Open Letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama:

As you know better than I do, the apparatus of government in these United States is held now, as it has been for at least sixty-five years, in the ineluctable grip of an iron triangle of socioeconomic forces – the true axis of evil that former President Eisenhower identified in saying prophetically that, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

Since January 17, 1961 when General Eisenhower gave his farewell address as President to the people of this country, that appellation has become standard terminology − as the pervasive power of the cancerous concatenation of forces represented by the Pentagon, the so-called national defense industry, their corporate mercenary armies, and their allied financial and political organizations, have grown toward metastasis.

Old Uncle Ike should better have referred to the military, industrial, and congressional complex in his final speech. The majority of our members of Congress, including the Senate, have become tragically complicit in that insidious and malicious combination of forces. There can be no doubt that Ike meant to point out the truly malignant nature of the combination of private sector and public sector establishments in continual military preparedness and elective wars. He himself included in his rhetoric the urgent warning that,

“The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

In beginning his speech, Ike couched his remarks with a summation of his working relationship with the Congress, and the looming threat to our freedom and peace posed by the military-industrial complex. He noted that,

“We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence − economic, political, even spiritual − is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.”

In words that echo down the many years since his time, Ike warned us that, “Any failure of our [government’s] basic purposes . . . to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations, traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.”

At the time, he spoke of the military threat posed by the former Soviet Union and its supposedly inimical ideology, and he paired with it the threat of a galloping tendency toward fascism – let us call it what it is − in our social, economic, and governmental order.

According to Wikipedia [on the topic of the military-industrial complex], in the prescient book Fascism and Big Business, “by the French historian and anarchist Daniel Guerin, which was written before the Second World War broke out, [Guerin] examines the development of Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, and [the] relationships [of the Fascist political leaders] with the capitalist families there. Its main thesis is that fascism supported the heavy industrial sector to the detriment of lighter industrial sectors, dedicated to building consumer goods. It points out the failure of ‘corporatism,’ which in effect meant the dismantling of trade unions and workers’ inability to elect their own representatives, who were nominated instead by the fascists.”

Nowadays we devote even more, much more, of our economic productivity to weapons and war than we did in 1961. We have recently wrought havoc in the Middle East, and elsewhere, with our criminal wars and covert misadventures. And we have created widespread economic disadvantage, and enforced repression of dissent at home, in our headlong rush to hugely advantage the interests of the ruling elites in the Pentagon, on Capitol Hill, in so-called defense industries, and on Wall Street.

It has been more than thirty years now, since the late enemy of Eisenhower and his contemporaries, the U.S.S.R., imploded and ceased to exist. Yet, instead of making a return to building plowshares, we have continued to build ever more terrible swords. Now we tilt at windmills against a false enemy, created out of whole cloth by our shadow government: the supposed terrorist alliance of Al Qaida, and the imaginary enemy Osama bin Laden, who in fact is almost certainly deceased, and storied beyond all true fact.

In your administration, Mr. Obama, you have demonstrated a deeply worrisome unwillingness to break with the continuity of former administrations in furtherance of the United States’ unending warfare, military expansion, and export of militarism globally.

I, for one among many, had dared hope you would lead the rulers of the nation toward peace and disarmament, toward withdrawal from our global conflicts, toward demilitarization, and the cessation of international weapons distribution – as I believe President Eisenhower would have done if he could have − and that you would instead lead us toward a retooling of our industrial capacities for clean energy sufficiency, and critical reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

But you have so far failed us in our hopes.

And during your watch, the ruling elites have by now arrogated to themselves trillions of dollars of the public weal, crippling our national economy and consigning the poorer 99% of our people to decades of continual economic decline, while you have stood by impotently, complicitously making the former administration’s disastrous foreign wars yours, and the universally hated far-flung military empire of the United States has become your own legacy.

Unless this country’s misbegotten foreign military and insane so-called national security expenditures can be reduced by huge proportions – soon – the domestic order of the United States will certainly collapse into chaos, anarchy, and violent popular uprisings against our failed national institutions.

Is this the nightmare you will preside over before your term in office is finished, or will you find the personal courage to commit your administration to the radical change that is absolutely necessary to avoid this country’s impending descent into fascist tyranny?

Which do you choose?

Sincerely,

Jim Weller