{"id":28481,"date":"2017-12-02T08:53:47","date_gmt":"2017-12-02T13:53:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28481"},"modified":"2017-12-02T08:53:47","modified_gmt":"2017-12-02T13:53:47","slug":"americas-military-industrial-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28481","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Military-Industrial Addiction\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
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America\u2019s Military-Industrial Addiction\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Polls show that Americans are tired of endless wars in faraway lands, but many cheer President Trump\u2019s showering money on the Pentagon and its contractors, a paradox that President Eisenhower foresaw, writes JP Sottile.<\/p>\n

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The Military-Industrial Complex has loomed over America ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of its growing influence during his prescient farewell address<\/a> on Jan. 17, 1961. The Vietnam War followed shortly thereafter, and its bloody consequences cemented the image of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) as a faceless cadre of profit-seeking warmongers who\u2019ve wrested control of the foreign policy. That was certainly borne out by the war\u2019s utter senselessness \u2026 and by tales of profiteering<\/a> by well-connected contractors like Brown & Root<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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President Dwight Eisenhower delivering his farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Over five decades, four major wars and a dozen-odd interventions later, we often talk about the Military-Industrial Complex as if we\u2019re referring to a nefarious, flag-draped Death Star floating just beyond the reach of helpless Americans who\u2019d generally prefer that war was not, as the great Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler<\/a> aptly put it, little more than a money-making \u201cracket<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The feeling of powerlessness that the MIC engenders in \u201caverage Americans\u201d makes a lot of sense if you just follow the money coming out of Capitol Hill. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) tabulated<\/a> all \u201cdefense-related spending\u201d for both 2017 and 2018, and it hit nearly $1.1 trillion for each of the two years. The \u201cdefense-related\u201d part is important because the annual National Defense Authorization Act<\/a>, a.k.a. the defense budget, doesn\u2019t fully account for all the various forms of national security spending that gets peppered around a half-dozen agencies.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America\u2019s Military-Industrial Addiction\u00a0 Polls show that Americans are tired of endless wars in faraway lands, but many cheer President Trump\u2019s showering money on the Pentagon and its contractors, a paradox that President Eisenhower foresaw, writes JP Sottile. The Military-Industrial Complex has loomed over America ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of its growing influence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[6963,9775,17300,528,620,5638],"class_list":["post-28481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-consortium-news","tag-dwight-eisenhower","tag-jp-sottile","tag-military-industrial-complex","tag-pentagon","tag-smedley-butler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28482,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28481\/revisions\/28482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}