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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The anniversary of Ike's warning to us all

From The Huffington Post today: "Fifty-one years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his final, prescient warning about the rising power of the military industrial complex. More than half a century later, we find ourselves in a political system which has ignored Eisenhower's sound advice as the influence of the war industry on our society reaches a crescendo. Nowhere is this "disastrous rise of misplaced power" more apparent than in the debate about the Pentagon budget taking place in Washington, D.C." President Eisenhower's warning, in part, to the nation: "In the councils 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...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. ...We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat." Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/derrick-crowe/military-industrial-complex_b_1211388.html

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