A Huge Military-Industrial Complex Threatens Our Rights, Our Liberties, Our Democracy
FEB 12, 2026
Hello Everyone: here’s an interview I did with Dick Price and Sharon Kyle at LA Progressive about why we can’t seem to heed Ike’s warning about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in 1961.
Other topics covered include sports and the military, Hollywood and the Pentagon, first-person shooter games, and toxic masculinity.
We also discuss what it would take to change America—to redirect energies dedicated to imperialism and war to democracy and peace. I say something here about idealism, a sign perhaps of my own naïveté.
You can have my ideals when you pry them from my cold dead brain.
Bracing Views 
The “war” notion, in its various dimensions, has been foisted upon us in recent history since the onset of the Cold War, arguably since the campaign to wipe out the Native Peoples. Some allusions may seem appropriate, e.g., War on Poverty, War on cancer. Others not so much, War on Drugs, War on Terrorism. Toss in Energy Czar and Drug Czar, and some other applications for sure.
Point is, it all speaks to metaphorical though also literal application of military-like, search-and-destroy-the-enemy kind of thinking, get it over and done with so we can go on with our lives, with little if any understanding of the “diplomatic” approach, that the problem whatever it may be requires introspection and analysis. For example, people in poverty? How about instituting national health insurance so people don’t have to go into medical debt? Nope, can’t do that, that’s socialism.
War on drugs? How ’bout people driven to despair due to lack of education, meaningful employment, how ’bout redressing the social and economic conditions that have led to that? Nope, government involvement in the private sector, can’t allow that.
War on terrorism? I think it was Chomsky who identified this country as the leading practitioner of that, a large part – but not the totality – involving our support of the genocidal entity known as Israel.
So one way or another, there are enemies in the form of actual human beings to be identified and so labeled, and nuked to get ’em out of way, out of consciousness, ASAP.
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