The United States spends about as much on the military as the rest of the world combined, even though there isn't, and hasn't been since 1812, any military threat to our country. But what there has been since 1812 is a perceived need to channel billions of taxpayer dollars to the wealthy, the top one per cent of the population which owns half the nation's stock assets--the bankers and corporate elite. The elite get rich by building expensive ships, airplanes, vehicles and other armaments for our "defense," which usually means invading countries where the leaders won't follow our instructions, especially if oil is involved.
Billion dollar ships and airplanes and million dollar vehicles, along with their high-tech electronics and the highly-trained personnel needed to operate them, because there is no real military threat, require some trumped-up justification for their un-necessary construction and existence. Therefore a security threat is concocted and announced by a protective government (aren't we fortunate?): Libyan terrorists, Haitian unruliness, a Grenadan nutmeg crisis, possible Nicaraguan invasion of Texas, Panamanian something, or Iraqi weapons of mass destruction are created. Often it's a Third World country to which we've sold armaments which now constitute a "threat." Or perhaps it isn't any threat at all, it's just a chance to show off what we can do, like in Kosovo. The "threat" is always a weak country which we can bomb and/or invade in a relatively short time. If the scenario is properly planned the target country is one where corporations can benefit from, in addition to their normal welfare payments, the increased profits from the war and hopefully also the subjugation and/or occupation of the country and the exploitation of its raw materials and people. Another outcome is a seat at the head of the table at the next economic summit when the world's assets are allocated.
The propaganda campaign accompanying any such military action is a vital part of the operation. Devised by corporate-funded think tanks and disseminated by the government and corporate media, this propaganda is designed to convince the population that what is bad for us is actually a good thing. They dream up stuff like: "fighting to defend freedom against the tyranny of terrorism" and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" -- just plug in a Senator and be inspired.
All of this doesn't happen accidentally. The policies and plans of the Corporate Welfare State are devised carefully and methodically, like any new corporate product, by technocrats in the big transnational corporations. Their goal is to maximize power and profit in the short term at the expense of everyone and everything else. That's just what corporations are designed to do. A corporate CEO following any other course would be fired by the shareholders. These policies and plans are then eagerly implemented by lobbyists, legislators and the Pentagon, and announced by the President in a ceremonial speech.
President Eisenhower spoke out in 1961 about the dangers military-industrial complex, and it is worse now because it includes Congress. Our congressional representatives are passionate about militarism because that's where their constituents' jobs are (more and more, that's the ONLY place good jobs are) and that's where their campaign financing comes from.
The following is from an interview between Brian Lamb of C-Span and Karen Kwiatkoski, a retired Air Force officer who worked in the Pentagon at the start of the Iraq invasion. The subject of the interview is the movie "Why We Fight," which is based on Eisenhower's statement.
EISENHOWER: In the counsels of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.
LAMB: Does this worry you today? And what aspects of it worry you?
KWIATKOSKI: Well, the orientation of our economy. If you think about a lot of jobs going offshore and different shifting. You know, we’re more service-based. There’s one big industry that we still produce a lot of, and that is our defense industry, and we still do very, very well at that. We don’t outsource too many of our defense manufacturing jobs. We may outsource every other manufacturing jobs, but defense will be the last to go. So, what happens is, in a democracy, Congress needs to get re-elected, and they have constituents, and those constituents need jobs, and our shifting towards this has given a militaristic foreign policy and a pro-military. I don’t really call it pro-defense because it doesn’t really mean much about defense. It’s offense, in most cases.
But, this emphasis, this need, it’s kind of connected. It’s like you said, it’s the military industrial, and he wanted to say Congressional complex, because there’s kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way. I mean, we need the jobs. Those jobs happen to be producing military weapons. In order to justify that, we have to have a use for those military weapons. Now, this sounds very simplistic and, oh, it really can’t be this way, and maybe it’s not this way. But, what’s weird and what’s strange and compelling is that Eisenhower said what he said in 1961, so he must have seen something as - from his perspective that said this was going to happen, this was a possibility. And I think it’s come true, just as he predicted.
end of interview
This tight coordination of the State and corporations is characteristic of a fascist state, which is probably not something that our founding fathers had in mind in 1776, especially since fountain-of-gold corporations hadn't yet been devised. Smedley Butler was ridiculed, and in fact was arrested and threatened with court-martial, when he decried the fascist state corporatism promoted by Mussolini in Italy in the 1930's. General Butler never applied the term "fascism" to the United States. He, of course, did say that "war is a racket . . the only one where profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. . . conducted for the very few, at the expense of the very many."