The fact that both President Obama and Mitt Romney are calling for increases to the defense budget (in the latter case, above what the military has asked for) is further proof that the military is the true “third rail” of American politics. In this strange universe where those without military credentials can’t endorse defense cuts, it took a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Adm. Mike Mullen, to make the obvious point that the nation’s ballooning debt was the biggest threat to national security.
Tag Archives: military-industrial complex
The Permanent Militarization of America – NYTimes.com
5 NovThrottled by the military-industrial complex
14 AprIke got it right
And he saw it and called, yes in 1960 when he left the Presidency. But James Ledbetter informs us on Blogginheads.tv, that he was aware of the problem much earlier. Here’s an excerpt from a speech he gave in 1953:
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. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Will ever escape the grasp of this terrible logic, which continues to impoverish us?
Truth and Traditions 