Government Produces Crony Capitalism Like The Military-Industrial Complex

People miss much of the point of President Eisenhower’s amazing farewell address. He delivered a potent warning whose meaning has been forgotten by most, but remains especially relevant as we wonder how suddenly industry has run away with our government.

My fellow Americans:








































To understand how this visionary warning gets misconstrued, it helps to examine the parts of the speech outside of what your liberal arts instructors told you about. He is not warning about militarization, but about how regulatory capture between government and big industry results in crony capitalism.

We’ll start with the elevator pitch you get in your HS Amerikan History Course. Eisenhower warned us about a “Military-Industrial Complex.” The predictably brain-washed graduate of some !LIBERAL! Arts college will then talk about how Eisenhower warned us about Alt-Right Nazis that were coming for all your bong paraphernalia and sex toys.They’d get at your precious children to give them buzz cuts and warped minds.

These Leftist voices are only right about the warmongering by mistake. They badly miss a critical point that Eisenhower was trying to make. Here is what President Eisenhower specifically said about the Military-Industrial Complex. Eisenhower is talking about greed, incentives, and power. Eisenhower is not talking about Nazis.


Siemens, Volkswagen, and Hugo Boss honored contracts with the German Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht and made some honking big money off of Nazism’s military expansionism. They did not empower the rise of Adolf Hitler. There is a significant difference between debating the pros and cons of German corporate business ethics and claiming Hugo Boss put Hitler in charge.

It’s a further leap into intellectual Neverland to claim GE and Tommy Hilfiger could put a new Hitler in charge of the good, old USSA. In fact, there is an American leader who probably benefited more from and gave more goodies to the big business lobby here than did One-Nut Adolf in Post-Weimar Germany. According to none other than Matt Stoller, that would be President Barack Obama.


So the worst thing we get politically from The Military-Industrial is Barack Obama? I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but if these big-shots can ameliorate the Leftism of a Bernie Sanders by buying him another yacht or mansion, then we’ve just erected another part to our checks and balances system. Maybe GE will keep some lefty from sending us all off to mine rocks at Point Barrow once the demographic replacement has succeeded.

And yet there is a deep and fundamental problem incurred when you entrust an amoral, short term actor like GE with your continued security. It’s a problem as least as old as Ancient Rome and it gets to the real point Eisenhower was making as he strolled on out the door towards the golf course back in 1961. Quis costodiat ipsos custodes? GE understands this dynamic tension.

The more substantive parts of the report deal with potential ongoing accounting fraud. GE needs to immediately increase its insurance reserves by another $18.5 billion, according to the authors — above and beyond the $14.5 billion it’s contributing between 2018 and 2024. Additionally, Markopolos and his co-authors allege that GE already should have booked losses based on its entire investment in Baker Hughes, a GE Company (NYSE: BHGE). The report also includes allegations that GE’s numbers are too good to be true — especially in its prized aviation unit. However, there isn’t any substance to back up these claims — just a lot of innuendo implying that the company is probably covering up problems in GE Aviation because it has previously been slow to acknowledge losses in other businesses.

So how come the entire board of directors at GE hasn’t been Epsteined to some place for a neat and handy Arkancide? GE is a major engine manufacturer whose products power every significantly important rotary wing asset in an Army Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB). In plainer English, eff too hard with GE and none of the helicopters in Sam’s Army get off the ground for very long. They’ve got the tech data, the maintenance subcontract and the development contract for the next generation engine. If you like having an army, they are probably immune from most of the law. This is true across the spectrum of major defense systems.

Boeing could outsource its software programming to $9/hour labor in a nation that has never successfully designed and developed a jet and then had two of its aircraft crash with paying customers aboard and only have to designate some overpaid scumbag to fire. Boeing owns the contract and data for both The Apache and Chinook Helicopter programs. They, like GE, can effectively ground every CAB in the Army. You can contemplate enforcement of norms against their behaviors, but it will cost you.

Given the recent corporate behavior of Google and Twitter, we may not be too far away from getting the Nazis. We won’t get them immediately. The major corporations have to finish their unspoken project to destroy the society and sell out Amerika’s people for short-term politics. That will leave a vacuum that will eventually be filled by some kind of strong power. And maybe we’ll still have a few spare GE ITEPs laying around. Those Pinochet helicopters will be needing the horsepower.

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