The Military-Industrial-Congressional Cabal

Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, describes the origins of the US Military-Industrial-Congressional complex and how it has bankrupted the republic. "This country is the greatest debtor nation in human history."

"In 1947 a constellation of world leaders --and principally US leaders-- revealed that there had been a massive change of power in the world. Let's just sum it up simply by saying that the United States looked at being not the rather democratic republic it had been for the 150 plus years prior but the New Rome ... what we looked at in 1947 was being Imperial Rome."

"Until 2000 I would maintain that most presidents had done a fair or good or not-so-good-but-average job of the tension between these two fundamental sides of us [ie. democratic republic versus imperial Rome], the past, the present and the future. When we got to 2000 we decided that that's no longer the way we're going to do things ..."

"In 1961, probably the most capable man to assume the presidency in the Twentieth Century, in his Farewell Address, warned us what was happening with regard to the tension between what we had had and what we had created. I'll call it a national security state ... and I'll call it a well-governed democratic republic on the other hand ... that tension that Eisenhower described [was] a real, sneaking, insidious, powerful problem. It was called a Military-Industrial-- and he wanted to say but was advised against saying -- Congressional complex."

"The Military-Industrial-Congressional complex is not an insidious force out there, sneaking up on us a riding down Pennsylvania Avenue to take over Washington. It is an enormous power, basically undetected, not overseen adequately and in a particular sense of the Cold War when contractors have moved together to become primes and subs and colluded and [become] monopolistic, it has become a real and constant danger for this country, certainly to the democratic republic that we like to think we are."

"When war is as profitable as it was to Lockheed Martin who leads this clan of defense consortiums where share prices go up by 25-and-three-quarter on March 19, 2003 to a year later about $126 0r $127 a share, when war is that profitable you're going to have more of it ... the war instrument is the instrument of choice for US presidents ... it's got us to bankruptcy ... this country is the greatest debtor nation in human history."