It's hopeless! Read "The Real Matrix: The Pentagon Invades Your Life" by

[sinkingfeeling]

Nick Turse.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042508M.shtml

What a way to start my morning. I've never felt this hopeless before. There's no way, short of the overthrow of the US government and starting from scratch again, to ever break the 'military-industrial complex' and the 'war-driven economy'.

<snip>
Rick is a midlevel manager in a financial services company in New York City. Each day he commutes from Weehawken, New Jersey, a suburb only a stone's throw from the Big Apple, where he lives with his wife, Donna, and his teenage son, Steven. A late baby boomer, Rick just missed the Vietnam era's antiwar protests, but he's been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. He thinks the Pentagon is out of control and considers the military-industrial complex a danger to the country. If you asked him, it's a subject on which he would rate himself as knowledgeable. He puts effort into educating himself on such matters. He reads liberal websites, subscribes to progressive-minded magazines, and is a devotee of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In fact, he has no idea just how deep the Pentagon rabbit hole goes or how far down it his family already is.

Back in Eisenhower's day, arms dealers and mega-corporations, such as Lockheed and General Motors, held sway over the corporate side of the military-industrial complex. Companies like these still play an extremely powerful role today, but they are dwarfed by the sheer number of contractors that stretch from coast to coast and across the globe. Looking at the situation in 1970, almost 10 years after Eisenhower's farewell speech, Sidney Lens, a journalist and expert on U.S. militarism, noted that there were 22,000 prime contractors doing business with the U.S. Department of Defense. Today, the number of prime contractors tops 47,000 with subcontractors reaching well over the 100,000 mark, making for one massive conglomerate touching nearly every sector of society, from top computer manufacturer Dell (the 50th-largest DoD contractor in 2006) to oil giant ExxonMobil (the 30th) to package-shipping titan FedEx (the 26th).

[caraher]

1. It's bad...

but a lot of this "buying product X from a military contractor means the Pentagon controls you" stuff is a bit silly. While on one hand it's true that corporate America and the Pentagon are deeply intertwined, very few people will consider buying a product with a predominantly civilian market (such as shoes) constitutes Pentagon violation of their rights and freedoms.

It's kinda like saying Kevin Bacon casts a long shadow on everything we do...

I don't think picture really doesn't change much even if I were to make all my purchases only from companies with no defense contracts. The total system is still driven by a set of inhumane values. For instance, in the early 20th century United Fruit had the US military do its fighting for them; would the consequences of purchasing food through that corporation be substantially different if they also had a military contract to feed "the troops" compared to doing exactly the same things while "scrupulously" avoiding taking any cash from the miltary?

The fact that we have no clearly distinct military-industrial complex, but instead one "corporatocracy," is well-worth noting. But the headline obscures the message, because the article will not deliver on the implicit promise to show that the Pentagon controls their lives in any immediate, concrete way. The argument is far too subtle for most people to find plausible calling this a Pentagon "invasion."