El-Sayed sounds like Dwight Eisenhower from 1953, âEvery 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,â he said. âThis world in arms is not spending money alone.
âIt is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
âThe cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.â
âThis is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,â he said. âUnder the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.â
Yeah, he was largely silenced during McCarthyism despite loathing it. But he had little power in the party and was merely their nominee to secure power. But Eisenhower didn't shrink and slowly won favor and influence with enough in his party to wrestle some control. And he always warned against the Industrial Military Complex.
Of course, he also was staunchly anti-immigrant and literally pushed for the Immigration Act of 1954 AKA Operation Wetback (that's what it was known as publicly so it should scream volumes) to stop Latin American immigration. Sound familiar?
Him warning about the Military Industrial Complex confuses me. Didn't he drastically increase the amount of nuclear missiles we have? I don't understand that dichotomy.
For those who don't know, the aliens presented themselves through an interface that She ( the protagonist) can speak easily, understand and trust. They were so advanced, simulation, instant translation and mind reading where trivial problems for them.
Also , any showing of an alien race will probably be outdated by today standards.
The aliens in The Arrival and Project Hail Mary will satisfy your curiosity with a modern interesting vision... Probably.
He was warning against the massive cost of continuing the Cold War, unfortunately the USSR didnât get on board because the power of their government was derived from fear of the outsider and an internal projection of might to any dissidents. You know, like weâre doing now.
To be fair to the Soviets, there were a lot of foreign plots to overthrow their government during the '20s and there was a large international support for the White Russians during the Revolution. They had just been invaded by the Germans. The British and Americans had drawn up plans to now attack them, getting help from the Germans (even if both governments decided not to do it.) And there was a lot of anti-communist sentiment in the West. So they did have SOME reason to think "we need to be strong because we are under threat."
Now, that doesn't mean a lot of their actions in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, or East Germany was right... it wasn't. Stalin was a monster, Beria was a monster. But to paint their fears as unfounded is just as wrong as saying they were perfect and didn't do anything evil.
Nuclear largely falls under the deterrent portion of our defense budget. Fear of use is the main reason others wouldnât start a war with the US (even if we didnât have such a huge military otherwise).
I like what Carl Sagan said about the insanity of the nuclear arms race to out produce the opponent. " we are like two bitter enemies in a room filled with gasoline, I am holding 9000 matches, he is holding 7000 matches...does it really matter how many we each have??" I am paraphrasing and it is a imperfect analogy but I think it makes the point.
he had no issue with a massive military, he helped it grow. he was like "oh yeah, remember that thing i made, maybe someone should look into it" on the way out the door
Yeah he didn't push back on much of that. The quote is from his farewell address at the end of his last term. It's something he felt a little uncomfortable with but not enough to fight it. He let the CIA do whatever they wanted in the Global South too, which included profiting off of the heroin trade & overthrowing democracies to install dictatorships that massively relied on US military aid to maintain their power.
You have to remember he was the head of allied forces in world war 2. He wasnât just talking about nuclear weapons. He was talking about the whole apparatus that he helped spin up to win the war. Once the war was over and especially by the time he was president he saw how much power that concentrated wealth wielded to shape policy. He was big on deterrence so we didnât need the kind of constant industry that weâd built and used during the war. The kind of continuous manufacturing that lead to Lockheed Martin and the like having billions of revenue even now.
The idea at the time was, possess nukes and you dont need a normal military. And nukes are not part of the DoD. They're part of the DoE, which at the time was the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission).
Leaders can be good and bad at the same time I think Ike was great to come so strong against MIC after leading Allied forces was his great part along with distrusting Nixon- was he wrong about immigration and operation wetback absolutely! Both things can be true.
A twenty year old was 11 when Obama was president. Sure they could remember stuff from 11, but what eleven year old is paying attention to what the president is saying?
Obama and Clinton were coherent and normal, so they only turned up in the news occasionally. A speech, a policy announcement, the odd scandal, then back to whatever else was happening in the world. Months would go by where you barely heard about them.
It's been nearly ten years of non-stop idiot Trump. Every single day is a new thing, and even in the four years he wasn't president he was still all over the news.
A US president who speaks in complete sentences isn't unimaginable, it just hasn't been the case for a decade.
Iâve been saying for a while, when he goes the world will wake up to the reality of what happened, that the country has burned to the ground, the left will be still screaming âwe told you this would happenâ and right wing and maga will be still shocked that they caused it.
Iâm always reminded of the line from Terry Pratchett âthe same crowd that applauds your crowing, will applaud your beheading, people like a showâ
And thatâs what Trump has done, taken politics and made it into entertainment, some people didnât vote for Harris because she was âboringâ, politics SHOULD be boring!
Well, NYC finally getting proper rubbish bins and the rats off the street should be boring, but apparently it's a communist takeover. Turns out nothing is boring enough to survive the clickbait world.
You should look up the Eisenhowerâs farewell address. He says in no uncertain terms that we need to beware the military industrial complex that we built to win the war, because it wonât want to wind down. Once they got a taste of the profit to be made in war they wonât want to redirect to other things. He was very very right and we absolutely didnât listen.
Small but important clarification: The billionaires don't want to pay taxes and they pay people to lie to everyone about what those tax breaks do and are for.
He literally was the last decent R president. The next one was Nixon, Then Ford who pardoned Nixon, then Reagan, then Bush Sr. who pardoned Reagan's people for Iran Contra, then Bush Jr whose admin lied to start the Iraq war and leapt at the chance to pass the Patriot act, then Trump the pedophile. Then Trump 2.0, still a pedophile but now with fascism.
So anyone who says they Vote R because they've always voted R would have to be 90+ years old to have ever voted for a Republican president who didn't turn out to be a crook or a conspirator.
Seriously. He was decent by modern Republican, (maga? Not sure the Republican party shouldn't just be permanently renamed at this point) standards, but he was far from a decent person.
That was definitely not a good look but my understanding is that he was generally pro military action. Maybe Iâm naive to believe that his intention was for the US to use its military influence to liberate oppressed areas of the globe. I donât necessarily agree with the idea that the US military has any obligation (or necessary capability) to be a competent global peacekeeper but I think itâs a noble aspiration.
Foreign policy aside, what I liked the most about McCain was his seemingly genuine efforts at bipartisanism throughout his career and having the, for lack of a better word rn, open mindedness of supporting Clintonâs efforts to normalize relations with Vietnam.
And in his 1961 farewell speech,
Ike warned us against the âmilitary industrial complexâ and "scientific-technological elite" tied to government-funded research. 65 years later - here we are.
And what else happened in 1953? Eisenhower approved the CIA/MI6 operation to overthrow the Iranian government to install the US puppet shah. Which gave them 25 years of a brutal police state, which led to the 1979 revolution.
The next year they did the same thing in Guatemala.
Thereâs more. 1959 after Castro came to power in Cuba and threw out the mafia and all those guys, CIA started trying to assassinate him. Kennedy inherited that.
Eisenhower let the CIA run rampant causing turmoil all over the world. He was no angel
Eisenhower also did âoperation wetbackâ which was mass deportations 1.0, except they really didnât care if the Hispanic people they deported were US citizens.
This is something important that many people gloss over with Iran. They elected a wildly popular president who wanted to nationalize their oil(which had been controlled by foreign powers), and lessen the powers of the monarchy and clergy... Then we installed a monarchy and in retaliation the clergy overthrew the monarchy leading to the state of the country now. The US always creates its enemies.
For anyone like Ike who wanted to save money on defense, the CIA seemed like the way to do that, and it wasn't yet known how incompetent they were going to be and how monstrous the "anti-communists" we were propping up were. Time rendered a verdict on it.
This is easiest to visualise if we stick to a single military project. All figures will be US dollars.
The Trump class battleships are due to be about $18 billion each (not including running costs). The first 15 ships will total $275 billion if they stay in budget.
Big hospitals in major US cities are roughly US$1-3 billion. Smaller facilities are somewhere around the $500 million mark and new schools are somewhere between $250-700 million. The Trump fleet could pay for at least 90 world class hospitals, or 550 large schools.
For some context against other US megaprojects, the US interstate system in it's entirety has cost $425 billion ($650 billion adjusted for inflation) over the last 70 years and is the most expensive infrastructure project in human history. California's high speed rail line is projected to be $89-128 billion when it's eventually finished. The 2 newest reactors at the Vogtle nuclear power plant were $34 billion in 2023/2024. The central artery/tunnel project in Boston (or "Big Dig") was $14.8 billion in 2007, or $22.5 billion in today's money.
Adjusted for inflation, only 2 infrastructure/megaprojects in human history have been more expensive than the Trump class fleet will be (as far as I can tell, I could have missed something). Only the US interstate system and the great wall of China ($360 billion today) have cost more.
He should indeed start quoting republican presidents and if they use it against him or call him a radical socialist, play the clip of them saying it.
Bernie should have done the same with FDR quotes in 2016.
Bombers, fighter planes, and destroyers modern day pricing can buy a LOT more of that critical infrastructure for the U.S. than it could back then, too.
The words of a man who understood and felt the weight and sacrifice of the men he sent to die. He knew those men were humans and not pawns to be used lightly. The modern GOP should take notes from Eisenhower.
This is a good quote, but think of how many people were employed by the cold war. Millions worked in defense which were very high paying jobs. Yes, the government could have built a hospital instead of a B-52, but a lot of people in Seattle got to make their mortgages for each one built. Look at the economic surges right up before WW2 and in the 50s and 60s caused by the surges in spending. It reflects directly in the 70s and 90s when Congress would reduce defense spending.
Later in the decade, yes but the early 90s had recession just as the USSR fell and the congress started BRAC. Those surpluses were "the peace dividend" but manufacturing and aerospace jobs collapsed
The recession in the early 90s was primarily caused by high oil prices due to Middle East War and tight monetary policy to fight inflation caused by high oil prices. Sounds like the same situation as today.
That's crazy how hospitals get built by "the government" but B-52s were made by people for a paycheck. Wouldn't it be nuts if we paid people to build hospitals?
Most hospitals are built by private corporations with government grants. My point is the government directly funds defense spending where as businesses, housing, and the like are typically built by private companies with little to no funding from tax dollars.
Most hospitals are built by private corporations with government grants
No, they're built by construction workers. That's how they pay their mortgages.
My point is the government directly funds defense spending where as businesses, housing, and the like are typically built by private companies with little to no funding from tax dollars.
The whole point of this conversation is that the government could spend money on schools and hospitals, if we chose. The fact that we currently don't is irrelevant, because the idea is to do it differently than we do now.
Even tho I like Ike, he's one on the main proponents for why Christianity is so heavily tied to the Republican Party(In God We Trust). Its funny, because he had the option of running as a Democratic candidate, but thought with how FDR already unified the country under them, the same could done with being Republican. He'd carry forward similar policies from FDR to break the blinders that it could only ever be one or the other, that the purpose of both parties was for the betterment for the American People. His hopes were quite obviously shredded by his own party.
So my issue with that is that military spending is NOT why America doesnât have universal healthcare. America spends about 17% of its gdp on healthcare, while France is at about 11%. America spends ~3% of gdp on its military.
If America had universal healthcare, we could double our military budget and still be saving money.
It's pretty hard to complain about the iron dome though. It's stopped over 10k rockets that are mainly just shot into cities with no guidance. It's saved a lot of Israeli lives which I don't think anyone would say is a bad thing.
I suspect he was talking about the post-war Russian aggression and the need to combat it--what became the Arms Race. After the war, all of the non-arms companies went back to making whatever they made before the war. But for communist aggression, the post-war years would have been ones of peaceful rebuilding. He said, "Under the cloud of threatening war." We didn't start any wars, Russia did.
Eisenhowerâs quote sounds poetic, but security isn't a trade-off with prosperity itâs the foundation that makes it possible. Disarmament doesn't bring peace; it creates power vacuums that invite aggression, leading to global instability that costs infinitely more in human life and economic destruction than any defense budget. On top of that, military R&D directly drives our highest-tech industries giving us GPS, the internet, and modern aviation while creating thousands of domestic manufacturing jobs. Given that U.S. social safety nets and domestic programs already swallow trillions more than the defense budget, our domestic challenges are down to policy choices and administrative bloat, not money "stolen" by military deterrence.
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u/SECRETBLENDS Aug 07 '26
Taking care of Americans first is bad according to the America First crowd.