10 ms·

Two quotes from Eisenhower spring to mind. "It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was b

by M_Grey 10y ago

Two quotes from Eisenhower spring to mind. "It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary [sic] foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war." (D.W. Eisenhower) "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." (D.W. Eisenhower) He was absolutely right, and I'm not sure that there's a realistic way out of the decades-deep hole we've been digging for ourselves. Especially when you consider that we appear to switch our brains off in the wake of any significant terror attack, it seems hopeless.

wyldfire 10y ago
> Especially when you consider that we appear to switch our brains off in the wake of any significant terror attack I agree but we must admit that it's terribly difficult when faced with terrorism to consider the proposition that doing nothing might be better than any action. Harder still is to make the claim in front of politicians who might consider that an opportunity to spin it into a weakness rather than a strength.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  And thus terrorists win long term. Not by actually achieving what they want, but by paralysing their enemy and affecting them negatively. One would think people in "the land of the free" wouldn't act like either scared rabbits or enraged bull.
chishaku 10y ago
> I'm not sure that there's a realistic way out of the decades-deep hole I'm not either. I think broad-stroke laws reversing much of the damage are necessary. We need a law prohibiting secret law. Any legally-binding statute, regulation, opinion or judgement that is not published to the Federal Register within 18 months would be rendered invalid. Regarding government documents in general, I think everything should be published by default. Instead of FOIA applications to have information published, agencies should be applying to keep their documents secret.
- nickff 10y ago
  >"We need a law prohibiting secret law. Any legally-binding statute, regulation, opinion or judgement that is not published to the Federal Register within 18 months would be rendered invalid." The federal agencies continually avoid the Federal Register by issuing 'guidance letters' and 'advisory opinions', as well as re-interpreting existing rules in very creative ways. What is really needed is greater fidelity to the structural protections by the constitution (such as the Bill of Rights and non-delegation), but I have lost almost all hope of that coming to pass.
  - adrianratnapala 10y ago
    The federal agencies continually avoid the Federal Register by issuing 'guidance letters' and simply re-interpreting existing rules in very creative ways Yes, Chikasu's broad-stroke laws can only work if they are part of a cultural shift away from seing micromanagement as the government's job. The agencies are what they are from the mentality that everything in our society must be "run" perhaps by a "czar". People call this regulation, but in order to run things, the authorities need not laws and predictable rules, but arbitrary (if scope-limited) powers.
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    This is why "term limits" sound great in theory but are worthless in practice. The people who are writing these laws by another name (guidance letters, recommendations, etc) are nameless, faceless people who no one will ever know. And unless it's an official "memorandum of understanding" or similar, we won't even know their names. The people we see and hear in the news are just the distraction so we miss the real show.
    - zanny 10y ago
      This can only happen when you lack accountability and actual representation in a republic. I've concluded that the general chain of reasoning is this: Unrepresented -> Corruption -> Money -> Corporate Influence -> Gerrymandering / First Past the Post / Term Limits -> Whole election system is fucked The way the US, and most other governments, are organized is broken because of a lack of humanity. If you try having one person represent millions, those millions will always be numbers to anyone, and that person will just be a name on a ballot to the numbers. Real representation requires a personal relationship, and that means you need to build government on the foundation of your community first. I generally see every position added to the ballot as a failure of a republic, because what you really should be doing is electing, say, a regional council (using STV or other proportional voting systems) whom then both nominates higher offices and appoints everything you would normally have on the ballot. Because that is their job, and you would not be picking between the lesser of two evils on a ticket but one of a few hundred of your neighbors who is exemplary who would do the best job. Most people I know, at least in less dense neighborhoods (and community interaction in cities and dense living always has been problematic) can name someone who lives around them they would want to represent them in government. And you are much more likely to have reason to trust, and hold responsible, your neighbor than some guy who lives in the richest part of the city, state, or country and whom you will never meet in person, and they will never know you to give a damn about your liberty.
JackFr 10y ago
Dwight David Eisenhower
1024core 10y ago
We need to blame the voters as much as we blame the politicians. People get so scared that they demand a dictatorship, basically. Look at the scare du jour, ISIS. I mean, come on! We have the worlds largest military by a factor of 10, and yet people are peeing their pants at the sight of a few gun-toting crazies 8,000 miles away!! We faced down USSR which had the capability to annihilate us 100 times over, and yet we cringe at the sight of ISIS. What's wrong with these people?
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Different kind of enemy.
- dmix 10y ago
  ISIS is hardly a problem when it comes to the military industrial complex. The constant fear mongering over Russia recently is the real and serious driver here. The military doesn't want to fight ISIS because it's not predicated on expensive jets, aircraft carriers, naval warfare, cyber, etc, etc. It's not a mistake that any level of provocation by Russia is met with weeks of saber rattling and outrage in the media. Although ISIS is a good driver for expanding the intelligence community. Hillary Clinton's primary military strategy that she promotes on her website is expanding an already bloated intelligence community and broadening intelligence collection. Both candidates are very much industrial complex friendly. That's one of the few things that's certain in this election.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    if pure military industrial complex expansion was the goal, we'd already be fighting in the south china sea. a huge amount of manufacturing would be forced to move stateside again, and lockheed/nothrop/boeing/raytheon/etc. etc. would make a lot of money.
  - gaius 10y ago
    expensive jets, aircraft carriers, naval warfare, cyber But it is - the US military fought the Taliban in a landlocked country with F18s launched from aircraft carriers 200 miles away!
washadjeffmad 10y ago
Eisenhower did not want either to abjure or to further turn opinion against them and so left it unspoken, but the original phrase was the "military-industrial-Congressional complex". By the laws of the nation, it could not be enabled any other way.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ChoHag 10y ago
  Using violence to bring industry and politics together? Don't we have a word for that?
oppositelock 10y ago
There are a few hundred primary law makers, a few thousand if you count their aides, and a few tens of thousands if you count the bureaucrats involved. There are hundreds of millions of people living under their rule. They can't do this without the consent of the governed. You give consent when you vote for a politician who has supported this form of government because they're a member of your party, or running against the party you hate. You give consent when you quietly accept this, or ignore this. You give consent when you vote for the lesser evil, since you are still voting for evil. Don't vote for the establishment, it's proven to be untrustworthy, irrespective of party. Write your representatives about this, pay attention to who you vote for at every level. Secret law is a huge step towards despotism, so basically, don't vote for anyone who has supported it in any way. This may mean you don't cast a vote for anyone depending on where you live.
- memracom 10y ago
  Kudos for an excellent description of how slavery works via the consent of the oppressed. This understanding is likely why the founders of the USA reserved the right of the people to have revolutions.
- dmansen 10y ago
  They seem to be doing just fine without the consent of the governed, given voter turnout in the US. I prefer to look through the lens of expected value. How can you vote in a way that maximizes the chance that your preferred policy outcomes will go through? "Don't vote for anyone who has supported it in any way" is nice in theory, but there are plenty of times when a vote any other way has lower expected value.
tim333 10y ago
On the other hand defence spending as a % of GDP has trended downwards: http://dailysignal.com/2015/02/14/history-defense-spending-one-chart/ http://dailysignal.com/2015/02/14/history-defense-spending-o...
- M_Grey 10y ago
  You mean, it's come down from the wartime peak? The actual trendline is not a decrease, at least, not on your graph.
schoen 10y ago
I keep being impressed by Michael J. Glennon's "National Security and Double Government" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 ; subsequently also published as a book), which gives a fairly disturbing analysis of the "Madisonian" (or "dignified") institutions vs. the "Trumanite" (or "efficient") institutions in the government and how they relate to one another.
- ccostes 10y ago
  Link has an extra semicolon at the end. Here's a working version: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 EDIT: Just looking through the abstract I agree that it is a very scary assessment. Abstract: National security policy in the United States has remained largely constant from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. This continuity can be explained by the “double government” theory of the 19th-century scholar of the English Constitution, Walter Bagehot. As applied to the United States, Bagehot’s theory suggests that U.S. national security policy is defined by the network of executive officials who manage the departments and agencies responsible for protecting U.S. national security and who, responding to structural incentives embedded in the U.S. political system, operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints. The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.
  - schoen 10y ago
    Thanks, I edited the link to move the semicolon out of it.
- selimthegrim 10y ago
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-want-the-secret-government-won-change/jVSkXrENQlu8vNcBfMn9sL/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-wa...
eternalban 10y ago
> He was absolutely right I am not sure I can agree with this. Whether knowingly or not, Eisenhower coined the term "military-industrial-complex" (MIC) and to me this is a form of disinformation, and unless one is willing to ascribe extreme naiveté to General Eisenhower, disingenuous. The MIC is the visible portion of a larger complex. The correct term (since his warning was issued post OSS and CIA) is the Military-Intelligence-Complex. And the industrial part is merely the means for the governing plutocracy to milk the national treasury, and, reward the faithful servants of the powerful interests. And unless we are to assume that we have indeed been living under a secret military goverment since WWII, the military of this nation is supposed to take its orders and direction from the civilian authorities. Secrecy is the domain of spooks. That said, I also find it 'interesting' for the "august" New York Times to opine regarding the "unsettling" character of the current American regime at such a late date. Where were the ladies and gentlemen of the New York Times editorial board in 2001 when Patriot Act passed without a nod towards even a sham attempt at deliberation? An entire generation of Americans has been born and raised to adulthood since 2001, and no doubt, just as they find the internet and web to be a 'natural' aspect of life, they likely find nothing objectionable to "secret laws", "warrantless" action by the government, "torture", and the rest of that sordid and entirely unAmerican (at least to this old fogey) laundry list of creeping authoritarianism. As I skimmed some of the comments in this thread, I also noted that the general theme of corrective actions that are suggested seem to place an unreasonable emphasis on architectural aspect of the system. But we already had and have standing laws on the book. What, pray tell, would further emblemishments to the constitutional order achieve when existing laws are 'cleverly' circumnavigated and the constitution treated as a dead letter? A people can not be saved from themselves. America used to produce a people whose mother's milk was Liberty. The current actors in our system that knowingly and willfully distort or disregard standing laws (such as the War Powers Act) are either America's own sons and daughters or we have been literally subverted by a foreign people whose mother's milk was not and is not and will never be life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (for all). The long term, and strategic, response to this malaise is simply this: every single one of you who has children must instill the essential American Values in your children. For unless we are indeed not only subject to secret laws but also to secret occupation, then it is our children, our sons, and our daughters who vie with one another in finding clever ways to trample the American Social Contract underfoot.
Zarath 10y ago
Slightly off topic, but man I wish our leaders would still talk to us like this.
memracom 10y ago
Collapse of the USA is always one way out. Now that the world is ruled by Russia, China, India and others, this is a distinct possibility if the people of America don't get their shit together and start being builders rather than destroyers. It is a serious cultural revolution happening world wide.

by M_Grey 10y ago

wyldfire 10y ago

> Especially when you consider that we appear to switch our brains off in the wake of any significant terror attack I agree but we must admit that it's terribly difficult when faced with terrorism to consider the proposition that doing nothing might be better than any action. Harder still is to make the claim in front of politicians who might consider that an opportunity to spin it into a weakness rather than a strength.

AstralStorm 10y ago
And thus terrorists win long term. Not by actually achieving what they want, but by paralysing their enemy and affecting them negatively. One would think people in "the land of the free" wouldn't act like either scared rabbits or enraged bull.

chishaku 10y ago

> I'm not sure that there's a realistic way out of the decades-deep hole I'm not either. I think broad-stroke laws reversing much of the damage are necessary. We need a law prohibiting secret law. Any legally-binding statute, regulation, opinion or judgement that is not published to the Federal Register within 18 months would be rendered invalid. Regarding government documents in general, I think everything should be published by default. Instead of FOIA applications to have information published, agencies should be applying to keep their documents secret.

nickff 10y ago
>"We need a law prohibiting secret law. Any legally-binding statute, regulation, opinion or judgement that is not published to the Federal Register within 18 months would be rendered invalid." The federal agencies continually avoid the Federal Register by issuing 'guidance letters' and 'advisory opinions', as well as re-interpreting existing rules in very creative ways. What is really needed is greater fidelity to the structural protections by the constitution (such as the Bill of Rights and non-delegation), but I have lost almost all hope of that coming to pass.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  The federal agencies continually avoid the Federal Register by issuing 'guidance letters' and simply re-interpreting existing rules in very creative ways Yes, Chikasu's broad-stroke laws can only work if they are part of a cultural shift away from seing micromanagement as the government's job. The agencies are what they are from the mentality that everything in our society must be "run" perhaps by a "czar". People call this regulation, but in order to run things, the authorities need not laws and predictable rules, but arbitrary (if scope-limited) powers.
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  This is why "term limits" sound great in theory but are worthless in practice. The people who are writing these laws by another name (guidance letters, recommendations, etc) are nameless, faceless people who no one will ever know. And unless it's an official "memorandum of understanding" or similar, we won't even know their names. The people we see and hear in the news are just the distraction so we miss the real show.
  - zanny 10y ago
    This can only happen when you lack accountability and actual representation in a republic. I've concluded that the general chain of reasoning is this: Unrepresented -> Corruption -> Money -> Corporate Influence -> Gerrymandering / First Past the Post / Term Limits -> Whole election system is fucked The way the US, and most other governments, are organized is broken because of a lack of humanity. If you try having one person represent millions, those millions will always be numbers to anyone, and that person will just be a name on a ballot to the numbers. Real representation requires a personal relationship, and that means you need to build government on the foundation of your community first. I generally see every position added to the ballot as a failure of a republic, because what you really should be doing is electing, say, a regional council (using STV or other proportional voting systems) whom then both nominates higher offices and appoints everything you would normally have on the ballot. Because that is their job, and you would not be picking between the lesser of two evils on a ticket but one of a few hundred of your neighbors who is exemplary who would do the best job. Most people I know, at least in less dense neighborhoods (and community interaction in cities and dense living always has been problematic) can name someone who lives around them they would want to represent them in government. And you are much more likely to have reason to trust, and hold responsible, your neighbor than some guy who lives in the richest part of the city, state, or country and whom you will never meet in person, and they will never know you to give a damn about your liberty.

JackFr 10y ago

Dwight David Eisenhower

1024core 10y ago

We need to blame the voters as much as we blame the politicians. People get so scared that they demand a dictatorship, basically. Look at the scare du jour, ISIS. I mean, come on! We have the worlds largest military by a factor of 10, and yet people are peeing their pants at the sight of a few gun-toting crazies 8,000 miles away!! We faced down USSR which had the capability to annihilate us 100 times over, and yet we cringe at the sight of ISIS. What's wrong with these people?

oh_sigh 10y ago
Different kind of enemy.
dmix 10y ago
ISIS is hardly a problem when it comes to the military industrial complex. The constant fear mongering over Russia recently is the real and serious driver here. The military doesn't want to fight ISIS because it's not predicated on expensive jets, aircraft carriers, naval warfare, cyber, etc, etc. It's not a mistake that any level of provocation by Russia is met with weeks of saber rattling and outrage in the media. Although ISIS is a good driver for expanding the intelligence community. Hillary Clinton's primary military strategy that she promotes on her website is expanding an already bloated intelligence community and broadening intelligence collection. Both candidates are very much industrial complex friendly. That's one of the few things that's certain in this election.
- rfrank 10y ago
  if pure military industrial complex expansion was the goal, we'd already be fighting in the south china sea. a huge amount of manufacturing would be forced to move stateside again, and lockheed/nothrop/boeing/raytheon/etc. etc. would make a lot of money.
- gaius 10y ago
  expensive jets, aircraft carriers, naval warfare, cyber But it is - the US military fought the Taliban in a landlocked country with F18s launched from aircraft carriers 200 miles away!

washadjeffmad 10y ago

Eisenhower did not want either to abjure or to further turn opinion against them and so left it unspoken, but the original phrase was the "military-industrial-Congressional complex". By the laws of the nation, it could not be enabled any other way.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ChoHag 10y ago
Using violence to bring industry and politics together? Don't we have a word for that?

oppositelock 10y ago

There are a few hundred primary law makers, a few thousand if you count their aides, and a few tens of thousands if you count the bureaucrats involved. There are hundreds of millions of people living under their rule. They can't do this without the consent of the governed. You give consent when you vote for a politician who has supported this form of government because they're a member of your party, or running against the party you hate. You give consent when you quietly accept this, or ignore this. You give consent when you vote for the lesser evil, since you are still voting for evil. Don't vote for the establishment, it's proven to be untrustworthy, irrespective of party. Write your representatives about this, pay attention to who you vote for at every level. Secret law is a huge step towards despotism, so basically, don't vote for anyone who has supported it in any way. This may mean you don't cast a vote for anyone depending on where you live.

memracom 10y ago
Kudos for an excellent description of how slavery works via the consent of the oppressed. This understanding is likely why the founders of the USA reserved the right of the people to have revolutions.
dmansen 10y ago
They seem to be doing just fine without the consent of the governed, given voter turnout in the US. I prefer to look through the lens of expected value. How can you vote in a way that maximizes the chance that your preferred policy outcomes will go through? "Don't vote for anyone who has supported it in any way" is nice in theory, but there are plenty of times when a vote any other way has lower expected value.

tim333 10y ago

On the other hand defence spending as a % of GDP has trended downwards: http://dailysignal.com/2015/02/14/history-defense-spending-one-chart/ http://dailysignal.com/2015/02/14/history-defense-spending-o...

M_Grey 10y ago
You mean, it's come down from the wartime peak? The actual trendline is not a decrease, at least, not on your graph.

schoen 10y ago

I keep being impressed by Michael J. Glennon's "National Security and Double Government" (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 ; subsequently also published as a book), which gives a fairly disturbing analysis of the "Madisonian" (or "dignified") institutions vs. the "Trumanite" (or "efficient") institutions in the government and how they relate to one another.

ccostes 10y ago
Link has an extra semicolon at the end. Here's a working version: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2376272 EDIT: Just looking through the abstract I agree that it is a very scary assessment. Abstract: National security policy in the United States has remained largely constant from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration. This continuity can be explained by the “double government” theory of the 19th-century scholar of the English Constitution, Walter Bagehot. As applied to the United States, Bagehot’s theory suggests that U.S. national security policy is defined by the network of executive officials who manage the departments and agencies responsible for protecting U.S. national security and who, responding to structural incentives embedded in the U.S. political system, operate largely removed from public view and from constitutional constraints. The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.
- schoen 10y ago
  Thanks, I edited the link to move the semicolon out of it.
selimthegrim 10y ago
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-want-the-secret-government-won-change/jVSkXrENQlu8vNcBfMn9sL/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/18/vote-all-you-wa...

eternalban 10y ago

> He was absolutely right I am not sure I can agree with this. Whether knowingly or not, Eisenhower coined the term "military-industrial-complex" (MIC) and to me this is a form of disinformation, and unless one is willing to ascribe extreme naiveté to General Eisenhower, disingenuous. The MIC is the visible portion of a larger complex. The correct term (since his warning was issued post OSS and CIA) is the Military-Intelligence-Complex. And the industrial part is merely the means for the governing plutocracy to milk the national treasury, and, reward the faithful servants of the powerful interests. And unless we are to assume that we have indeed been living under a secret military goverment since WWII, the military of this nation is supposed to take its orders and direction from the civilian authorities. Secrecy is the domain of spooks. That said, I also find it 'interesting' for the "august" New York Times to opine regarding the "unsettling" character of the current American regime at such a late date. Where were the ladies and gentlemen of the New York Times editorial board in 2001 when Patriot Act passed without a nod towards even a sham attempt at deliberation? An entire generation of Americans has been born and raised to adulthood since 2001, and no doubt, just as they find the internet and web to be a 'natural' aspect of life, they likely find nothing objectionable to "secret laws", "warrantless" action by the government, "torture", and the rest of that sordid and entirely unAmerican (at least to this old fogey) laundry list of creeping authoritarianism. As I skimmed some of the comments in this thread, I also noted that the general theme of corrective actions that are suggested seem to place an unreasonable emphasis on architectural aspect of the system. But we already had and have standing laws on the book. What, pray tell, would further emblemishments to the constitutional order achieve when existing laws are 'cleverly' circumnavigated and the constitution treated as a dead letter? A people can not be saved from themselves. America used to produce a people whose mother's milk was Liberty. The current actors in our system that knowingly and willfully distort or disregard standing laws (such as the War Powers Act) are either America's own sons and daughters or we have been literally subverted by a foreign people whose mother's milk was not and is not and will never be life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (for all). The long term, and strategic, response to this malaise is simply this: every single one of you who has children must instill the essential American Values in your children. For unless we are indeed not only subject to secret laws but also to secret occupation, then it is our children, our sons, and our daughters who vie with one another in finding clever ways to trample the American Social Contract underfoot.

Zarath 10y ago

Slightly off topic, but man I wish our leaders would still talk to us like this.

memracom 10y ago

Collapse of the USA is always one way out. Now that the world is ruled by Russia, China, India and others, this is a distinct possibility if the people of America don't get their shit together and start being builders rather than destroyers. It is a serious cultural revolution happening world wide.