Mike Gravel: Eisenhower was RIGHT on the military-industrial complex

"[E]very part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign Nations; and, what is of inestimable value, they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighboring countries not tied together by the same government, which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence, likewise, they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments, which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other.

These considerations speak a persuasive language to every reflecting and virtuous mind, and exhibit the continuance of the UNION as a primary object of patriotic desire. Is there a doubt whether a common government can embrace so large a sphere? Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal."

George Washington

Farewell Address, 1796

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Considering the exorbitant rise of Blackwater in luxurious contracts that saw the substantial increase from a little over 200k in 2000 to $200 million and more in the last two years (reported claim that Blackwater earned almost $1 billion since 2004), it reminds me of President Eisenhower's astounding farewell address warning on the danger of misplaced power in the hands of what he termed "military-industrial complex" connected to the corrupted Washington body politic in the executive and legislative branches.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a flawed U.S. president who okayed the CIA overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government after the nationalization of that country's oil industry in the early 50's among other misdeeds (such as Eisenhower's oversight in the termination of German prisoners of war after WWII), but he left America and the conscious world an indelible message that could be construed as a prophecy for what will transpire in the direction of U.S. foreign policy, shortly after the 1963 JFK assassination.

This was done for the State of Israel and the Pentagon in connection to the defense industry that engineer and manufacture the military and weapon technologies to bask in the glory of war at taxpayers' expense to the tune of several trillions in the past four and a half decade.

Mike Gravel: "Eisenhower's Warning", 5 min