Category: US Politics

Dwight Eisenhower on the Cost of Permanent War

W.J. Astore

Ike’s Cross of Iron Speech, 70 Years Later

If Dwight Eisenhower could somehow give his 1953 “Cross of Iron” address and his 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex to the American people today, I truly believe he’d be dismissed by the mainstream media (MSM) as a Putin puppet and as repeating Kremlin talking points. Why? Because Ike advocated for negotiation and peace instead of war; he documented how spending on weapons was intrinsically wasteful and a bane to democratic society; and he challenged citizens to be alert and knowledgeable, ready to take action against the growing power of a corporate-military nexus supported and strengthened by Congress.

To mark Ike’s integrity and wisdom, and also to update his cost calculations from 1953 for the present day, I wrote this article, my latest for TomDispatch.com. Again, the words of Ike, focusing on peace, the preciousness and burdens of democracy, and the dangers of militarism, are rarely if ever heard in our government and in the MSM today. And that suggests we are in a dark place indeed in this country of ours.

In April 1953, newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general who had led the landings on D-Day in France in June 1944, gave his most powerful speech. It would become known as his “Cross of Iron” address. In it, Ike warned of the cost humanity would pay if Cold War competition led to a world dominated by wars and weaponry that couldn’t be reined in. In the immediate aftermath of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Ike extended an olive branch to the new leaders of that empire. He sought, he said, to put America and the world on a “highway to peace.” It was, of course, never to be, as this country’s emergent military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) chose instead to build a militarized (and highly profitable) highway to hell.

Eight years later, in his famous farewell address, a frustrated and alarmed president called out “the military-industrial complex,” prophetically warning of its anti-democratic nature and the disastrous rise of misplaced power that it represented. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, fully engaged in corralling, containing, and constraining it, he concluded, could save democracy and bolster peaceful methods and goals. 

The MICC’s response was, of course, to ignore his warning, while waging a savage war on communism in the name of containing it. In the process, atrocious conflicts would be launched in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as the contagion of war spread. Threatened with the possibility of peace in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the MICC bided its time with operations in Iraq (Desert Storm), Bosnia, and elsewhere, along with the expansion of NATO, until it could launch an unconstrained Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.  Those “good times” (filled with lost wars) lasted until 2021 and the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Not to be deterred by the fizzling of the nightmarish war on terror, the MICC seized on a “new cold war” with China and Russia, which only surged when, in 2022, Vladimir Putin so disastrously invaded Ukraine (as the U.S. had once invaded Afghanistan and Iraq). Yet again, Americans were told that they faced implacable foes that could only be met with overwhelming military power and, of course, the funding that went with it — again in the name of deterrence and containment. 

In a way, in 1953 and later in 1961, Ike, too, had been urging Americans to launch a war of containment, only against an internal foe: what he then labeled for the first time “the military-industrial complex.” For various reasons, we failed to heed his warnings. As a result, over the last 70 years, it has grown to dominate the federal government as well as American culture in a myriad of ways. Leaving aside fundingwhere it’s beyond dominant, try movies, TV shows, video games, education, sports, you name it. Today, the MICC is remarkably uncontained. Ike’s words weren’t enough and, sadly, his actions too often conflicted with his vision (as in the CIA’s involvement in a coup in Iran in 1953). So, his worst nightmare did indeed come to pass. In 2023, along with much of the world, America does indeed hang from a cross of iron, hovering closer to the brink of nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Updating Ike’s Cross of Iron Speech for Today

Perhaps the most quoted passage in that 1953 speech addressed the true cost of militarism, with Ike putting it in homespun, easily grasped, terms. He started by saying, “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.” (An aside: Can you imagine Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or any other recent president challenging Pentagon spending and militarism so brazenly?)

Ike then added:

“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 fifty miles of concrete pavement. 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.”

He concluded with a harrowing image: “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.”

Ike’s cost breakdown of guns versus butter, weapons versus civilian goods, got me thinking recently: What would it look like if he could give that speech today? Are we getting more bang for the military megabucks we spend, or less?  How much are Americans sacrificing to their wasteful and wanton god of war?

Let’s take a closer look. A conservative cost estimate for one of the Air Force’s new “heavy” strategic nuclear bombers, the B-21 Raider, is $750 million. A conservative estimate for a single new fighter plane, in this case the F-35 Lightning II, is $100 million. A single Navy destroyer, a Zumwalt-class ship, will be anywhere from $4 to $8 billion, but let’s just stick with the lower figure. Using those weapons, and some quick Internet sleuthing, here’s how Ike’s passage might read if he stood before us now:

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick-veneer and reinforced concrete school in 75 cities.  It is five electric power plants, each serving a town with 60,000 inhabitants. It is five fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 150 miles of pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with more than 12 million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 64,000 people.”

(Quick and dirty figures for the calculations above: $10 million per elementary school; $150 million per power plant [$5,000/kilowatt for 30,000 homes]; $150 million per hospital; $5 million per new mile of road; $8 per bushel of wheat; $250,000 per home for four people.)

Grim stats indeed! Admittedly, those are just ballpark figures, but taken together they show that the tradeoff between guns and butter — bombers and jet fighters on the one hand, schools and hospitals on the other — is considerably worse now than in Ike’s day. Yet Congress doesn’t seem to care, as Pentagon budgets continue to soar irrespective of huge cost overruns and failed audits (five in a row!), not to speak of failed wars.

Without irony, today’s MICC speaks of “investing” in weapons, yet, unlike Ike in 1953, today’s generals, the CEOs of the major weapons-making corporations, and members of Congress never bring up the lost opportunity costs of such “investments.” Imagine the better schools and hospitals this country could have today, the improved public transportation, more affordable housing, even bushels of wheat, for the cost of those prodigal weapons and the complex that goes with them. And perish the thought of acknowledging in any significant way how so many of those “investments” have failed spectacularly, including the Zumwalt-class destroyers and the Navy’s Freedom-class littoral combat ships that came to be known in the Pentagon as “little crappy ships.”

Speaking of wasteful warships, Ike was hardly the first person to notice how much they cost or what can be sacrificed in building them. In his prescient book The War in the Air, first published in 1907, H.G. Wells, the famed author who had envisioned an alien invasion of Earth in The War of the Worlds, denounced his own epoch’s obsession with ironclad battleships in a passage that eerily anticipated Ike’s powerful critique:

The cost of those battleships, Wells wrote, must be measured by:

“The lives of countless men… spent in their service, the splendid genius and patience of thousands of engineers and inventors, wealth and material beyond estimating; to their account we must put stunted and starved lives on land, millions of children sent to toil unduly, innumerable opportunities of fine living undeveloped and lost. Money had to be found for them at any cost—that was the law of a nation’s existence during that strange time.  Surely they were the weirdest, most destructive and wasteful megatheria in the whole history of mechanical invention.”

Little could he imagine our own era’s “wasteful megatheria.” These days, substitute nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, strategic bombers, aircraft carriers, and similar “modern” weapons for the ironclads of his era and the sentiment rings at least as true as it did then. (Interestingly, all those highly touted ironclads did nothing to avert the disaster of World War I and had little impact on its murderous course or ponderous duration.)

Returning to 1953, Eisenhower didn’t mince words about what the world faced if the iron cross mentality won out: at worst, nuclear war; at best, “a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system, or the Soviet system, or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.”

Ike’s worst-case scenario grows ever more likely today. Recently, Russia suspended the START treaty, the final nuclear deal still in operation, that oversaw reductions in strategic nuclear weapons.  Instead of reductions, Russia, China, and the United States are now pursuing staggering “modernization” programs for their nuclear arsenals, an effort that may cost the American taxpayer nearly $2 trillion over the coming decades (though even such a huge sum matters little if most of us are dead from nuclear war).

In any case, the United States in 2023 clearly reflects Ike’s “cross of iron” scenario. It’s a country that’s become thoroughly militarized and so is slowly wasting away, marked increasingly by fear, deprivation, and unhappiness.

It’s Never Too Late to Change Course

Only Americans, Ike once said, can truly hurt America.  Meaning, to put the matter in a more positive context, only we can truly help save America. A vital first step is to put the word “peace” back in our national vocabulary.

“The peace we seek,” Ike explained 70 years ago, “founded upon a decent trust and cooperative effort among nations, can be fortified, not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and timber and rice. These are words that translate into every language on earth. These are the needs that challenge this world in arms.”

The real needs of humanity haven’t changed since Ike’s time. Whether in 1953 or 2023, more guns won’t serve the cause of peace. They won’t provide succor. They’ll only stunt and starve us, to echo the words of H.G. Wells, while imperiling the lives and futures of our children.

This is no way of life at all, as Ike certainly would have noted, were he alive today.

Which is why the federal budget proposal released by President Biden for 2024 was both so painfully predictable and so immensely disappointing. Calamitously so. Biden’s proposal once again boosts spending on weaponry and war in a Pentagon budget now pegged at $886 billion. It will include yet more spending on nuclear weapons and envisions only further perpetual tensions with “near-peer” rivals China and Russia.

This past year, Congress added $45 billion more to that budget than even the president and the Pentagon requested, putting this country’s 2023 Pentagon budget at $858 billion. Clearly, a trillion-dollar Pentagon budget is in our collective future, perhaps as early as 2027. Perish the thought of how high it could soar, should the U.S. find itself in a shooting war with China or Russia (as the recent Russian downing of a U.S. drone in the Black Sea brought to mind).  And if that war were to go nuclear…

The Pentagon’s soaring war budget broadcast a clear and shocking message to the world. In America’s creed, blessed are the warmakers and those martyrs crucified on its cross of iron.

This was hardly the message Ike sought to convey to the world 70 years ago this April. Yet it’s the message the MICC conveys with its grossly inflated military budgets and endless saber-rattling.

Yet one thing remains true today: it’s never too late to change course, to order an “about-face.” Sadly, lacking the wisdom of Dwight D. Eisenhower, such an order won’t come from Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis or any other major candidate for president in 2024. It would have to come from us, collectively. It’s time to wise up, America. Together, it’s time to find an exit ramp from the highway to hell that we’ve been on since 1953 and look for the on-ramp to Ike’s highway to peace.

And once we’re on it, let’s push the pedal to the metal and never look back.

Strange Doings in the Democratic Party

W.J. Astore

Taking Democracy Out of America

Amazingly, the presidential election of 2024 isn’t that far away, and already the Democratic Party is doing its best to remove democracy from the process.  Once again, the DNC is uniting behind Joe Biden who, if reelected, would be 86 if he finished his second term of office.  Already South Carolina has been awarded the first primary in place of New Hampshire, since Biden performed much better in SC than in NH in 2020. Already the DNC has announced it wants no primary debates even though Biden faces at least one challenger of substance, Marianne Williamson.  Already Democrats are being told you shouldn’t want a younger, more dynamic, more progressive candidate, that more candidates and more choice is bad, that no possible mainstream candidate is better than Biden, and anyway Democrats can’t be distracted by choice when the Republican candidate is likely to be Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis.

At the same time, Kamala Harris remains Biden’s heir-apparent, even though Harris is both politically unpopular and ham-fisted.  As Krystal Ball, who can’t be accused of being anti-women, explained, Harris lacks political talent, full stop.  Like most VPs, she has accomplished little, but when she has taken center stage, she hasn’t inspired confidence.  Nevertheless, she’s important to the image of the party and its alleged commitment to diversity.  Old white guy Joe needs to be balanced by a younger woman of color irrespective of her lack of political acumen and her lackluster record in office.

Sadly, we’re at a place where to critique Joe Biden is to be accused of ageism; to critique Kamala Harris is to be accused of both racism and misogyny.  To ask for more candidates, more competition, more democracy is to be accused of being an operative for Trump.  So it’s likely Biden/Harris again for 2024, like it or lump it.

Well, at least they’re happy

The last true liberal/progressive Democratic nominee who tried to bring real hope and change to America was George McGovern in 1972.  Nixon trounced him, of course, and Democrats at the top abandoned “leftist” notions for a pro-business, pro-banking, pro-military, and pro-money agenda, as implemented by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  Both were two-term presidents, both were good at posing as champions of regular folk while implementing agendas that were old-school Republican.  Meanwhile, the real Republicans drifted ever further to the right.

America today is stuck with two rightist parties, a uniparty of sorts, where the agenda favors the richest few versus the poorest many, the powerful versus the powerless.  Sure, the Democrats profess they are more “woke” and are willing to talk about systemic racism, sexism, LGBTQ issues, and so on, while the Republicans, incredibly, are both more populist and more willing to question massive spending on weapons and war.  Yet both parties remain bought and paid for, serving the interests of the big-money owners and donors.  In short, 2024 promises a rigged deal, not a new one, no matter which major party candidate wins.

And that’s a shame, because America needs a New Deal for the poor, the powerless, the workers, the regular folk, but they’re not even allowed to have a candidate, let alone a choice.  At this moment, the most likely “choice” is between Biden/Harris and Trump/DeSantis, and if you think either ticket will support meaningful change…

Establishment America is bereft of new ideas and new possibilities; thus, the dynamism of our nation is dying, smothered by greed and cynicism.  It’s “no change” Biden versus “very unstable grifter” Trump, or possibly “younger grifter” DeSantis.  What a choice!

So, who would I vote for if the election were held today?  Marianne Williamson.  She’s not perfect (there is no perfect candidate), but she’s articulate, empathetic, and open-minded.  Better yet, she’s not bought and paid for.  If I were a Democrat (I’m not), I’d vote for her just because the establishment dismisses her as an unserious crystal/aura lady.  Imagine: she dares talk about love and compassion and pursuing peace.  We can’t have that in America!

I hope Williamson gains traction within the party, enough so that the DNC can’t suppress debates, because real debates would reveal what many have already noted: that Biden has slipped too much to be entrusted with the presidency for another four years.  Yet, unless he collapses on stage, or even if he does, the DNC will continue to prop him up as vigorous and able to serve.

That ongoing sham reveals a harsh reality: who is president doesn’t really matter in America when the candidates and their staff are pre-selected by the real power centers like Wall Street and the National Security State.

With the Twitter Files, Democrats Support Government Censorship of Lawful Speech

W.J. Astore

Welcome to the era of state-sponsored thought police

Yesterday, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Their testimony, and the risible reactions of Democrats on the subcommittee, are well worth watching; I watched the entire hearing, which lasted 140 minutes. Kim Iverson has an excellent summary here which lasts about 23 minutes. As Iverson notes, the Democrats on the subcommittee demonized the journalists while supporting censorship of ordinary Americans for political advantage, a clear violation of freedom of speech and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Shellenberger and Taibbi, “so-called” journalists according to Democrats

Clearly, the Twitter Files have revealed government-directed censorship of lawful speech. The reactions and strategy of the Democrats on the subcommittee were as follows:

  1. To smear the two journalists who volunteered to appear before Congress as “so-called” journalists; as being biased witnesses in favor of the right (even though Shellenberger testified he’d voted for Biden, and Taibbi described himself as a traditional ACLU liberal); as having the basest of motives, such as taking payments and otherwise profiting from their journalism; and of being willing or unwilling dupes of Elon Musk.
  2. To repeat, again and again, that Russia massively interfered in the 2016 and 2020 elections, therefore government-directed efforts to suppress “foreign interference” in U.S. elections was both legitimate and praiseworthy.
  3. To associate Elon Musk with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and other alleged bad actors, thereby suggesting that the Twitter Files are tainted and compromised by foreign information ops and influence.
  4. To defend the FBI and other government agencies like the DHS and CIA as trustworthy and reliable defenders of truth as well as upholders of the First Amendment.
  5. To suggest that the journalists involved posed a “direct threat,” e.g. to workers at Twitter, not the federal government or powerful corporations like Twitter itself or Facebook.
  6. To imply the subcommittee’s purpose wasn’t about free speech at all; that its purpose was purely political and intended to advance right-wing agendas.
  7. Specific to the Hunter Biden laptop story, one Democrat implied the hard drive could have been altered, thus calling into question the validity of emails and other data on that drive.
  8. To change the subject by accusing Republicans of being worse offenders since they’re trying to ban books; also that Donald Trump is worse because he jailed one of his opponents.

Not one Democrat on the subcommittee expressed concern about the peril of state-sponsored censorship and suppression of free expression. Indeed, the Democrats took pains to portray the journalists in front of them as the real peril, along with Russia, Elon Musk, Republican book-banners, and other bad actors.

It was all rather amazing, a “shit storm” to quote Kim Iverson.

Matt Taibbi, award-winning journalist with 30 years’ experience, dismissed as an Elon Musk tool by Democrats

So many important points made by Taibbi and Shellenberger could easily get lost in this political shit storm, which I suppose was the Democrats’ strategy. Here’s a short list of those points:

  1. As Taibbi said, state-directed censorship on Twitter didn’t just affect the right but also people on the left and publications like Consortium News and Truthout.
  2. We’re looking at an emerging censorship-industrial complex, an unholy alliance between government and private corporations to filter, constrain, and otherwise control information sources. A form of “digital McCarthyism.”
  3. Ordinary Americans are being deprived of their free speech rights without due process. Not only that: some are de-platformed and then denied access to pay sources (like PayPal) as punishment. So, not only can’t you speak freely: you also can’t support yourself financially.
  4. Government calls (in this case by the FTC) to investigate the backgrounds of Taibbi, Shellenberger, and other journalists involved in the Twitter Files creates a chilling effect on journalism. As Shellenberger noted, it’s reminiscent of the Stasi (secret police) in East Germany.

Democrats on the subcommittee had no interest in any of this. Their strategy was to dismiss the hearing as politically motivated and the journalists involved as greedy opportunists handpicked by Elon Musk (whom, you might recall, was associated with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, and perhaps Hitler, Stalin, and Darth Vader).

Interestingly, I learned a new word in the hearings: “pre-bunking.” Apparently, the Democrats in 2020 knew the Republicans had Hunter Biden’s laptop, so they engaged in an exercise to “pre-bunk” the release of embarrassing details from that computer. To wit, mainstream media “journalists” were encouraged not to follow the “Pentagon Papers” model of publishing leaked and legitimate material quickly. Rather, they were primed not to cover such a story, or to cover it as a case of Russian disinformation.

And that’s exactly what the mainstream media did in October 2020: as a group, they wrongly dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop revelations as Russian disinformation as the government worked hand-in-glove with Twitter, Facebook, and others to suppress the story as malicious and false. As we now know (and as was known then), the Hunter Biden laptop story was well-sourced and accurate. There was no Russian connection whatsoever. (Kudos to the Democrats for their dirty tricks here; even Richard Nixon couldn’t have done it better.)

Again, Democrats on the subcommittee showed no interest in or concern about an emerging censorship-industrial complex and its suppression of free speech rights. They painted the journalists before them as bad or sketchy actors and the FBI and other government agencies like DHS and the CIA as the good guys, working selflessly and without bias to protect us all from the “dangerous” ideas of our fellow citizens.

Welcome to the era of state-sponsored thought police, brought to you by your Democratic friends in Congress.

Addendum (3/11): All those Democrats so eager to pillory Taibbi and Shellenberger: they all took an oath to support and uphold the Constitution.

I’m not sure there’s any more fundamental right to that oath than freedom of speech.

If you take your oath seriously as a Member of Congress, your focus at the hearing should — must — have been on upholding that fundamental right against government-directed interference and censorship.

Yet none of them mentioned this or their oath — their sworn duty — to the Constitution.

This is worse than mendacity; they are derelict in their duties as representatives and public servants.

Peaceful Sightseers at the Capitol!

W.J. Astore

The Fight Over the January 6th Riots

Yoda, the Jedi Master, once told Luke Skywalker that the future is difficult to see because it’s always in motion.

So too is the past. Always in motion it is. Its meaning. We can’t and don’t remember everything even as we construct narratives of meaning out of those things we can or choose to remember.

William Faulkner famously said the past isn’t dead — it’s not even past. That’s most certainly true of the now-infamous Capitol riot in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s defeat in November 2020.

America is yet again fighting for control over the past with respect to the January 6th riot in 2021. This week at Fox News, Tucker Carlson suggested the rioters were mostly peaceful respectful sightseers. They revered the Capitol! They took cheerful selfies! They even queued in neat little lines! 

Insurrectionist goons, or peaceful protesters who revere the Capitol?

Even Republicans like Mitch McConnell have gone on record to denounce Carlson’s cherrypicking of the video evidence. Here’s what McConnell had to say: “It was a mistake, in my view, for Fox News to depict this in a way that’s completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capitol thinks.” McConnell cited a letter by the US Capitol Police that described Carlson’s program as being “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions about the January 6th attack.”

To state the obvious: On controversial and politicized issues like this, the past doesn’t speak with one voice. Opportunists seek to polarize the past. To exploit it for their own purposes. This is true of Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump. It’s also true of many Democrats.

The January 6th riots were not an insurrection. They were not a coup. They were akin to mob violence. They most definitely were a collective temper tantrum incited by Trump that led to considerable chaos and violence. The person most responsible for them should be punished. That person, Donald Trump, walked away scot-free. 

My immediate reaction to the Capitol riots (written on January 7th) still holds true, I think:

Once again, America will likely take the wrong lessons from these riots. The Capitol police will likely call for more money, more resources, more officers, more guns, more security cameras, more barricades, etc. There are already calls for more Internet censorship. Homeland Security funding will surely get a boost. And certain people will dismiss too easily the alienation and indignation of Trump supporters.

What I mean is this: Americans are upset. Angry. Alienated. Confused. And rightly so. And until our government serves the people instead of corporate, financial, and similar lobbyists and special interests, the potential for future mobs will remain. Donald Trump is a total buffoon, a shell of a man, a narcissist with ambitions centered always on himself and his self-image. But imagine a more skilled manipulator, one less narrowly focused on himself, one with a stronger work ethic, one with boundless ambition for power. Such a person could truly lead an insurrection or coup, and yesterday’s scenes suggest such a takeover would be easier than we think.

Predictably, in the aftermath of the riots, the Capitol police did indeed get more money and resources, with House Democrats approving $1.9 billion for added security. Democrats under Joe Biden now sell themselves as the party of law and order, of expanded police forces (along with exploding Pentagon budgets and unanimous support of war-related aid to Ukraine in excess of $100 billion). They paint Republicans as dangerous, as undemocratic, even as an enemy within. Trump, most recently at CPAC, gleefully returns the favor, using similar inflammatory rhetoric.

Meanwhile, as Trump angles and preens for another presidential run, supporters of his who bought the big lie of a stolen election and protested at the Capitol on January 6th are being hounded by prosecutors. Yes, some of the rioters were violent, broke laws, and merit prosecution and punishment. But in many cases the federal pursuit and prosecution of these “deplorables” has been over-the-top, notes Chris Hedges. Their punishment has been grossly disproportionate to their crimes.

This may help the Democrats politically, but it is unhealthy for our democracy, notes Hedges:

The cheerleading, or at best indifference, by Democratic Party supporters and much of the left to these show trials will come back to haunt them. We are exacerbating the growing tribalism and political antagonisms that will increasingly express themselves through violence. We are complicit, once again, of using the courts to carry out vendettas. We are corroding democratic institutions. We are hardening the ideology and rage of the far-right. We are turning those being hounded to prison into political prisoners and martyrs. We are moving ever closer towards tyranny.

Hedges is right here. The Democrats and Republicans have been twisting, manipulating, and polarizing the past for their own purposes. Two diametrically opposed versions of the January 6th riots have been presented to the American people, and they are both self-serving and dishonest.

Clearly, Trump was the inciter-in-chief of mob violence from which he casually walked away. The Congress impeached him but otherwise refused to act. The Capitol police profited from its ineptitude even as the “deplorables,” Trump’s foot-soldiers, paid the price for his lies and tantrums. And so the past is warped and twisted, bludgeoned and misused, to serve the needs of the already powerful.

Against the Dark Side of American politics and “justice,” even Yoda might lose hope.

The Military-Industrial Complex and American Fascism

W.J. Astore

Since Ike’s warning more than 60 years ago, the MIC has only grown stronger and more anti-democratic

President Dwight D. Eisenhower (Ike) had it right.  The military-industrial complex (MIC) is fundamentally anti-democratic.  The national security state has become the fourth branch of government and arguably the most powerful one.  It gets the most money, more than half of the federal discretionary budget, even as the military remains America’s most trusted institution, despite a woeful record in wars since 1945.

A colleague, Christian Sorensen, says that when we look closely at the MIC we see something akin to American fascism. As he put it to me: “Our fascism certainly doesn’t look like past European movements, but it is far more durable, has killed millions and millions (SE Asia, Indonesia, Central America, Middle East), and has manifold expressions: wars abroad, wars at home, surveillance state, digital border, militarized law enforcement, economic warfare in the form of sanctions, militarization of space.”

It’s hard not to agree with him, not in the sense of Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy but in the sense of concentrated government/corporate power that draws sustenance from nationalism at home and imperialism abroad. It’s true that America doesn’t have goose-stepping soldiers in the street. There are no big military parades (though Donald Trump once wanted one). It still seems like we have contending political parties. But when we look deeper, a militant nationalism and aggressive imperialism powered by corporations and enforced by government, including notably the Supreme Court, is the salient feature of this American moment.

Consider the classic symbol of the fasces, from which the word fascism is drawn. It’s a bundle of rods bound tightly together — the idea being that while one rod may be bent or broken, a bundle of them becomes far more resistant to bending or breaking.  For me, this image conjures the MICIMATT.  Bundle the military with industry, add Congress, roughly 17 intelligence agencies, the media, academe, and various think tanks, then bind them with nearly a trillion dollars and enormous political and cultural authority and you create a structure that is far stronger, insidiously so, than the sum of its individual parts.

Fasces, or rods bundled and bound together, sometimes with an axe head. A decent symbol for the MICIMATT

This is exactly what the MICIMATT constitutes: an imperial bundling and binding of powerful interests that possesses and commands enormous resources, including most importantly mental and emotional ones, like appeals to patriotism and the flag. Consider the mainstream media (MSM), which nowadays is pro-war, pro-military, and therefore highly critical of anti-war protests. Indeed, the MSM today in the U.S. employs retired generals, admirals, and ex-CIA and ex-FBI officials to support the establishment and attack and dismiss critics of the same as naive (at best) or as dupes or puppets of various enemies (most often of Russia).

Consider, for example, the smear in 2020 of Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq War who continues to serve in the Army National Guard. NBC News, together with prominent establishment figures like Hillary Clinton, portrayed Gabbard as a potential Russian asset and the favorite candidate of the Kremlin. Gabbard’s “crime” was her criticism of disastrous regime-change wars (such as Iraq) that Clinton had enthusiastically supported, along with Gabbard’s statements that echoed Ike in their criticism of the MIC.

Influential critics of war and the MIC are neutralized. For its prescient criticism of the Iraq War, Phil Donahue’s show was cancelled. Reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who critiqued Iraq War coverage, was demoted. Former Governor Jesse Ventura was hired to a lucrative three-year contract, then put on ice when MSNBC discovered he was against the Iraq War. Worse is the punishment allotted to those who truly embarrass the MIC, such as Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale. Both were imprisoned for showing the American people the ugly face of the MIC’s wars. Worst of all is the persecution of Julian Assange, an Australian citizen who the U.S. government is seeking to prosecute and jail under laws passed during World War I to deter internal dissent within America. Edward Snowden, meanwhile, remains exiled in Russia, perhaps permanently, since to allow him to return might inspire other patriotic whistleblowers to come forward—and we can’t have that in the land of the free. 

But I can write my blog so I’m free, right? The MIC is not worried by my critique. If it can survive and flourish despite Ike’s warning, it can certainly ignore me.  We the people have no real power unless we too can combine. Sadly, a weakness of antiwar forces in America is internal disagreements and bickering, as witnessed recently before the Rage Against the War Machine Rally in DC. The MIC, in contrast, is tightly bound by greed and power.

Bending or breaking the MICIMATT seems well-nigh impossible. It could be weakened by making substantial cuts to its budget, but Congress insists on feeding it more money, not less, despite enormous waste and five failed audits in a row for the Pentagon.

If bending and breaking it is impossible, can we light it on fire? To do that would require a powerful incendiary movement, a concentrated blast as if from a flamethrower, yet the MICIMATT is wrapped in a fire-resistant coating of patriotic cant, so even incendiary ideas and actions have their limits.

Returning to Ike, I continue to find it painfully ironic (and tragic) that his warning about the MIC has been buried even at the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C. Not only buried: Ike’s warning has been downgraded to a caution and interpreted by a narrator sponsored by Boeing, a leading merchant of death in the MIC.

So, despite an article I wrote ten years ago, critiquing the idea of American fascism, I find myself coming to accept it, especially as Democrats try to outdo Republicans in embracing war, militarism, and weapons sales as the health of the state. With so-called progressives voting for massive war budgets, where is the hope and change?

I know progressives make noises about cutting the war budget, thus Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan are yet again sponsoring legislation to cut that budget by $100 billion. It’s pretty much a scam, notes David Swanson. They are allowed to do this because the MIC knows their initiative stands no hope of passing. Meanwhile, Republicans like Matt Gaetz have their own effort to cut Ukraine war funding, an effort also doomed to fail. What America truly needs is a bipartisan effort against the war machine, but instead it’s the MIC that continues to enjoy strong bipartisan support. The MIC is bound together (thus its strength); its opponents are both too disputatious and too few.

Which brings me to a sentiment attributed to Sinclair Lewis (though he didn’t use these exact words): If fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Certainly, the MIC is wrapped in the flag. Remarkable too is how U.S. militarism is embraced as a form of muscular Christianity, a sign of America’s righteousness, with might making right. Across Christianity in America today, one hears remarkably little criticism of war, killing, and genocidal nuclear weapons. The vision of Christ as a peacemaker was long ago replaced by “Peacekeeper” nuclear missiles. Meanwhile, new nuclear ICBMs, bombers, and submarines are under construction today, increasing the chances of apocalyptic war (while guaranteeing large profits for the MIC).

Again, Ike warned us that the MIC is fundamentally anti-democratic. And, whatever else it is, the MIC is certainly not communist or leftist. Is it America’s version of fascism? That conclusion may seem shrilly alarmist, but that is arguably what we need: a shrill alarm to awaken us from our slumber.

East Palestine, Ohio and the Oblivious Democrats

W.J. Astore

When Trump Shows More Empathy, You Know You’re In Trouble

The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio on February 3rd that led to a “controlled” explosion of toxic chemicals that’s now causing sickness among residents there was preventable. Both the Obama and Trump administrations made compromises driven by rail industry lobbyists that contributed to the disaster, which isn’t surprising, given the corporate capture of the U.S. government. The disaster represents a bipartisan failure, yet somehow it’s the Democrats who’ve emerged as the party most out of touch with the suffering of the people of East Palestine.

Nothing to see here, no reason to visit. A “controlled” chemical explosion after the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio

This week, former President Donald Trump visited East Palestine, handing out water bottles emblazoned with the Trump name, looking like a natural as he visited the local fire department and McDonald’s. Alleged billionaire Donald Trump: man of the people! Meanwhile, President Joe Biden announced he has no plans to visit East Palestine. Instead, after Trump had already stolen the spotlight, Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation, was sent in the next day, robotically trying to show concern when it was obvious he had little to show.

Trump visits East Palestine. Senator J.D. Vance stands to Trump’s right and Trent Conaway, mayor of East Palestine (purple shirt) stands to Trump’s left

It’s been a corporate-made disaster for East Palestine residents who have to live with the aftermath of this toxic chemical spill and explosion: let’s not lose sight of that. But it’s also been a total public relations disaster for Joe Biden, “Mayor Pete,” and the Democratic Party, showcasing an obtuseness that borders on obliviousness.

What should have happened? Buttigieg, as Transportation Secretary, should have been on the ground in Ohio within days of the accident. The government should have clearly announced that the rail company would be held responsible, that government aid would be provided, and that Ohioans would be given all the help they need to recover from this disaster. If Biden was unavailable, Kamala Harris should have joined Buttigieg, because that’s what Vice Presidents are for.

Buttigieg and Harris could have seized control of the narrative. They could have admitted that members of both parties, Democrats and Republicans, were responsible, but that the Trump administration was arguably most responsible in its relaxation of rules regarding safety brakes. They could have admitted as well that Ohioans had legitimate concerns about the safety of their air and water, and that the federal government would do everything in its power to assist state government authorities with the cleanup and the investigation.

Pete Buttigieg (far left) finally visits East Palestine. He looks more than a little out of place

Instead, the Democrats have allowed Trump and the Republicans to appear to be more concerned about, more in touch with, the plight of ordinary Americans.

Recently, Trump has released videos in which he’s warned of World War III, advocated for peace and a negotiated end to the Russia-Ukraine War, while promoting the idea (yet again) of putting Americans first. If he stays with this message, and if Democrats allow Trump to pose as the champion of peace as well as the champion of regular guys and gals (and all gender pronouns in between), there’s a good chance we’ll be looking at four more years of Trump beginning in 2025.

If so, Trump’s victory will be the ultimate proof of how oblivious Democrats have become.

Are Biden and Trump Too Old to Run Again?

W.J. Astore

Corporate Capture of Government, not Age, Is the Problem

In honor of Presidents’ Day, let’s look ahead to the 2024 presidential election.

Right now, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the leading candidates of their respective parties for the 2024 election. Biden will be 82 if reelected; Trump will be 78. Are they simply too old to serve?

Another battle of aging white men wearing red power ties?

The short answer is “no.” Sixty is allegedly the new forty, so I suppose eighty is the new sixty. Seriously, age alone isn’t the issue. Many people are mentally alert and physically vigorous well into their eighties and beyond. But many people aren’t; age does take its toll, we do age unequally, so it’s best to take this case by case, person by person.

Trump’s problem isn’t that he’s too old; he’s simply too much of a con man and a narcissist. Even as a businessman, he was largely a loser. When you go bankrupt running casinos, where the odds are stacked in your favor, you truly are incompetent. Trump wants to be president again because he lost and hates to lose. He lacks a positive plan for America, which isn’t surprising, as he has no empathy for others. He’s not too old; he’s just supremely focused on himself. 

Biden isn’t too old, in theory. But more so than Trump, he does appear to be in physical and cognitive decline. At the British Guardian, Margaret Sullivan wrote that:

“Of course, I wish Biden were 20 years younger; I wish he didn’t stumble over his words and sometimes make inexplicable mistakes. I worry about his cognitive decline and physical frailty. But right now, he looks like the best bet to stave off a likely-disastrous Republican presidency and his record, while not flawless, is impressive.”

Her argument is simple: Biden is the best bet to defeat Trump (or DeSantis), so ignore his faults and frailties. It’s OK for a president to stumble over his words, to make inexplicable mistakes, even to exhibit signs of cognitive decline and physical frailty. Why? Because Democrats apparently have no other viable candidate to defeat the Republicans.

The willingness of the mainstream media and so many otherwise sensible people to dismiss obvious signs of Biden’s decline inadvertently points to a larger truth: Biden, if reelected, won’t be running the country anyway, so why worry about his physical and mental health?

As Chris Hedges and others have argued, America isn’t a democracy. Presidents aren’t public servants. America is an oligarchy, and presidents largely answer to the oligarchs. A corporate coup d’etat enacted over the last half-century ensures the real rulers of America are on Wall Street, in big finance, and with the national security state and similar powerful interests. 

So, which figurehead do you want, Trump or Biden? That seems to be America’s “choice” for 2024, making this Presidents’ Day grimmer than it should be.

Show me a candidate who wants to fight against the corporate capture of the U.S. government, and I’ll joyfully vote for that person irrespective of their age.

(A coda: Speaking of age, can you imagine two women the ages of Biden and Trump contesting for the presidency in America? I can’t. They’d be dismissed by too many as “old hags,” obviously well past their prime, as Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was recently described by CNN host Don Lemon, and Ms. Haley is only 51! Yet again, America has a “choice” between aging white men wearing red power ties, each with serious flaws. Democracy!)

Another “Kill” for America!

W.J. Astore

Paint two balloons under the cockpit of our F-22s

Send in the F-22s! Get those balloons! No mercy!

Good gawd, apparently another balloon fell victim to a missile launched from an F-22, this time over Alaska.

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a Chinese war balloon!

Details are sketchy, but what’s clear is that the Biden administration is touting decisive action against what was apparently another balloon/surveillance instrument, most likely from China.

This is all about domestic politics.  About the Biden administration “looking strong” by shooting down Chinese balloons (assuming the latest UFO was indeed another balloon).

The question is: Have these balloons truly been threats to U.S. national security?  To my knowledge, they are not threats.

I’ve heard these balloons could be used for signals intelligence, but even if true, it seems a very crude method.  The U.S. military has far more sophisticated techniques for SIGINT.

(An aside: China could mass produce balloons, release them toward the U.S., then watch us exhaust our limited F-22 fleet and our air-to-air missiles.  Would we be that stupid?)

I never pictured America’s most sophisticated air superiority fighter, the F-22 Raptor, chasing and shooting down floating balloons in the sky, but here we are.

I love this quotation, courtesy of NBC News: “Do we have a plan for the next time that happens and how we’re going to deal with it?” Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., asked defense officials testifying Thursday on Capitol Hill about the alleged spy balloons. “Because, quite frankly, I’ll just tell you: I don’t want a damn balloon going across the United States.”

No more “damn” balloons floating over America! Mister President, we cannot allow a spy(?) balloon gap!

When you think about it, why is this even news?  This could easily have been kept quiet.

Again, I come back to domestic politics.  Biden was criticized for not acting fast enough on the previous balloon, so now we must shoot down all balloons as soon as they enter U.S. air space.  And we must announce it too, as if it’s a great achievement.  

Hooray, America!  Paint two balloons as “kills” on the side of our F-22s. Airpower!

The State of the Union

W.J. Astore

My Daily Helping of Propaganda from the New York Times

In this image, Joe Biden is “showing vigor,” according to CNN

This morning I read the New York Times’ coverage of Joe Biden’s “State of the Union” address and found this gem of a paragraph on the Russia-Ukraine War:

Ukraine has defied expectations so far, and could continue doing so. But if Ukraine falls, it would signal to the world that autocrats can get away with invading democratic countries. It would suggest the Western alliance isn’t as powerful as it once was — shifting global power away from democracies like the U.S. and members of the E.U. and toward authoritarian powers like Russia and China. And for Biden, it could damage his standing domestically and globally, much as America’s messy exit from Afghanistan did.

A few comments on this:

  1. Note how negotiations aren’t mentioned. Cease fire? Forget about it. 
  2. If Ukraine were to fall, would that truly be a signal to autocrats everywhere that democratic countries were ripe for the plucking? Which autocrats and which democratic countries?
  3. Was Ukraine a democracy? Is the USA a democracy?
  4. What about invasions and occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya by the US and its allies? Were those costly and disastrous wars OK because a so-called democratic entity invaded a more autocratic one?
  5. Was Biden’s standing truly damaged by that messy exit from Afghanistan? Or was America’s standing truly damaged by persisting in an unwinnable war for 20 years?
  6. If NATO suffers a blow to its prestige due to Ukraine’s fall, that will be the US and NATO’s fault. There was and remains no formal alliance between NATO and Ukraine. Recall that Ukraine was a Soviet republic and that Ukraine is far more closely linked to Russia historically than it is to Europe, let alone the USA.
  7. To answer my own question at (3), the US is not a democracy. It’s an authoritarian oligarchy controlled by Wall Street, the military-industrial complex, and other big financial and corporate interests. Choosing between Corporate Stooge 1 (D) and Corporate Stooge 2 (R) every two or four years is not democracy.

I was further fascinated by how the NYT’s summary began:

President Biden used his State of the Union speech to portray the U.S. as a country in recovery, and he is right that there has been a lot of good news lately.

Price increases have slowed. Covid deaths are down about 80 percent compared with a year ago. Ukraine is holding off Russia’s invasion. Congress passed legislation addressing climate change, infrastructure and gun violence, and some of it was bipartisan.

That Ukraine “is holding off Russia’s invasion” is a sign of “recovery” for the United States! If that’s not a tacit admission of proxy war, I don’t know what is.

It’s nice to know Ukrainians are fighting and dying so that the NYT can brag of the US as being “in recovery.”

A nod of thanks to the NYT for my daily helping of propaganda.

(Also, please detail any important legislation that seriously addresses climate change and gun violence; climate change continues apace, as does gun violence in the US. Finally, Covid deaths are down mainly because of a less virulent strain and increased immunity due to infections, not because of any decisive action taken by the Biden administration.)

MIC on the Brain

W.J. Astore

Why write so much about the military-industrial complex?

Loyal readers may recall that in June of 2022 M. Davout and I posted a debate between the two of us on the Russia-Ukraine War. This debate is still worth reading, I think.

The other day, my old friend Davout quipped that I had MIC on the brain. Of course, I had suggested that he had Putin on the brain because of his keen support of Ukraine’s war of national liberation, so it was a fair retort. It was also one that I embraced, for as I wrote back to him:

You’re right that I have MIC on the brain. MICIMATT is a useful acronym.  The military industrial congressional intelligence media academia think tank complex.  Awkward, but it captures some of the scope of the MIC.

There’s a reason Ike warned us about the MIC in 1961.  It absorbs more than half of federal discretionary spending.  This year Congress gave it $45 billion more than even Biden and the Pentagon wanted.  And it just failed its fifth financial audit in a row.

Biden, back in the day, stated “show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value.” Looking at the federal budget, we see what they value.

The MIC’s budget is at least 14 times greater than the State Department’s.  And there are times when State acts as a salesman for U.S. weaponry overseas, as I wrote about here: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/our-state-department-a-ti_b_748658

Back when I wrote that article (2010), the Pentagon Budget was 10 times as great as State.  Now it’s 14 or 15 times as great. Progress!

So, yes, I have the MIC on my brain.  All Americans should.  That’s why Ike said “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” has any hope of keeping the MIC under control.

So far, we’ve failed, myself included.

Davout then made this reply:

What are the real problems with the MIC? 

That it functions as a mini-welfare state for many Americans is not a big problem for me. That it supports weapons systems we do not need and in numbers we do not need is a big problem. 

That it needlessly supports redundant bases across the country because of protection from members of congress worried about employment and small business in their congressional districts is not a big problem for me. That it provides military surplus to local police departments is a big problem.

The more crucial issue is to what extent and in which ways are military contractors like Boeing more corrupt, wasteful of US taxpayer dollars or endangering to the common good than Exxon Mobil or Philip Morris or Merck? 

Haven’t you squeezed enough meaning out of Ike’s speech by now? Why not do a deep dive into the Pentagon budget and give like-minded people better arguments to make to their congressional reps than the top line DOD budget figure and Ike’s warning?

To which I made this reply:

One “deep diver” on the Pentagon budget is William Hartung.  You can read his stuff at TomDispatch.com and Responsible Statecraft.  There are other deep divers as well.  One of my colleagues, Christian Sorensen, has done detailed work on the MIC.  Here’s one of his articles: https://www.businessinsider.com/military-industrial-complex-budget-us-security-profit-forever-wars-2021-5

Google his name for more “deep dives.”

“Deep divers” already exist.  I don’t need to duplicate their fine work.

I’m not sure of the relevance of comparing big oil or big tobacco to the MIC.  My focus is on the MIC because that’s what I know best.  Do I need to add nuance to my critique of the MIC by saying there are other bad corporate actors out there too?

You can see I was getting testy, but we’re old friends, so we don’t mince words.

Davout responded by saying:

The point I was making (inelegantly) about the one-sided focus on the MIC is that if one does not see it in the context of other factors, one might tend to deploy it as an explanation in cases where it doesn’t apply. (If one only has a hammer in one’s toolbox, then one might try to use it for tasks for which it is not fitted.) 

For example, you have suggested the US MIC is a major factor explaining the transfer of weapons from western countries to Ukraine. While I think the US MIC does benefit from those transfers (though not so much as one might think, given that some of that weaponry is drawing on overstocks of weapons systems no longer in use), it is not driving this war. Russian aggression, Ukrainian resistance, and NATO countries’ concerns about future Russian aggression are the prime factors driving those weapons transfers. 

To which I replied:

For a grimmer take on the Ukraine war and its implications for the US, consider this article by Chris Hedges: 

The Chris Hedges Report

Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong

And you’re wrong about the MIC and its profits here.  For example, in the case of M-1 tanks, the 31 going to Ukraine will be newly built, despite the fact that we have thousands of Abrams tanks in Army inventory.  Also, most of the weapons/ammo being sent from U.S. inventories have to be replaced.  (Yes, a few weapons systems are obsolete, like MRAPs and M113 APCs, but most aren’t.). Assuming we send F-16s, again these will be new, and Lockheed Martin has already announced they’re willing and eager to produce more.

Don’t worry: the MIC is doing very well indeed [from the Russia-Ukraine War].  It has decades of practice at this.

That was the end of our exchange. I’d add that the MIC profits far more from the atmosphere of uncertainty and anxiety created by the Russia-Ukraine War than it does from the war itself. Even though Russia’s forces haven’t performed well in this war, even though Russia is arguably weaker today than it was before the invasion, the MIC and various preening politicians are exaggerating the Russian threat as a way of boosting military spending. And it’s working, hence the $45 billion extra given to the Pentagon by Congress in this year’s budget.

And so I will continue to have “MIC on the brain” because it continues to grow ever more powerful within our society, and ever more ambitious on the world stage. You might say it’s invaded my brain as well, though (so far) I haven’t sent it more than half of my discretionary income.

Davout and I don’t always agree, but we’re always willing to talk and to listen. We need more conversations among Americans about war and the MIC, for conversing leads to clarity and clarity can lead to a shared commitment to act.