush launched and Barack Obama insists on perpetuating does not qualify. Not if by war one means doing the obvious and checking a highly suspicious air traveler’s underwear to see if explosives have been sewn in.
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U.S. Air Force / Master Sgt. Shane A. Cuomo
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One politician’s jobs program is another’s “inexcusable waste of money.” Luckily for the taxpayer, that’s how Barack Obama feels about the F-22 strike fighter, a plane Congress has been pushing over the military’s objections. After Obama threatened a veto, the Senate voted not to fund the jet, which was designed to fight the Soviets.
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AP photo / Rich Pedroncelli
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By Chris Hedges — The embrace by any society of permanent war is a parasite that devours the heart and soul of a nation. Permanent war extinguishes liberal, democratic movements. It turns culture into nationalist cant. It degrades and corrupts education and the media, and wrecks the economy.
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We certainly saw evidence that President Eisenhower’s famous warning about the dangers of an insatiable U.S. “military-industrial complex” rang true during the Bush administration, but how about now?
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Newt Gingrich is right: “It is European socialism transplanted to Washington.” How else to describe an economy in which the government controls the entire financial center and is now supplying life support for the auto industry?
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flickr.com/mindfrieze
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By Chalmers Johnson — There has been much moaning, air-sucking and outrage about the U.S. government’s $700-billion bailout deal, but in fact we dole out similar amounts of money every year in the form of payoffs to the armed services, the military-industrial complex, and powerful senators and representatives allied with the Pentagon.
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U.S. Navy / Jordon R. Beesley
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By Chalmers Johnson — Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our constitutional structure of checks and balances.
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AP photo / Greg Baker
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By Robert Scheer — You can’t trust the Chinese. I don’t care if you’re talking about those communists on the mainland or the other guys on Taiwan; they just won’t follow the war-games script that our weapons hawks had counted on.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — War doesn’t pay, nor does imperial ambition. This proposition should be evident to anyone who has paid attention to the fivefold increase in the price of oil since George W. Bush took office. The principle of nonintervention is neither liberal nor conservative in orientation, and at the inception of the Republic it was accepted as a commonsense.
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joezuikerforcongress.com
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Pork, as in earmarks, not as in pig, is again in vogue this political season only a year after a 2007 congressional promise to curb what some call wasteful spending in politicians’ home districts. At the top of the earmarking ladder is the defense authorization bill (read military-industrial complex), which saw a 29 percent increase in district spending since 2007.
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In this clip from The Real News, featuring an interview with Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, we learn that Iranian officials made an offer back in 2003 to negotiate with the Bush administration about all the important issues causing friction between Tehran and Washington. But we also learn that Dick Cheney was opposed to “talking to evil, period”— and had certain other reasons for refusing Iran’s overture.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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By Robert Scheer — Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic stability and reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.
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AP photo / Junji Kurokawa
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By Robert Scheer — Not to stoke any of the inane conspiracy theories running wild on the Internet, but if Osama bin Laden wasn’t on the payroll of Lockheed-Martin or some other large defense contractor, he deserves to have been. What a boondoggle 9/11 has been for the merchants of war, who this week announced yet another quarter of whopping profits made possible by George Bush’s pretending to fight terrorism by throwing money at outdated Cold War-style weapons systems.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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James Harris and Josh Scheer —
Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Philip Coyle knows a thing or two about the “staggering” amounts of money the U.S. funnels into the military-industrial complex, and why it is so difficult to stanch the profiteering.
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AP Photo / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
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By Robert Scheer — In 1795, James Madison wrote of war’s far-reaching and corrosive effect on public liberty. He could well have been warning us about our own King George, just the sort of imperial president that Madison and other founders of our nation feared most.
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AP Photo / Khalid Mohammed
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By Robert Scheer — Many critics of the war suggest that the U.S. remains in Iraq because it wants that nation’s petroleum. But oil is not the primary reason. Instead, look to the military-industrial complex, a threat that President Eisenhower warned of in the 1960s.
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According to internal audit documents obtained by The Washington Post, the Defense Department wasted millions of dollars by farming out contracting to the Interior Department in an effort to “expedite” the process. Through the program, Interior routinely awarded overpriced and under-monitored no-bid contracts in exchange for a fee from the Pentagon.
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