War Nation: Military Keynesianism's Iron Grip on Washington

President Dwight D. Eisenhower may have said it best in his Chance for Peace speech of April 16^th 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 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.   This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point to the hope that comes with this spring of 1953."

Sadly, almost 60 years later the United States is far more firmly in the grip of the military industrial complex than when President Eisenhower issued this admonition.

___________________________

Sources and additional reading:

http://www.petercusters.nl/file/126

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Keynesianism

http://www.dvbic.org/TBI-Numbers.aspx

http://www.countercurrents.org/custers110811.htm

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/23-7

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/opinion/17mon1.html?hp

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0310garrett-peltier.html

http://monthlyreview.org/2007/06/01/from-military-keynesianism-to-global-neoliberal-militarism

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Moving-from-a-War-Economy-by-Bruce-K-Gagnon-111225-670.html

http://www.thenation.com/article/america-hooked-war

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/05-1

Next Page  1  |  2  |  3

(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).