military-industrial complex

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The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

"Over the previous five-year plans, military spending had been growing twice as fast as national income. This Moloch was devouring everything that hard labor and strain produced ... What made matters worse was the fact that it was impossible to analyze the problem. All the figures related to the military-industrial complex were classified. Even Politburo members didn't have access to them." 13 On the staff of the Central Committee, one man knew the secret inner workings of the military-industrial complex. Vitaly Katayev had the appearance of a thoughtful scientist or professor, with a long, angular face and wavy hair brushed straight back. As a teenager he loved to design model airplanes and ships.

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There was a "permanent gap," he said, between the drawing boards and the factories. This was the underside of the Soviet military machine. Katayev's notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.16 Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name "Ministry of Medium Machine Building," and others were similarly disguised.

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Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines. 17 Taking into account all the ways the Soviet military-industrial complex functioned and all the raw materials it consumed and all the tentacles that spread into civilian life, the true size of the defense burden on the economy may well have been even greater than Katayev estimated. Gorbachev would need deep reserves of strength and cunning to challenge this leviathan. At one Politburo meeting, he lamented, "This country produced more tanks than people." The military-industrial complex was its own army of vested interests: generals and officers in the services, designers and builders of weapons, ministers and planners in the government, propaganda organs, and party bosses everywhere, all united by the need, unquestioned, to meet the invisible Cold War threat.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

They were early curiosities and experiments, technical demonstrations rather than something fun to play around with. The technological basis for videogames was laid by the US military. As Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter have argued, “They originated in the U.S. military-industrial complex, the nuclear-armed core of capital’s global domination, to which they remain umbilically connected.”26 The military-industrial complex was enlisting the “first draft of immaterial labor, the highly educated techno-scientific personnel recruited to prepare, directly or indirectly, for nuclear war with the Soviet Union.” This preparation meant establishing academic research centers with military funding and developing “the massive defense-contracting system, in which the giants of U.S. corporate power, including information and telecommunication companies,” including IBM, “prepared for doomsday.”27 The expertise put to work in academic, military, and corporate laboratories was also applied to early games.

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This would later involve Sony, a much larger Japanese company, entering the stage too.57 The rise of Japanese videogames is also linked to the military-industrial complex. The irony is that Japan, defeated by the military and nuclear forces of the US, later “excelled in adopting the victors’ techno-cultural innovations.”58 The state-led policies in Japan pushed for a postindustrial reconstruction after the Second World War, laying the technical basis for the videogames industry. (This is analogous, in part, to the later experience of South Korea with online gaming.)59 While the military-industrial complex remained a key part of Japan’s development of videogames, so too was there a subversive element drawn into the industry.

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Douglas created a noughts and crosses game (more commonly known as “tic-tac-toe” in the US) on Cambridge’s EDSAC computer for research. Two years later, at the Los Alamos laboratory (infamous for the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb), programmers in their spare time developed the first blackjack game for the IBM 701.28 These early videogame links to the military-industrial complex were further solidified in 1955 with the introduction of the military war game Hutspiel, which simulated a war between NATO and the Soviet Union, represented, respectively, by blue and red characters. The similarities between these simulations and later videogames was riffed on in the 1983 film WarGames, in which Matthew Broderick’s character hacks into a military supercomputer.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), esp. pp. 79-82. 2. The literature on the military-industrial complex is voluminous. See, for example, James L. Clayton, ed., The Economic Impact of the Cold U'tzr: Sources and Readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970); Steven Rosen, ed., Testing the Theory of the Military-Industrial Complex (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1973); Paul A. C. Koistinen, The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective (New York: Praeger, 1980); Jacques S. Gansler, The Defense Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980); J.

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The ensuing "war within a war," the scene of "continuous conflict, acrimony, and bureaucratic infighting as civilian and military agencies clashed in the forwarding of their opposing interests," affords many lessons for students of public administration and politics. 37 My focus, however, is on another aspect of this experience. The great military-industrial mobilization of 1940-1945 created a new institution (or set of connected institutions), the military-industrial complex, pregnant with implications for the character of the postwar political economy. The origins and nature of that complex in World War II are at issue here. The military-industrial complex denotes the institutionalized arrangements whereby the military procurement authorities, certain large corporations, and certain executive and legislative officials of the federal government cooperate in an enormous, ongoing program to develop, produce, and deploy weapons and related products.

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"Labor for the Picking: The New Deal in the South." Journal of -Economic History 43 (Dec. 1983). Wilbur, Ray Layman, and Arthur Mastick Hyde. The Hoover Policies. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937. WORLD WAR II Beaumont, Roger A. "Quantum Increase: The MIC [military-industrial complex] in the Second World War." In U'tlr, Business, and American Society: Historical Perspectives on the Military-Industrial Complex, ed, Benjamin Franklin Cooling. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1977. Blum, Albert A. "Birth and Death of the M-Day Plan." In American Civil-Military Decisions, ed. Harold Stein. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1962.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

Ultimately, the deep state of the military-industrial complex encourages the militarization of foreign policy, forming a challenge to world peace. A favorite tactic of deep state doubters is to deride the idea as fringe kooky, but Eisenhower’s credibility is beyond reproach. He was a two-term president, a retired five-star general, and a hero of World War II—he had unparalleled authority in the matter. The language he used to describe the military-industrial complex mirrors how we think about deep states today. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex,” he said, adding, “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”17 For his sins, the military, with congressional approval, renamed its top war college for arms procurement after him.18 At least the deep state has a sense of humor.

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The plutocrats met their match with the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first White House occupant to say it aloud: “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”16 The secret marriage of corporate and political agendas birthing an American deep state may shock some, but it shouldn’t. President Eisenhower famously warned the nation against the corrupting influence of what he termed the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address. The military-industrial complex is a deep state alliance among the military, the arms industry that supplies it, and Congress, which oversees it. It’s an infinity loop fueled by corporate contributions to politicians, congressional approval for military spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and pliant government oversight of the industry.

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“I’m telling you right now,” Work said, “ten years from now if the first person through a breach isn’t a friggin’ robot, shame on us.” 11 The colonel was sharing his iPhone with his neighbors, who were equally impressed. The presentation ended with a shout-out to the defense industry, whose representatives nearly stood up and whooped. The Third Offset Strategy bestows a multibillion-dollar shopping list to the military-industrial complex. To push matters along, the Department of Defense set aside $18 billion as seed money.12 It also took the unprecedented step of establishing its own venture capital fund in California’s Silicon Valley, courtesy of US taxpayers. It need not be profitable, just supply the warfighter with gee-whiz technology.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Academic scientists, not politicians and bureaucrats, spurred the funding for and shaped the design of more-powerful computers, breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, and the Internet—a marvelous communication network of many nodes but no single command center. Government largesse extended beyond the military-industrial complex, too. Deregulation and tech-friendly tax policies, lobbied for and especially benefiting computer hardware and software companies and their investors, helped the Valley grow large; ongoing public investments in research and education trained and subsidized the next generation of high-tech innovators.

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Supersonic planes demanded sophisticated electronics to help their human pilots, because “the airplanes simply blast through space faster than the human mind can think,” as one aerospace executive put it. By 1955, thanks to the money being shoveled in the electronics industry’s direction, it had revenue of $8 billion a year—the third largest in the United States, behind only autos and steel.20 THE YOUNG AND TECHNICAL The military-industrial complex ran on people power too. Ramping up R&D required thousands of physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and chemists with cutting-edge skills and a Terman-esque work ethic. Need far outpaced supply. Altogether, the nation’s universities had produced only 416 physicists and 378 mathematicians between 1946 and 1948.

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The university was also quite young—in business for barely sixty years by the start of the Korean War—and had relatively few traditions or entrenched practices that might resist the machinations of an engineer-administrator determined to turn Stanford into the perfect laboratory for the military-industrial complex. Such license allowed Terman to not only build up basic research capacity but also move his university into even more applied work, bringing together star faculty and lab resources into the new Stanford Electronics Laboratories. The facility quickly became one of the military’s most important hubs of reconnaissance and radar R&D.

The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050 by Matt Savinar

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, clean water, disinformation, Easter island, energy security, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, invisible hand, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Rosa Parks, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Y2K

Cheney's house is equipped with state-of-the-art energy-conservation devices installed by Al Gore. Think they know something we don't? 104. How am I supposed to help stop the military-industrial complex that seems to have taken over the world? Are you ready to be a truly revolutionary American and put down your wallet? The military-industrial complex has taken over because we've given it our money, mostly for useless items that we don't need. Limit your consumer purchasing as much as you can and you will do more to slow down, and perhaps stop, the military-industrial complex than you will ever do by attending a peace march. Marching for peace does nothing to address our situation.

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What are some steps that I can personally take in the next few days to begin addressing this situation?............................................................................................ 105 103. Would it be a good time to look into buying a solar-powered home, if I have the financial resource to do so? ........................................................................................ 106 104. How am I supposed to help stop the military-industrial complex that seems to have taken over the world?.................................................................................................. 106 105. How am I supposed to maintain a positive mental attitude now that I know industrial civilization is about to collapse? How should I prepare emotionally?

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Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the county will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” -Abraham Lincoln (1864) “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” -Benito Mussolini “Beware of the military-industrial complex.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower 72 The Oil Age is Over 71. Does Peak Oil have anything to do with September 11th and the war in Afghanistan? The standard story regarding 9-11 is that Osama Bin Laden and his followers were angry at the US because we have military bases located near Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

“We owe it all to the hippies,” as the futurist (and countercultural activist) Stewart Brand famously put it, positing that the “real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.” But Silicon Valley—the real Silicon Valley—had never been about subverting the military-industrial complex. Silicon Valley, in its purest form, was the military-industrial complex. Its founders weren’t dropping LSD. They were proud squares, with politics that were closer to those of David Starr Jordan than to the radicals of Stewart Brand’s imagination. The man who’d coined the phrase “traitorous eight” (and the boss whom those eight men rebelled against) was William Shockley, a physicist who worked on radar for B-29 bombers during World War II, then invented a new kind of transistor, and then, after closing his company and taking a job as a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, picked up Jordan’s mantle to become the campus eugenicist.

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. | Power (Social sciences) Classification: LCC HG172.T46 C43 2021 (print) | LCC HG172.T46 (ebook) |DDC 332.092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007920 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007921 designed by meighan cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by shayan saalabi pid_prh_5.8.0_c0_r1 CONTENTS Introduction 1. Fuck You, World 2. A Strange, Strange Boy 3. Hope You Die 4. World Domination Index 5. Heinous Activity 6. Gray Areas 7. Hedging 8. Inception 9. R.I.P. Good Times 10. The New Military-Industrial Complex 11. The Absolute Taboo 12. Building the Base 13. Public Intellectual, Private Reactionary 14. Backup Plans 15. Out for Trump 16. The Thiel Theory of Government 17. Deportation Force 18. Evil List 19. To the Mat 20. Back to the Future Epilogue: You Will Live Forever Photographs Acknowledgments Notes Image Credits Index About the Author INTRODUCTION It may seem hard to remember, but there was a time when the world seemed ready to put Silicon Valley in charge of everything.

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He didn’t just want to break into government contracting; he wanted to take it over. He didn’t just want to persuade college administrators to root out campus political correctness; he wanted to turn fears about political correctness into an issue that could swing an American election. 10 THE NEW MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Most histories of the American tech industry begin in September 1957, at a laboratory in Mountain View, California, when a group of the country’s best young engineers at Shockley Semiconductor announced that they had decided to quit. The Traitorous Eight, as they would become known, would go on to start Fairchild Semiconductor.

@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris

air gap, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Brian Krebs, centralized clearinghouse, Citizen Lab, clean water, computer age, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, Firefox, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Stuxnet, systems thinking, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

When the employee opened such an e-mail, it installed a digital backdoor and allowed the Chinese to monitor every keystroke the employee typed, every website visited, every file downloaded, created, or sent. Their networks had been infiltrated. Their computers compromised and monitored. America’s military-industrial complex had, in the language of hackers, been owned. And the spies were still inside these companies’ networks, mining for secrets and eavesdropping on employees’ communications. Maybe they were monitoring the executives’ private e-mails right now. “A lot of people went into that room with dark hair, and when they came out, it was white,” says James Lewis, a prominent cyber security expert and a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, who knows the details of the meeting.

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The government cannot possibly protect or patrol all of them. But most of the world’s communications travel through equipment located in the United States. The government has a privileged position to exploit those networks, and an urgent need to protect them. To those ends, a military-Internet complex has emerged. Like the military-industrial complex before it, this new cooperative includes the makers of tanks and airplanes, missiles and satellites. But it includes tech giants, financial institutions, and communications companies as well. The United States has enlisted, persuaded, cajoled, and in some cases compelled companies into helping it fend off foreign and domestic foes who have probed the American electrical grid and looked for other weaknesses in critical infrastructures.

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Indeed, his embrace of the historic importance of intelligence to warfare underscored his desire to protect the NSA and keep its mission intact. The timing of Obama’s speech was fitting, if unintentionally so. On January 17, 1961, exactly fifty-three years earlier, President Dwight Eisenhower had warned in his farewell address to the nation of a “military industrial complex,” whose “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government.” Eisenhower said the military of the day bore little resemblance to the one in which he served during World War II or that his predecessors in the White House had commanded.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

The 1960s seem to explode onto the scene in a Technicolor swirl of personal exploration and political protest, much of it aimed at bringing down the cold war military-industrial bureaucracy. Those who accept this version of events [ 4 ] Introduction tend to account for the persistence of the military-industrial complex today, and for the continuing growth of corporate capitalism and consumer culture as well, by arguing that the authentically revolutionary ideals of the generation of 1968 were somehow co-opted by the forces they opposed. There is some truth to this story. Yet, as it has hardened into legend, this version of the past has obscured the fact the same military-industrial research world that brought forth nuclear weapons—and computers—also gave rise to a free-wheeling, interdisciplinary, and highly entrepreneurial style of work.

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Finally, if the bureaucracies of industry and government demanded that men and women become psychologically fragmented specialists, the technology-induced experience of togetherness would allow them to become both self-sufficient and whole once again. For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan. Introduction [ 5 ] Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system.

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In that sense, both he and his students agreed that the university was an information machine. Second, he suggested that this machine had a particular role to play in the ongoing cold war. “Intellect has . . . become an instrument of national purpose,” he wrote, “a component part of the ‘military-industrial complex.’ . . . In the war of ideological worlds, a great deal depends on the use of this instrument.”4 For the students of the Free Speech Movement, the university’s role as knowledge producer could not be separated from its engagement with cold war politics. Moreover, the entanglement threatened many at a deeply personal level.

The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security by Deborah D. Avant

barriers to entry, continuation of politics by other means, corporate social responsibility, failed state, Global Witness, hiring and firing, independent contractor, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, operational security, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, The Nature of the Firm, trade route, transaction costs

Lashman, Paul, “Spicer’s Security Firm in Battle with DynCorp over $290m Deal,” Independent (4 July 2004). Lee, Dwight R., “Public Goods, Politics, and Two Cheers for the Military Industrial Complex,” in R. Higgs, ed., Arms, Politics, and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (New York: Homes and Meier, 1990). Legro, Jeffrey, Cooperation Under Fire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Lens, Sidney, The Military Industrial Complex (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970). Leppard, David and Nicholas Rufford, “Arms to Africa: ‘no prosecution’” Sunday Times (17 May 98). Levi, Margaret Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1989).

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The Pan-Am contract allowed the US to build airstrips on some bases in the British West Indies (acquired through the Lend-lease Program) without violating its neutral status, and the contract with TWA allowed the army to quickly train new pilots. After Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt nationalized the airline industry. Ibid., pp. 454–55. Sidney Lens, The Military Industrial Complex (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1970), pp. 129–30; James Collins Jr., The Development and Training of the South Vietnamese Army, 1950–1972 (Washington, DC: Department of the Army, 1975), pp. 111–12; William Proxmire, Report From the Wasteland (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 9–10. State capacity and contracting for security 115 the US forces could not do for legal reasons or lack of resources.171 In the wake of Vietnam and the concerns it engendered over US intervention, the 1980s brought an increased focus on military training as a substitute to direct US involvement and private firms played a role here as well.

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.: How a US Company Props up the House of Saud,” Progressive Vol. 60 (April 1996). Cynthia Arnson, Crossroads: Congress, the President, and Central America, 1976–1993 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1993); Jonathan Feldman, Universities in the Business of Repression: the Academic–Military–Industrial Complex and Central America (Boston: South End Press, 1989). Most of these programs were in concert with established institutions, community colleges, technical institutes, or proprietary schools. Lawrence Hanser, Joyce Davidson, and Cathleen Stasz, Who Should Train? Substituting Civilian Provided Training for Military Training (Santa Monica: RAND, 1991), ch. 2. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars/a076.pdf.

The Profiteers by Sally Denton

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Boycotts of Israel, clean water, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, nuclear winter, power law, profit motive, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, William Langewiesche

In the end, McCone’s legacy in both government and industry would be one of global saber rattling, covert intervention, war profiteering, and billion-dollar energy and defense contracts for his associate on the West Coast. McCone was “the greatest organizer in the United States,” Steve told Jack Anderson. CHAPTER TEN Weaving Spiders “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” President Eisenhower had warned in his 1961 farewell address to the nation. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He cautioned against the unhealthy alliance between defense contractors, the Pentagon, and their friends on Capitol Hill. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” he continued.

…

Yet even Eisenhower could not have foreseen the near-total influence the defense industry would have over American foreign policy in the coming decades. Among the inherent ironies of Eisenhower’s grim prescience is how two of his associates—John McCone and Steve Bechtel—would become iconic figures of his envisioned military-industrial complex. “Rarely does a big Pentagon construction project surface that doesn’t have a role set aside especially for Bechtel,” a press account said of Bechtel’s twenty-first-century position as one of the country’s top defense contractors. Eisenhower had long worried about a post–World War II Japan turning toward China and Russia, sounding an alarm as early as 1954 that the shift of Indochina toward Communism would usher in such a tilt and declaring that the “possible consequences of the loss of Japan to the free world are just incalculable.”

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Once described by President Hoover as “the greatest men’s party on earth” (a non sequitur apparently lost on Hoover, who was once described as “that swinging Bohemian . . . who was running for the presidency on a ‘dry’ platform”), the Grove is where emerging geopolitical trends are discussed in the privacy of 127 primitive camps. The most esteemed of these camps is Mandalay—named for the Kipling poem—where Steve Jr., like his father before him and his father’s partner, McCone, had been a member his entire adult life, following the patrilineal formation of the Grove. A “virtual personification of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex,” author Joan Didion once pronounced Mandalay’s roster of members and guests. “Here, shielded from intrusion by a chain-link fence and the forces of the California Highway Patrol,” wrote Laton McCartney, “men like Justin W. Dart, William F. Buckley, George Bush, Edgar Kaiser, Jr., and Tom Watson could walk in the woods, skinny-dip in the Russian River, toast marshmallows over a fire, dress in drag for a ‘low jinks’ dramatic production, and, for a few days at least, hew to The Grove’s motto: ‘Spiders Weave Not Here.’ ” Its edict, taken from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, refers to a strict directive that prohibits Bohemians from explicitly conducting business at the Grove.

American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

How did America abandon its happy isolation to become the world’s dominant military power, with an empire of influence and strength of a kind never before seen in world history? There are three possible answers: interest-group corruption, a presidential constitution and the country’s bigness. The Military-Industrial Complex The first explanation is the form of interest-group corruption that President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” in his Farewell Address.5 He warned against a defense industry that teams up with the military to shape policy decisions about spending and diplomacy. As if to evidence this, defense industry stock prices fell when Trump signaled that a meeting with North Korea’s President Kim had been a success.6 By itself, the influence of the defense industry doesn’t explain why we spend more per capita on our military than other countries.

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As if to evidence this, defense industry stock prices fell when Trump signaled that a meeting with North Korea’s President Kim had been a success.6 By itself, the influence of the defense industry doesn’t explain why we spend more per capita on our military than other countries. Every First World country has a military-industrial complex, and if our defense industry is bigger, the reason might be that our military and our defense budget are bigger. We have a military budget of over $600 billion, and about half of this is awarded to defense contractors. Like bears to honey, lobbyists are drawn to that money. The size of our defense industry is arguably not just a consequence of a large military, since causation can also work in the other direction.

…

Eisenhower, Public Papers of the Presidents: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960–61 (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Federal Register, 1961), p. 1038. Gillian Rich, “Defense Stocks Fall As Trump Makes This Concession at North Korea Summit,” Investors Business Daily, June 12, 2018. William D. Hartung, “How the Military-Industrial Complex Preys on the Troops,” Common Dreams, October 10, 2017. Clay Dillow, “Defense Contractors Outgun Other Industries in Corporate PAC Donations,” Fortune, July 15, 2015. Charles W. Ostrom and Brian Job, “The President and the Political Use of Force,” American Political Science Review, vol. 80, no. 2 (June 1986): 541–66; Patrick James and John R.

The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service

Able Archer 83, active measures, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Chicago School, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

The result is an incomparable record of deliberations and decisions in Soviet foreign policy; it is a pleasure to bring them to attention for the first time.2 Vitali Kataev of the Party Secretariat’s Defence Department assiduously documented the discussions inside the Soviet leadership on arms reduction. This material is unusually helpful in elucidating the links between the politicians and the ‘military-industrial complex’. Anatoli Adamishin, who headed the First European Department in the Foreign Affairs Ministry before his appointment as Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister, kept a diary through the 1980s and beyond. His observations offer an enthralling and largely unexamined source on the USSR’s internal politics and international relations.

…

Only a fool in the Kremlin or the White House could expect to emerge unscathed from any conflict involving nuclear ballistic missiles. Yet no serious attempt was made to end the Cold War. At best, the leaders strove to lessen the dangers. Their policies were conditioned by influential lobbies that promoted the interests of national defence. For decades the Soviet ‘military-industrial complex’ had imposed its priorities on state economic policy, and the Western economic recession that arose from the rise in the price of oil in 1973 encouraged American administrations to issue contracts for improved military technology to stimulate recovery.1 The Cold War therefore seemed a permanent feature of global politics, and pacifists and anti-nuclear campaigners seemed entirely lacking in realism.

…

Reagan’s trust in Gorbachëv grew at the summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow in 1985–1988. Bush was Gorbachëv’s friend from the Malta summit of 1989 onwards. The leaders in Moscow and Washington had to find ways to carry their political establishments along with them. For years before the mid-1980s it had been argued that the American military-industrial complex had no interest in moves towards global peace. The heavy industry ministries and army high command in the USSR were similarly regarded as eternally attached to militarist objectives.9 Reagan and Bush were conscious of the scepticism among American conservatives about the agreements that they wanted to finalize with the Kremlin.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

With too much government and military control, technologies can’t reach their full potential. President Dwight Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex.”22 It’s ironic that this five-star general and two-term president—the quintessential Washington insider—issued such a clarion call against concentration of influence within and around the government. He said: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for disastrous use of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”23 The analogy between access to space and access to information seems to break down.

…

Amateur Computerist, vol. 2, no. 2, and “A Brief History of the Internet” by B. M. Leiner et al. 2009, online at http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet. 22. “Eisenhower’s Warning: The Military-Industrial Complex Forty Years Later” by W. D. Hartung 2001. World Policy Journal, vol. 18, no. 1. 23. Unwarranted Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-Industrial Complex by J. Ledbetter 2011. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 5: Meet the Entrepreneurs 1. “Private Space Exploration a Long and Thriving Tradition” by M. Burgan 2012. In Bloomberg View, online at http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-07-18/private-space-exploration-a-long-and-thriving-tradition. 2.

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As they orbited the Earth, many commented on the seamlessness of a planet where no political or cultural boundaries were visible. The iconic image of the fragile Earth hanging in the blackness of space—a blue marble—helped spur the environmental movement in the late 1960s. It is indeed ironic that a supreme feat of the military-industrial complex was embraced by counterculture activists.10 When Frank Sinatra performed “Fly Me to the Moon” on his TV show in 1969, he dedicated it to the astronauts who had “made the impossible possible.” The song’s jaunty melody perfectly captured the lightness of the people who had slipped the bonds of Earth.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

Cold War strategy, reminded the foreign policy elite of the importance of U.S. economic power: “One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living.”19. For Paul Nitze, the principal author, “purposes other than civilian consumption” meant the defense budget. This “military Keynesianism” was the perfect economic engine to fuel the ambitions of U.S. policy makers. Inasmuch as a large part of the budget of the military-industrial complex was secret, even from government auditors, decisions were hidden under a cloak of national security. Military spending was no less politically motivated than civilian spending was. Bases and contracts were allocated to keep congressional support for the big Department of Defense budget.

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Like Kotkin and Slaughter, he believes that the U.S. tolerance for immigration will keep the country supplied with workers and low labor costs. For the nation-state, he says, per capita income is not what is important. He is indifferent to the fate of the U.S. standard of living. The key, he believes, is to keep total income high enough to support the military-industrial complex. Friedman too is not worried about China. Like the other happy-face forecasters, he believes that China is permanently hooked on U.S. markets and will always need us. For the next few decades, at least, China’s navy is too weak and its military electronics too primitive to undercut our strategic position in the Pacific.

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In its 2011 final report to Congress after three years of study, the Commission on Wartime Contracting made a conservative estimate that the waste, fraud, and abuse in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars might come to sixty billion dollars, but the commission didn’t know for sure because it never could get a good accounting. There is no stomach in the political parties for a knock-down, drag-out fight with the military-industrial complex. Defense contractors are important employers in every state and in a majority of congressional districts. They hire legions of lobbyists armed with generous campaign contributions. The military reaches into virtually every nook and cranny of American consciousness. The Pentagon is a major financier of universities through research grants and scholarships.

The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine M. Gehl, Michael E. Porter

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disintermediation, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, future of work, guest worker program, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, new economy, obamacare, pension reform, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, zero-sum game

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”39 What Eisenhower foresaw was a powerful alliance between America’s military and the defense industry. He believed that if this alliance were to be left unchecked, it would perpetuate a build-buy defense-spending cycle that would outpace actual need and create products designed to serve the goals of the complex over the goals of the “customer” (which should be our national security interests). The military-industrial complex would create a supply of defense goods for supply’s sake and, like many other modern American sectors, become too big and too powerful to fail.

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The need to reform our political system to create healthier competition and better outcomes remains unchanged. A Thriving Political-Industrial Complex In January 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight D.Eisenhower, a Republican, warned the nation of the threat and misplaced influence of what he called the military-industrial complex: “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 State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development.

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See campaign contributions; donors consultants, 7, 31, 38, 42, 187n44 Coons, Chris, 47 Crane, David, 176 cross-partisan approach electoral innovation and, 157–158 Nebraska’s legislative reform with, 164–165 Curry, James M., 193n63 customers average voters as, 27 citizens’ lack of power as, in 1870s, 103 duopoly control and, 23 Final-Five Voting and power of, 130 Five Forces framework on, 20 healthy competition and, 21 military-industrial complex and, 38 nonvoters and, 27 partisan takeover of Congress and, 60 party-primary voters as, 24–25 politics industry and power of, 24–28, 25 special interests and donors as, 25–27 Cutler, Eliot, 50 Dana, Richard Henry III, 204n61 dark money, 26 data analytics, 31, 184n16 Davidson, Roger, 161 Davis, Gray, 149 Dean, Howard, 152 debates, in presidential campaigns, 31, 41–43, 63, 188nn3, 13 Debs, Eugene, 108–109 deficit financing, 67–69 Delaney, John, 209n2 Delaware election machinery in, 46–48 sore-loser law in, 48 Delaware way, 47 democracy African Americans’ participation in, after the Civil War, 101 belief in change and need for constant reinvention of, 95 citizens’ power to reform politics and restore, 96 Constitution with formal blueprint for, 95 duopoly control as problem in, 23 election of representatives in, 94, 95 plurality voting’s impact on, 51 as political innovation, 94–95 political parties’ role in, 19 politics industry and decline of, 39, 66 Progressive Era reforms and, 97–98, 110 public loss of faith in, 72, 196n10 Reconstruction and, 101 reengineered elections and legislative machinery and, 141 Democracy Found, 156, 174 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, 32 Democratic National Committee (DNC), 42 Democratic Party Affordable Care Act and, 85–86 California primary reform and, 149, 150–151 closed primaries and, 183n10 committee control of Congress and, 56, 61 congressional bill process and, 60, 61 congressional rules and, 136 cross-partisan approach to electoral innovation and, 157–158 declining percentage of moderates in, 67, 68 deficit financing used by, 69 division of voters by, in Gilded Age, 106–108 Federal Election Commission members from, 35 Gilded Age and, 96, 201nn33, 45 Hastert Rule and bill support by, 54 Hayes-Tilden 1876 election and, 101–102 immigration reform and, 73–74, 196nn11, 12, 14, 196n15, 196–197n18, 197n22 machinery of political system engineered by, 3 Maine’s ranked-choice voting and, 150, 152 newspapers backed by, 104, 109, 200n29 partisan takeover of Congress and, 55–59 as part of duopoly in politics industry, 7 percentage of voters’ identification with, 71, 71 political machines in, 104, 201n33, 213n60 Populist Party and, 104–105 presidential debate rules and, 42, 63 public disillusionment with, 70–71 rivalries between Republicans and, in 1870s, 103 rules written by, 18 Social Security Act passage and, 84 spoiler effect and, 51 top-five primaries and, 122, 123 Trump’s election and presidency and adjustments within, 37 volatile swings of voter sentiment and, 71–72 voters and competition in elections and, 119 See also duopoly; two-party system Democratic Party of Washington v.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Applied to military affairs, traditional terms such as “deter,” “defend,” and “destroy” meant something concrete and specific. “Shaping,” by comparison, was amorphous. Requiring nothing in particular, it could permit just about anything. It promised to enlarge American freedom of action. As far as the national security apparatus and all those dependent upon the largesse of the military-industrial complex were concerned, this was its chief attribute. Here was a gift that promised to keep on giving. As it embarked upon the post–Cold War era, the United States faced few pressing dangers. Risks appeared manageable. In such circumstances, self-restraint seemed tantamount to timidity. So in national security circles, the collective mindset began tilting toward activism.

…

Yet he did little to curb American militarism. Global leadership remained largely synonymous with the use of force. The war machine churned on, with most citizens all but numb to its existence. In the year of Obama’s birth, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had decried the rise of what he called the military-industrial complex. In doing so, Ike performed a last great service for his countrymen. Yet a phrase coined in 1961 does not adequately describe the militarized mindset to which Washington had succumbed since the end of the Cold War. In contrast to Ike, Obama did next to nothing to educate Americans about the dangers this mindset poses.

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First, Clinton’s something-for-everyone set of promises represented the functional equivalent of Donald Trump’s widely ridiculed claim, “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”48 Clinton’s campaign strategists assumed that testifying to her own mastery of that system held one key to electoral success. So whatever the problem, Clinton had readily at hand her own plan to “fix it”—a chorus of dog whistles designed to resonate with just about every group of potential supporters: workers, women, the elderly, vets, people of color, gays, Jews, the military-industrial complex, and even big business. Yet in marketing their competing “I alone” claims, both candidates were in effect endorsing the post–Cold War paradigm of the U.S. president as maximum leader and ultimate source of salvation. Second, if Clinton’s vision was stupefyingly grandiose, it was also strikingly banal, its contents carefully vetted by Democratic think tanks and pollsters.

Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy

company town, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment

The continuing Cold War, which led the West to impose embargoes on the sale of advanced technologies to the Soviet Union, lent weight to their argument. The government-funded military-industrial complex was eager to move into the economic sphere while maintaining its monopoly on high-tech industries and products. Many, including Gorbachev, saw this as the most effective solution to the country’s economic troubles. THE DESIRES, fears, and aspirations of the Soviet military-industrial complex and its scientific wing were articulated to the congress by Anatolii Aleksandrov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The fact that he was the first representative of the Soviet intelligentsia to address the congress underscored the symbolic importance of his position in the party hierarchy as well as the hopes that the new leaders were now placing in the scientific establishment.13 A tall man with a long face, a big nose, and a shaved, egg-shaped head, Aleksandrov had turned eighty-three earlier that month.

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Nuclear power stations like the one in Chernobyl were no longer the responsibility of Yefim Slavsky, the all-powerful head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which was the hub of the Soviet nuclear program and its military-industrial complex. Slavsky’s ministry was a virtual empire, a state within a state with its own manufacturing plants capable of producing most of the equipment needed for the nuclear industry. Those plants had been used to build the nuclear power station at the Sosnovyi Bor settlement near Leningrad, where the first reactor began producing electrical energy in December 1973. But soon after that the construction of nuclear power stations had become the responsibility of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, which was not part of the military-industrial complex; it had a poor manufacturing base of its own and none of the political clout that came with Slavsky’s power and prestige.

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Rumor had it that he went so far as to declare that his reactors were safe enough to be installed on Red Square.18 That never happened, but after the new reactor was tested, at a plant in Slavsky’s ministry, it was deemed safe enough to be transferred to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, which had no experience with nuclear energy. Few doubted the positive effect that the fusion of science and technology would have on the country as a result of the military-industrial complex’s stewardship of the nuclear industry. Aleksandrov’s RBMK reactors were placed all over the European part of the Soviet Union, producing much-needed clean energy for the country. With a capacity of 1 million megawatts of electrical energy per unit, they were more powerful than their Soviet competitors, the VVERs (or Water-Water Energy Reactors, meaning water-cooled and water-moderated), which had been produced starting in the early 1970s.

A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic by Nicholas Eberstadt, Nick Eberstadt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, corporate governance, family office, income inequality, informal economy, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, reserve currency, women in the workforce, working-age population

Commentators on the right and left of the U.S. political spectrum decry what they call the American “national security state” (a term that has acquired a marked opprobrium in the decades since its early and decidedly more neutral Cold War coinage). And concern about excessive defense spending has hardly been a preserve of fringe extremists. No less a figure than Dwight Eisenhower, architect of the D-Day invasion and onetime supreme commander of NATO forces, warned of the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” in his famous 1961 farewell presidential address.62 A healthy measure of informed public skepticism toward any and all proposed military expenditures is not only suitable but essential for open democratic societies. A free people, after all, will jealously guard against impingements upon their liberties—including those arising from excessive, wasteful, or unwise outlays in the name of national defense.

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U.S. government outlays on entitlements do not merely exceed those for defense nowadays, they completely overshadow defense outlays. Increasingly, moreover, our seemingly insatiable national hunger for government transfer payments to individual citizens stand to compromise our present and future capabilities for military readiness. In 1961, the year of Eisenhower’s admonition about the military-industrial complex, America was devoting close to two dollars on defense for every dollar it provided in domestic entitlement payments.63 Up to that point, defense expenditures had routinely exceeded any and all allocations for social insurance and social welfare throughout American history.64 But in 1961 a geometric growth of entitlement payments was just commencing.

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But why, exactly, should America’s current and (heretofore) future military commitments be regarded as “unaffordable”? In 2010 the national defense budget amounted to 4.8 percent of current GDP (see Figure 28). As a fraction of U.S. national output, our military burden was thus lower in 2010 than in almost any year during the four-plus decades of the Cold War era. In 1961—the year of Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” address—the ratio of defense spending to GDP was 9.4 percent68; in other words, almost twice as high as in 2010. Put another way: America’s overall military burden was nearly twice as high in 1961 as in 2010. Americans may have deemed our defense commitments in 2010 to be ill-advised, poorly purchased, or otherwise of questionable provenance—but as a pure question of affordability, the United States is in a better position to afford our current defense burden than at virtually any time during the Cold War era.

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

Stealth was not just a product of the 1970s but rather drew on decades of R&D, which itself reflected a national willingness to make long-term investments in uncertain ventures. And those investments came from both the public and the private sectors. Stealth represented a vast integration of the state and private industry, what is commonly called the military-industrial complex. In order to demonstrate the superiority of an unfettered free market over a command economy in the Cold War, the US embraced a strong public-private partnership. The Cold War military-industrial complex often carries negative connotations, of a corrupting intrusion of the state into private enterprise and, in the other direction, of private interests into public policy. And indeed Stealth, as some observers argued, could seem like a waste of money and brainpower, enabled by official secrecy and encouraged by pork-barrel politics, all just to produce yet another weapon and a new lap of the arms race.

…

In his farewell address, in January 1961, he issued a dire warning about the emergence of “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” which the old Army general viewed as a dangerous incursion both by the state into private enterprise and by private interests into public policy. Eisenhower gave it a name: the “military-industrial complex,” thereafter usually invoked in the pejorative sense Ike intended.9 More recent scholars have taken a more positive view of the military-industrial complex, framing the public-private partnership as a remarkable engine driving technological innovation. What has been called the “hidden developmental state,” “entrepreneurial state,” or “innovation hybrids” was every bit the match of Japan’s vaunted Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI, which was heralded in the early 1980s, just when Stealth was emerging, as the reason for Japan’s high-tech lead over the US.10 Japan’s MITI, of course, promoted commercial consumer technologies, whereas Stealth projected military strength but did little for economic competitiveness.

…

One is the long-haired, tie-dyed hippie; the other is the aerospace engineer, in short-sleeved white button-down, skinny dark tie, and crew cut, with pocket protector and slide rule. The images seem orthogonal: the hippie a free spirit, flipping the bird to authority and denouncing the military-industrial complex; the aerospace engineer dedicated, conservative, and patriotic. On one side, romantic hedonism, turning on and dropping out; on the other, rocket-science rationality and can-do discipline. Norman Mailer saw it that way; after the moon landing, he mocked the hippies: “You’ve been drunk all summer… and they have taken the moon.”12 But the realms of the hippie and the engineer were not completely opposed.

The Dream Machine: The Untold History of the Notorious V-22 Osprey by Richard Whittle

Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, digital map, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, helicopter parent, military-industrial complex, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, The Soul of a New Machine, VTOL

—Steve Weinberg, Dallas Morning News “Drawing on more than 200 interviews, Whittle reconstructs the Pentagon strategy sessions and covert Capitol Hill meetings that kept the Osprey going despite crashes, production delays, and billion-dollar cost overruns… . a fine book.” —Dale Eisman, The Virginian-Pilot “Whittle takes the reader behind the closed doors of the military-industrial complex and into the cockpits of the Ospreys that went down, telling a story as gripping as it is important.” —Aviation Maintenance Whittle “pulls no punches, but takes no cheap shots either. The result is a truly readable book that spins a fascinating yarn of science, politics, and intrigue.”

…

They were willing to put money into a program in order to advance technology that might be an advantage on the battlefield.” Since World War II, the military’s “patient capital” has led to innumerable, often stunning advances in technology. It also spawned and sustains what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower was referring to the web of political and personal relationships between industry representatives and military officials that germinates when they do business or collaborate on projects. As institutions, defense companies and the government are often at odds over the costs and capabilities of weapons and other equipment; there is plenty of friction in the relationship.

…

Sometimes it can blur the line between the best interests of industry and the nation. Eisenhower, who as a five-star general had led the Allies in defeating Nazi Germany, warned of this larger danger in a farewell address as he left the White House in 1961. “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower declared. He also noted that the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.” During the Great Depression, the U.S. military wasn’t immense and the aircraft industry was tiny. Both would grow rapidly with the approach of World War II, but for most of the decade preceding that conflict, America’s armed forces numbered around 250,000 active-duty personnel, compared to roughly 1.4 million today, and the entire military budget was under $1 billion—less than one five-hundredth of its size in recent years, without adjusting for inflation.

10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less by Garett Jones

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Brexit referendum, business cycle, central bank independence, clean water, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Edward Glaeser, fake news, financial independence, game design, German hyperinflation, hive mind, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jean Tirole, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Neil Armstrong, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price stability, rent control, Robert Solow, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen

People need their phones and need their electricity, and there’s a lot of monopoly power there to exploit, so regulated businesses have a strong incentive to pressure any regulator for higher prices and lax quality requirements. The theory of regulator capture has some overlap with President Dwight Eisenhower’s worries about the military-industrial complex, which Ike discussed in a shocking and powerful speech toward the end of his presidency. He wanted to tell Americans that they needed to be vigilant about monitoring both the military and military contractors. He warned that in the post–World War II era, 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 State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. 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.¹⁶ Note that top military officials and top electricity regulators have something in common: they’re both interacting closely with the same small number of large businesses on a regular basis, and it’s often the government official’s job to give bad news to those large businesses.

…

The cynical, and thus plausible, case for electing electricity and telecom regulators is that the fear of looming elections will discourage regulators from selling out completely to the industries they regulate. The power of voters is a form of what Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith used to call “countervailing power”: power that has a chance to stand up to dangerous forces. But just because there’s a problem doesn’t mean there’s an easy solution. The risks of the military-industrial complex that Ike warned about are real, but that doesn’t mean we should be voting for our admirals. There are benefits and costs to democratic checks on insider power, and as we’ve already seen, it’s pretty likely that in the case of judges, central bankers, and city treasurers, we’re probably better off with the devil of insider influence than with the devil of democratic influence.

Masters of Mankind by Noam Chomsky

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, failed state, God and Mammon, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land bank, land reform, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, nuremberg principles, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system

That a situation such as this is fraught with perils is obvious. From the point of view of the liberal technocrat the solution to the problem lies in strengthening the federal government (the “radical centralizer” goes further, insisting that all power be vested in the central state authorities and the “vanguard party”). Only thus can the military-industrial complex be tamed and controlled: “The filter-down process of pump-priming the civilian economy by fostering ever-greater economic concentration and income inequality must be replaced by a frank acceptance of federal responsibility to control the tide of economic bigness, and to plan the conservation and growth of all sectors of the economy and the society.”48 The hope lies in skilled managers such as Robert McNamara, who “has been the unflinching hero of the campaign to reform and control the ‘Contract State.’”49 It is probably correct to suppose that the technostructure offers no greater hope than McNamara, who has clearly explained his own views regarding social organization: “Vital decision-making, in policy matters as well as in business, must remain at the top.

…

The above prospect, Nossiter concludes from his study, is this: Powerful industrial giants eagerly pressing for more military business, Pentagon defense planners eager to get on with the new weapons production, Congressmen whose districts profit directly from the anticipated contracts, and millions of Americans from the blue collar aircraft worker to the university physicist drawing their paychecks from the production of arms. About to take over the White House is a new president whose campaign left little doubt of his inclination to support the ABM and other costly arms spending while tightening up on expenditures for civilian purposes. This is the military-industrial complex of 1969. Of course, any competent economist can sketch other methods by which government-induced production can serve to keep the economy functioning. “But capitalist reality is more intractable than planners’ pens and paper. For one thing too much productive expenditure by the state is ruled out.

…

Similarly, the American people “understand” the necessity for the grotesquerie of the space race, which is quite susceptible to Madison Avenue techniques and thus, along with the science-technology race in general, serves as “a transfigured, transmuted and theoretical substitute for an infinite strategic arms race; it is a continuation of the race by other means.”53 It is fashionable to decry such analyses—or even references to the “military-industrial complex”—as “unsophisticated.” It is interesting, therefore, to note that those who manipulate the process and stand directly to gain by it are much less coy about the matter. There are some perceptive analysts—J. K. Galbraith is the best example—who argue that the concern for growth and profit maximization has become only one of several motives for management and technostructure, that it is supplemented, perhaps dominated, by identification with and adaptation to the needs of the organization, the corporation, which serves as a basic planning unit for the economy.54 Perhaps this is true, but the consequences of this shift of motivation may nevertheless be slight, since the corporation as planning unit is geared to production of consumer goods55—the consumer, often, being the national state—rather than satisfaction of social needs, and to the extension of its dominion in the organized international economy.

China's Future by David Shambaugh

Berlin Wall, capital controls, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high net worth, high-speed rail, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, market bubble, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent-seeking, secular stagnation, short selling, South China Sea, special drawing rights, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional

At the current rate of accelerating growth in the state R&D budget (up from 1.6 to 2.1 percent since 2012), China could overtake the United States around 2022, when it will spend more than $600 billion annually. China has a huge R&D network in terms of personnel and institutions.53 The government has a sprawling bureaucracy of national laboratories under most of the State Council ministries and within the nation’s large military-industrial complex. For decades China’s military industries were chronically incapable of innovation (imitation even gave them severe problems), but that is changing rapidly. As the work of expert Tai Ming Cheung has demonstrated, China’s civil-military integration and defense technological innovation is really taking off.54 However, innovation requires much more than government investment in R&D—it fundamentally requires an educational system premised on critical thinking and freedom of exploration.

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Politically, it would involve an even greater tightening and crackdown—Hard Authoritarianism morphing into restored totalitarianism. Coercion and control (already reinforced) would be stepped up. Social and ideological conformity would be enforced by a pervasive state security apparatus. In terms of the economy, privatization would give way to renationalization and collectivization by the state. The military-industrial complex would become the favored economic sector. Strict controls would be placed on the labor market. Nationalism would spike, with possible aggressive moves against Japan and other neighbors. While this possibility is not unimaginable, I judge it unfeasible given the already tremendous growth and dominance of the private sector of the economy and the relative freedoms that Chinese citizens do enjoy.

…

This was literally on display in massive military parades in Tiananmen Square on October 1, 2009 and September 3, 2015 (the former to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC and the latter to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II). China’s military power is not a new phenomenon; it has steadily been built over the past quarter century. Fueled by a booming economy, China’s military-industrial complex has been the beneficiary of annual budget increases in excess of GDP growth. From 1998 to 2007 China’s GDP has averaged 12.5 percent growth, but its (official) defense spending grew at an average of 15.9 percent.44 Since then it has leveled off at between 10–12 percent annual increases.

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

This is what happened in Argentina in the late 1990s, when, in the absence of a surplus recycling mechanism, the country’s deteriorating trade deficit eventually took its toll on the fixed exchange rate with the US dollar. The same negative dynamic is currently at play within the eurozone – see chapter 8. The two surplus recycling mechanisms characteristic of the United States since the Second World War have been the simple transfer union instituted by the New Deal in the late 1930s and the complicated military-industrial complex, which developed in the 1940s. The former works straightforwardly, by ensuring that the unemployment and health benefits of deficit states are paid for by Washington, dipping into taxes raised in surplus states, e.g. California and New York. The second mechanism, too, turns on a political arrangement: whenever a conglomerate like Boeing receives a large Pentagon contract to build a new fighter jet or missile system, it is stipulated that some of the production facilities must be located in depressed, deficit states.

…

Convinced that ‘free market capitalism’ had to be planned meticulously by Washington, and in a manner not too dissimilar to the successful running of the war economy, they sought to project onto a global canvas the successful recipe that had brought America out of the doldrums. Intent on winning the peace, they sought to empower US business through a combination of New Deal-inspired interventions and the technological advances achieved by the military-industrial complex. The four men were: • James Forrestal, secretary of defence (and previously secretary of the navy) • James Byrnes, secretary of state • George Kennan, director of policy planning staff at the State Department and renowned ‘prophet’ of Soviet containment • Dean Acheson, leading light in all major post-war designs (the Bretton Woods agreement, the Marshall Plan, the prosecution of the Cold War, etc.) and secretary of state from 1949 onwards.

…

Although most of the New Dealers had been influenced by the writings of John Maynard Keynes, and had taken note of his crucial advice not to trust markets to organize themselves in a manner that can bring about prosperity and stability, the Cold War, which they had to pursue at the same time as managing the Global Plan, and their closeness to the military-industrial complex prevented them from seeing as clearly as Keynes had the imperative of creating a formal, cooperative system for recycling surpluses. Many observers note the deep chasm separating the New Deal mindset from European, or British, Keynesianism. To begin with, whereas Keynes had become convinced that global capitalism required a cooperative, non-imperial global surplus recycling mechanism (GSRM), the New Dealers both wanted and were obliged to tailor their Global Plan in the context of Cold War imperatives and in clear pursuit of American hegemony.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

Today the agency maintains headquarters in an unmarked glass and steel building four miles from the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia. DARPA’s director reports to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In its fifty-seven years, DARPA has never allowed the United States to be taken by scientific surprise. Admirers call DARPA the Pentagon’s brain. Critics call it the heart of the military-industrial complex. Is DARPA to be admired or feared? Does DARPA safeguard democracy, or does it stimulate America’s seemingly endless call to war? DARPA makes the future happen. Industry, public health, society, and culture all transform because of technology that DARPA pioneers. DARPA creates, DARPA dominates, and when sent to the battlefield, DARPA destroys.

…

The revelation that the university was working with the Defense Department on nuclear weapons work had an explosive effect on an already charged student body. “The University has proven that it is not a neutral institution,” declared the antiwar group Radical Union, “but is actively supporting the efforts of the military-industrial complex.” One article after the next alleged malevolent intentions on the part of Professor Slotnick and the dean of the Graduate College, Daniel Alpert, in having tried to conceal from the student body the true nature of the computer. “The horrors ILLIAC IV may loose on the world through [the] hands of military leaders of this nation” could not be underestimated, the Daily Illini editorialized.

…

Why is the Defense Science Board so focused on pushing robotic warfare on the Pentagon? Why force military personnel to learn to “trust” robots and to rely on autonomous robots in future warfare? Why is the erasure of fear a federal investment? The answer to it all, to every question in this book, lies at the heart of the military-industrial complex. Unlike the Jason scientists, the majority of whom were part-time defense scientists and full-time university professors, the majority of DSB members are defense contractors. DSB chairman Paul Kaminski, who also served on President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board from 2009 to 2013, is a director of General Dynamics, chairman of the board of the RAND Corporation, chairman of the board of HRL (the former Hughes Research Labs), chairman of the board of Exostar, chairman and CEO of Technovation, Inc., trustee and advisor to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, and trustee and advisor to MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory—all companies and corporations that build robotic weapons systems for DARPA and for the Pentagon.

Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed by Ben R. Rich, Leo Janos

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business climate, cuban missile crisis, friendly fire, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, upwardly mobile, Yom Kippur War

We’d delay an attack five minutes knowing they’d have to stop firing to cool down their guns—then we’d come in and hit them. We drew all the demanding high-precision bombing of the most heavily defended, highest-priority targets. The powers that be decided to use B-52s to pour down bombs on the big North Taji military industrial complex. But it was protected by surface-to-air missiles that could knock down our bombing armada. So we went in the night before and took out all fifteen missile sites using ten stealth airplanes. They never saw us coming. That mission won us a standing ovation from General Schwarzkopf and the other brass monitoring us back in the coalition war room.

…

Ultimately, he ran all the spy plane and satellite operations for the agency until the last months of the Eisenhower administration in late 1959, when Allen Dulles put him in charge of organizing a group of Cuban émigrés into a rag-tag battle brigade that would attempt to invade the island at the Bay of Pigs. But in the early days of the U-2, he was a mysterious figure to most of us, part of a complicated working arrangement involving the agency, Lockheed, and the Air Force that was unprecedented in the annals of the military-industrial complex. The operational plan for deploying our highly secret airplane was approved personally by President Eisenhower. Under this plan, the CIA was responsible for overseeing production of the airplane and its cameras, for choosing the bases and providing security, and for processing the film, no mean feat since the special, tightly wound film developed by Eastman Kodak would stretch from Washington halfway to Baltimore on each mission.

…

And at the end of the line we were actually able to refund about 15 percent of the total U-2 production cost back to the CIA and in the bargain build five extra airplanes from spare fuselages and parts we didn’t need because both the Skunk Works and the U-2 had functioned so beautifully. This was probably the only instance of a cost underrun in the history of the military-industrial complex. The first group of six U-2 pilots recruited from the SAC fighter squadrons showed up at the Skunk Works in the fall of 1955 wearing civilian clothes and carrying phony IDs. They spent three days getting a thorough briefing on the airplane before flying off to the secret base to begin training with our test pilots.

Rethinking Camelot by Noam Chomsky

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Howard Zinn, land reform, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, Paul Samuelson, Ronald Reagan

Their attitudes toward the man who escalated the war from terror to aggression are perhaps more surprising, though it should be recalled that the picture of Kennedy as the leader who was about to lead us to a bright future of peace and justice was carefully nurtured during the Camelot years, with no little success, and has been regularly revived in the course of the critique of the Warren report and the attempts to construct a different picture, which have reached and influenced a wide audience over the years. Within both categories, some have taken the position that JFK truly departed from the political norm, and had become (or always was) committed to far-reaching policy changes: not only was he planning to withdraw from Vietnam (the core thesis), but also to break up the CIA and the military-industrial complex, to end the Cold War, and otherwise to pursue directions that would indeed have been highly unpopular in the corridors of power. Others reject these assessments, but argue that Kennedy was perceived as a dangerous reformer by right-wing elements (which is undoubtedly true, as it is true of virtually everyone in public life).

…

In this case, as noted earlier, it is largely grassroots elements (often called “the left”36) that have taken up the cudgels in the defense of President Kennedy, on the theory that he was assassinated by powerful groups that perceived him to be a dangerous “radical reformer.” These dark forces are variously identified as the CIA, the far right, militarists, etc. Many on the left accept this perception as accurate, holding that JFK was about to withdraw from Vietnam, end the Cold War and the arms race, smash the CIA to a thousand pieces, dismantle the military-industrial complex, and set the country on a course towards peace and justice. Others hold only that the assassins exaggerated his reformist zeal. Some popular variants bring in other assassinations, real and alleged. The plot also becomes intertwined with theories of a “secret team” that has “hijacked the state,” bringing us to our current sorry pass.

…

It is not even surprising to learn that when a faulty transmitter disrupted cable TV service in San Diego, delaying transmission of a film on “the JFK conspiracy,” dozens of viewers called the station denouncing this CIA plot. Books condemning the Warren Commission Report dominated the bestseller lists in early 1992, while its critics protested establishment suppression of their skepticism. Stone’s film traced the Kennedy assassination to a high-level conspiracy: CIA, military-industrial complex, and others, perhaps even LBJ. The film, Stone informed the National Press Club, suggests that Kennedy was assassinated “because he was determined to withdraw from and never send combat troops to Vietnam” (that he was “withdrawing from Vietnam” and “had committed himself firmly...to oppose the entry of U.S. combat troops” has been “unequivocally” demonstrated, Stone added, citing Arthur Schlesinger and John Newman).

Farewell by Sergei Kostin, Eric Raynaud

active measures, car-free, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, index card, invisible hand, kremlinology, Lao Tzu, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

The two presidents are relaxed and already in connivance: the disclosure of the Farewell dossier changed entirely the attitude of the leader of the Western Bloc toward the Socialist president. The Farewell dossier should be presented in this context. Located at a strategic node within the system, this officer opened the eyes of the West to the scope, structure, and operations of technological espionage as practiced by the USSR, primarily in the military-industrial complex. The free world suddenly realized the vulnerability of those very defense systems vital to its survival. Furthermore, it became clear that it was impossible to have the upper hand in the arms race against the East because, through the efforts of Soviet intelligence, it did not take long for the West to “share” its most efficient weapons and devices with this formidable adversary.

…

Vetrov analyzed every step of the process; information research, gathering, processing, exploitation, distribution, and protection. The changes to be made to improve the system’s operation were far-reaching, targeting residencies abroad as well as Yasenevo personnel, and even the beneficiaries of intelligence data within the military-industrial complex. This task took Vetrov at least a month to complete. He did not hesitate to take his highly sensitive manuscript home. Svetlana, who remembers it too, read the document to proof it. Then Vetrov had the document typed and, with pride, submitted it to the department chief. As he told his wife, for once his work would not go unnoticed.

…

Finally, Reagan became directly involved in restarting the arms race with the implementation of new, but classic, military programs, including the famous stealth bomber. Above all was the elaboration of the SDI project (the Strategic Defense Initiative; better known under the name of Star Wars). SDI was a formidable technological challenge for the Soviets, since their economy was resting mostly on the military-industrial complex, dependent on stealing Western technology through the KGB Line X. Since Vetrov’s revelations, the Line X network had no secrets anymore for the Reagan Administration. Actually, even before the Farewell dossier, the American government knew about technological spying by the Soviets. With the easing of restrictions on East-West trade under Nixon and Ford, however, the boundary between theft and legal commerce became fuzzy, especially as the KGB could quite legally buy certain technologies that were sold freely during international trade shows.

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Some optimists talked of “military Keynesianism” boosting the economy and spinning off innovations. Pessimists worried that the military-industrial complex would smother the civilian economy. There was a bit of both. The military-industrial complex provided a dependable source of income for some of the country’s best-known companies, which were paid on a cost-plus basis. It also produced important innovations for the civilian economy: the budding computer industry in Silicon Valley owed as much to military spending as to Stanford University. The United States even turned its immigration policy into an arm of the military-industrial complex: a country that put a strict limit on immigration in general nevertheless made an exception for world-class scientists and engineers.

…

The United States led the rest of the world in its investment in “big science.” The man who did more than anybody else to convert the political establishment to the idea that science was a vital economic input rather than an expensive luxury was Vannevar Bush. Bush united the three worlds at the heart of what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex: he was a sometime dean of engineering at MIT; the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, in charge of six thousand scientists, during the war; and the founder of a science company, Raytheon. He was also a confidant of Harry Truman and then of Dwight Eisenhower. A talented propagandist, his 1945 report “Science, the Endless Frontier,” which urged the government to fund basic research in partnership with academia and industry, captured the public imagination with its judicious mixture of references to America’s frontier past and its technological future.

…

Today most of the world’s great IT companies are American, with Apple and Google dominating the smartphone market, Google the search market, and Amazon the ecommerce and server markets. Why did the United States play such a dominant role in the IT revolution? The computer revolution had its roots in several different worlds—from the military-industrial complex to giant corporations to academia to computer hobby clubs. America excelled in three things: producing these different worlds in the first place; bringing them together in creative symbiosis; and then commercializing the ideas that they produced. We have already seen how Vannevar Bush played a central role in forging America’s unique military-industrial-academic complex.

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians by Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Frank Barat

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, desegregation, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Islamic Golden Age, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, one-state solution, price stability, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail

Contrary to what its name suggests, it is an ancient arena of defeat—that of the Native American Montauketts, who were destroyed in the U.S. genocide. Like so many other locations in the United States, this, too, is named after the chief of the defeated tribe, Sacut. Since the end of colonization, the area has been a military-industrial complex, which armed U.S. forces in both world wars. In 1946, the fledgling United Nations addressed, quite unexpectedly, the mayor of the little town of Lake Success and asked to rent some of the industrial areas, including huge hangars, as a temporary home. In one of them, in November 1947, the UN General Assembly announced the establishment of a Jewish state.

…

No wonder Mearsheimer and Walt were so deeply frustrated when they saw such a front, with its own impressive think tanks and presence in the Ivy League, retreating helplessly in the face of AIPAC’s charge forward. No wonder they attributed, in their London Review of Books piece, such mystical powers and forces to the Jewish lobby. This frustration only grew after the election of George Bush Jr. The Bush family and the influence of the military-industrial complex should have led to a greater say for those who represented oil, cement, and weapons. At first, indeed, it looked as if these were the leading considerations. Bush Jr. showed no inclination to be involved where his predecessor had failed. Even the outbreak of the second intifada was described as the fruit of Clinton’s failed policies and did not bother the agenda of the new president.

…

Truman considered retreat from the partition plan in March 1948 and Eisenhower seriously contemplated a peace plan that included the return of the refugees. So we should not take a teleological stance on this. Second, the triangle of the U.S.-Israeli relationship has three equal legs—AIPAC, the military-industrial complex, and the Christian Zionists—and if one of them collapses, the whole structure crumbles. Chomsky: To answer that, we have to consider the sources of the support. The corporate sector in the United States, which dominates policy formation, appears to be quite satisfied with the current situation.

Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution by Richard Whittle

Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentleman farmer, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, operational security, precision agriculture, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Yom Kippur War

He also did several tours behind a desk in the Pentagon, including one year as an “action officer” and a second stint as director of the Navy’s Aircraft Weapons Requirements Branch, followed by three years running the Tactical Readiness Division for the chief of naval operations. Cassidy knew how the sausage was made in the military-industrial complex—how defense equipment got marketed, sold, developed, tested, and put into service. He knew what aircraft the armed services owned, what aircraft they wanted, how they decided what they needed for the future, and how hard it was to get a new program started. Privately, Cassidy thought Neal Blue’s flying bomb drone idea was dumb, though naturally he didn’t say so in his initial conversations with Blue about working for him.

…

No one would have guessed that the organizers would wind up owing the City of San Diego and other creditors more than four million dollars, bankrupting the Air/Space America organization and making its first edition its last. The show was a critical success but a financial belly flop. The hidebound mentality of the military-industrial complex was responsible for the failure. Sandwiched between the weekends of aerial wonders were five professional trade days devoid of flying, during which aviation industry executives and marketers hawked their wares to potential military and commercial customers. Four massive white tents arrayed in a quadrant along Brown Field’s 7,972-foot main runway served as pavilions for 350 exhibitors.

…

He was designing, calculating, negotiating, researching, budgeting, buying, leasing, hiring—seemingly every day, seemingly all at once. Some nights he got by on only two hours of sleep. Weekends were workdays. He was going full throttle because at last he was living his dream. He was determined to build a company—a team, to be precise—that would defy the norms of the military-industrial complex, whose bloated bureaucracy, corporate mentality, and corrupting politics had made cost overruns, schedule delays, and outright failure in defense programs commonplace since World War II. Above all, Karem dreamed of leading the way into a new era of unmanned aviation the way pioneers of the early twentieth century led the way into the air—people such as Glenn Curtiss, Donald Douglas, Jack Northrop, Igor Sikorsky.

Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

During Brezhnev’s funeral, Arbatov whispered to Chernyaev and Bovin his “program for Andropov.” It would begin by replacing Prime Minister Tikhonov with Gorbachev, firing other Brezhnev favorites, and replacing them with liberals like themselves. Chernyaev’s “Andropov program” included pulling out of Afghanistan, ceasing to dictate to East European allies, curbing the military-industrial complex, freeing dissidents from prison, and allowing free emigration. Chernyaev’s dream was just that, a dream, he concedes in retrospect. What Andropov wanted most of all was power, Chernyaev later admitted. Even if he aimed “to make the people happy,” there was no way he could do so under the current regime.68 According to former East German spy chief Markus Wolf, Andropov talked frankly about the “decline” of the Soviet Union, tracing its beginning to the Czech intervention in 1968.69 Arbatov told Brutents that Andropov mocked Brezhnev’s boast that the USSR was now practicing “developed socialism,” insisting it was a long way from any socialism at all.70 But during his fifteen months in office, Andropov’s program emphasized style more than substance, and personnel shifts, far from all of them for the better, rather than structural reforms.

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Ukrainian party leader Shcherbitsky, whose late arrival from California on March 11 spared him the need to hold his nose and vote for Gorbachev, lasted until September 1989. Other Politburo members appointed in the early 1980s (such as Aliev, Vorotnikov, and Mikhail Solomentsev) were only marginally more progressive. Lev Zaikov, whom Gorbachev picked to join the Politburo in 1985, played a useful role as buffer between Gorbachev and the military-industrial complex. Viktor Nikonov, chosen to oversee agriculture, failed (like most of his predecessors) to galvanize the countryside. This roster underlines again how different Gorbachev was from his peers. That absence of like-minded leaders was a fact of Soviet political life. But his capacity to take the measure of those he favored left a lot to be desired.

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It wasn’t the Eurocommunists who liberated our thinking, adds Shakhnazarov; “we were ripe for new thinking, and came to it on our own.”9 All these constituted, as Grachev puts it, “a kind of professional army awaiting its leader,” along with scientists who wanted more access to foreign colleagues, economic managers, and local party officials jealous of resources gobbled up by the defense budget, even high KGB officials like Nikolai Leonov, who thought, “The people from the military-industrial complex . . . didn’t take economics into account at all. They thought our resources were unlimited—as if they had not been informed as to the country’s real situation.” “We could write a lot of memos,” recalled Shakhnazarov, “but it didn’t matter until a [new] leader appeared in the General Secretary’s chair. . . .”10 However, some of Gorbachev’s early pronouncements after taking office sounded as if they had been prepared under Brezhnev.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

But the party itself was a blast, and what’s more, it grossed over $12,000. He may have been a hippy, but Stewart Brand was good at making money. I’m not quite sure how I inspired the anti-anti-corporate rant Brand has just finished, but it serves to illustrate the time that stretches between his generation and mine. Whereas Brand’s generation had the military-industrial complex of the Cold War to haunt their nightmares, the politically conscious and privileged young hipsters of today are more likely to be found protesting Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Pharma. If there is a movement as obviously exuberant as the hippy movement today, you’ll probably find it incubating at Arms Trade demos, tooling-up at Climate Camp, and bursting onto the streets of whichever city the global leaders of the capitalist world choose to meet in each year.

…

At about the same time, James Lovelock was engaged in similar thinking, thinking that would eventually lead him to formulate his famous Gaia Theory. For Brand, and for the hippies who bought into his “Whole Earth” enthusiasm, the idea of the earth as a system was a powerful one. And it was also seductive: it certainly looked like a better system than the military industrial complex they had fled back to the land from. Later in 1968, back in Menlo Park, Brand began preparations for the first print run of the Whole Earth Catalog, a Sears catalogue for hippy communards that juxtaposed practical advice and tools for back-to-the-landers with intellectual stimulation in the form of reviews of books Brand and his fellow editors thought should be informing the ideals of their peers.

…

In the comfort of my study in a pretty English village, I poured myself a coffee, logged on, and tuned out, happy simply to blow my mind with the acceleration and scale of events. What I find most shocking about all this is how two stories – the Collateral Murder video, and the Afghan War Logs – which each had the power to rock the US military-industrial complex to its very foundations, were instead defused with such relative ease. And I, as one member of the international audience, am complicit in that scandal. There’s a reason this book isn’t about the shocking abuse of military power by the US and UK against states and citizens in the Middle East, about the “fiscalisation” of power, the privatisation of authority and the whole geopolitical chess game.

Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control by Medea Benjamin

air gap, airport security, autonomous vehicles, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Clive Stafford Smith, crowdsourcing, drone strike, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Jeff Hawkins, Khyber Pass, megacity, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, nuremberg principles, performance metric, private military company, Ralph Nader, WikiLeaks

Large swaths of Detroit, once a bustling city home to the country’s largest employers, now resemble a ghost town. But there’s one manufacturing sector that’s not hurting: the companies that profit from building the high-tech tools of modern warfare, America’s last great export. Indeed, what former President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” has made it through this age of austerity largely unscathed. And when it comes to drones, the complex is booming. “It’s a growth market,” crowed the Defense Department’s chief weapons buyer, Ashton B. Carter.37 And he should know, with the Pentagon’s $5 billion war chest for drones. Global spending on the research and manufacture of drones is expected to total more than $94 billion between 2011–2020, according to one analyst who monitors the aerospace industry.

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Overall, the company has spent more than $21 million lobbying public officials since 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.44 But by 2008 this little company made it into the Defense News list of top one hundred defense firms. One would be hard pressed to find such an enormous return on investment outside the military-industrial complex. General Atomics is not the only little military contractor that could. While it may sound like a gentle air freshener—and it did start out consulting on air quality—AeroVironment has been gobbling up a giant-size piece of the drone pie. Like General Atomics, the company is relatively small.

…

“There’s nothing special about Indiana in this field,” said Quigley, “so I presume that if you did the research, you’d find significant drone activities going on in universities, small factories and research parks all across the country.” “Our state needs jobs, but I hate the fact that people of good conscience may be sucked into the military-industrial complex process of creating machines that contribute to the death of innocent civilians,” said Lori Perdue, an Air Force veteran and Indiana member of CODEPINK. “If we could create green jobs instead of war jobs, I bet the guy working the line making jet turbines would rather be building a wind turbine.”

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. One little-remembered aspect of Eisenhower’s speech is that it contained not one but two central warnings. While the first, concerning the military-industrial complex, is more often cited, he also expressed equivalent concerns about the emergence of what he called the “scientific-technological elite.” His concerns, like Mills’s, reflect the zeitgeist of the 1950s, in which the predominant historical memory was of World War II and the subjugation of all U.S. political, financial, and industrial efforts to the goal of military victory.

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Schwarzman is not unique in his role as a connector, linking several domains of power. The power elite contains interlocking directorships, not only of companies but of society as a whole. Leadership communities connect across all the important power clusters: business and finance, politics, the military-industrial complex, and the arts and the world of ideas. In fact, such linkages are as distinguishing a characteristic of members of the superclass as wealth or individual position. Trace them and you will find a daisy chain of connections linking remarkably diverse groups. Such connections reduce the degrees of separation between individuals, enabling them to get to the people they need directly, when they need them, to operate at the highest level as efficiently as possible, and in so doing to maintain their status—because access to that level is so jealously guarded by those who have it.

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First, given that the U.S. political system at the time of the 9/11 attacks was in the hands of a government with the ideological views the Bush administration had toward the Middle East, the history it had with key regimes in that region, and its close ties to the oil industry and key defense contractors, no one should have been too shocked by the result: All the vectors of force from the relevant power players were pointing in the direction of the kind of militarized, unilateral adventure that materialized. In part, it was the consequence of a system where the incentive structure for politicians made adopting a war footing advantageous—and where the incentive structure of the military-industrial complex made supporting such a war footing profitable. It was also the consequence of the political mood in a wounded country, which made the United States open to such an approach, disinclined to lengthy debate, and eager for the appearance of action and strength. Furthermore, as bad as the Bush team has been at managing the war in Iraq and maintaining international alliances, it has proved exceptionally adept at managing the levers of American public opinion.

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

Like most in the Soviet leadership he had no understanding of how the American political system worked, with its different parts of government and its checks and balances. So, for instance, Nixon’s forced resignation over Watergate totally bemused a man like Kryuchkov. The KGB view was that he had not been forced out by public indignation but by a conspiracy of the enemies of détente, probably the Zionists and the military-industrial complex who wanted to maintain arms sales. Accustomed to a command economy controlled from the centre, most Soviets could not imagine a system that operated successfully without regulation and control. As one senior Soviet diplomat put it, many of his colleagues were ‘inclined to the fantastic notion that there must be a secret control room somewhere in the United States.

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The two world leaders talked for another half an hour, and when they emerged, after overrunning by nearly an hour, both men were smiling. Shultz could see that Reagan and Gorbachev had ‘hit it off well’.23 They had broken the ice. Then, with their experts and advisers around them, the two leaders began the first plenary session. Now the plain talking began. Gorbachev opened with an attack on the power of the military-industrial complex over US politics that stirred up hostility to Soviet Russia, he claimed, in order simply to sell more weapons. Reagan attacked the Soviet Union for its position on human rights and related a long history of Soviet aggression from 1917 onwards, especially in regional affairs over recent years.

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In Afghanistan, the US increased its secret military aid to the Mujahideen in their struggle against Soviet forces, arming them with hand-held Stinger anti-aircraft missiles that had the capacity to shoot down a helicopter. And in the Nevada desert the US tested a 19-kiloton nuclear bomb. To Moscow, all this, along with the lack of support for the peace offensive, came across as unexpectedly belligerent. Gorbachev imagined various scenarios. He suspected that the military-industrial complex had become alarmed at the progress in Geneva and had got at the President. He wondered if the hawks felt the President had already made too many concessions to the Soviets and had put him under pressure. Or perhaps there was fear in Washington of a renewed, dynamic Soviet Union talking peace on the world stage.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Crawford, “When We Wage Cyberwar, the Whole Web Suffers,” Bloomberg, April 25, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-25/when-we-wage-cyberwar-the-whole-web-suffers.html. new “cyber-industrial complex” somewhere between $80 billion and $150 billion annually: Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, “The New Cyber Military-Industrial Complex,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), March 28, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/the-new-cyber-military-industrial-complex/article573990. A raid on the Egyptian state security building after the country’s: Ibid.; Eli Lake, “British Firm Offered Spy Software to Egypt,” Washington Times, April 25, 2011, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/apr/25/british-firm-offered-spy-software-to-egypt/?

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What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first. Indeed, traditional defense-industry leaders like Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are already working with the U.S. government to develop cyber-capacity. Weapons manufacturers, airplane builders and other parts of the military-industrial complex might not lessen—conventional militaries will always require guns, tanks and helicopters—but big military operations, already heavily privatized, will carve out space in their budgets for technical assistance. Development assistance and foreign aid will take on a digital dimension too, buoyed by these new multilateral alliances.

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And, of course, wrapping all of this together will be a hefty layer of cybersecurity—more than any civilian would use—that enables instant data transmission within a cocoon of electronic protection. Without security, none of the advantages above will be worth the considerable cost that will be required to develop and deploy them. Alas, military contractors’ procedures will hold back many of these developments. In the United States, the military-industrial complex is working on some of the initiatives mentioned above—DARPA has led the development of many of the robots now in operation—but it is by nature ill-equipped to handle innovation. Even DARPA, while relatively well funded, is predictably stalled by elaborate contracting structures and its position in the Department of Defense bureaucracy.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Washington: Doing the Unprecedented Once again, however, coming down from the summit proved an anti-climax—and an occasion for second thoughts. Gorbachev increasingly believed that Reagan ‘was not free in making his decisions’, opining that he and Shultz ‘have their hands and feet tied by the military-industrial complex’.65 The Soviet leader was also acutely conscious of the growing budget crisis in the USSR. So although remaining obdurate about his ‘package’ approach to arms control negotiations, he now shifted ground on restricting SDI R&D to the ‘laboratory’. On 30 October, undeterred by dyspeptic comments from Gromyko, the Politburo agreed that it would accept testing anywhere except in space.

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A return to economic autarky was, however, not an option because the Soviet bloc needed continued access to the West in order to keep up technologically, especially in the dawning computer age, and also to placate ordinary people with more sophisticated consumer goods. The socio-economic malaise was exacerbated by imperial overstretch. With roughly a quarter of GDP being channelled into the armed forces and the military-industrial complex, manpower and resources were not available for the rejuvenation of the civilian economy. But breaking the mould of Soviet defence and foreign policy was enormously difficult because of the military’s stranglehold over political life. Such systemic conservatism could only be transformed by innovative leadership.

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But the sluggishness of reform forced him into more radical measures—perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness, or frankness)—and then to accept that socio-economic change required political reform as well, by giving people a greater stake in the system through controlled democratization and devolution of power to the individual republics. Each of these steps entailed protracted battles with the conservatives, especially the military-industrial complex. In order to reduce the burden of defence spending on the economy, Gorbachev became increasingly interested in arms control with the West. This pushed him into summitry. In the ensuing transformation of superpower relations, Gorbachev was the crucial change-agent but he could not have acted alone.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

The biggest ships in the future navy looked like being nuclear submarines.10 In 1961 President Eisenhower lamented the power of the military-industrial complex, a state dominated by a ‘scientific-technological elite’ and the encroachment of the state on the world of scholarship. There was barely any equivalent criticism in the United Kingdom, which appeared to many not even to have a state-centred scientific technological elite or indeed a military-industrial complex. Yet it had both, and there was some criticism, though of a different sort. It was in fact central to the politics of the left, though that bit of the left considered to be on the fringes.

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For them it was impossible, it seems, to think of the British state as a warfare state, even though it might have occasionally succumbed to foreign pressure to become so. The two world wars have not, remarkably enough, been generally thought of as involving an expanded warfare state. MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Into the late 1950s a future war was thought probable, and it was anticipated that it was likely to be a war of production much like the Second World War. After the Second World War a great deal of military factory capacity was kept in being in case it was needed. ‘War potential’, an important concept, was understood to include the ability to produce all sorts of specialized equipment that was needed in warfare.

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Conscription would go, as had already been announced. It went in stages from 1957, with the last draft (of previously deferred men) entering in 1960. The United Kingdom was the first power to put the nuclear deterrent at the heart of its strategy, to abolish conscription and to run down the military-industrial complex. It was returning to liberal militarism, to professional capital-intensive forces in order to reduce expenditure to more manageable levels. It was doing so with a new enthusiasm for new machines. The ‘central aim of military policy must be to prevent war rather than to prepare for it’ was the doctrine of the 1957 White Paper, which meant an end to the whole doctrine of war potential.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

“Well, Frank,” LBJ retorted, feigning sorrow, “the next time you need money to build a dam in your state, you better go to Mr. Lippmann.” That’s how the game often works. Ed Koch, like Jimmy Carter, is called a confrontationist if he speaks out and threatens to take his case to the public; if he doesn’t heed the counsel of the domestic equivalent of the military/industrial complex—the banks, unions, landlords and other organized-interest groups who profit from government. Government spending grows. Conservatives like Nixon and Ford didn’t stop it, and liberals don’t try. As spending rises, so do expectations. Parents demand tuition tax credits. Teachers demand more school aid.

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So, too, when the labor settlement was reached, the business/banking establishment, and the editorial pages of the Times and News, swallowed hard and chimed their support. That was preferable to tarnishing the Big Apple’s image in Washington. Thus there grew, over the first three years of the crisis, the local equivalent of a military/industrial complex—what one might call a public/profit complex. The same absence of opposition, of rigorous checks and balances, which helped cause the fiscal crisis now rendered it nearly impossible to cure. Former adversaries were now on a first-name basis. Labor leader Victor Gotbaum hosted a dinner party at his Brooklyn Heights home for Ellmore C.

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It was not hard for those covering the story to grow too close to the people involved; to assume they were all trying to save New York, forgetting they were also desperately trying to save their own ass. What happened to City Comptroller Goldin is pregnant with meaning both about the role of the press and about the workings of the local version of the military/industrial complex. In the summer of 1977, an agreement was reached between MAC, the city, the unions and the banks to trade in their shorter-term securities for longer-term MAC bonds. This stretch eased the city’s immediate debt service payments, but it also ballooned the city’s long-term costs because a higher rate of interest over a longer period of time was called for.

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen

air freight, airport security, banking crisis, clean water, drone strike, Edward Snowden, greed is good, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, large denomination, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Stuxnet, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, WikiLeaks

In the process, Obama normalized the post-9/11 measures that Bush had implemented on a haphazard, emergency basis. Obama’s great achievement—or great sin—was to make the national security state permanent. Half a century earlier, President Dwight Eisenhower had warned of a new “military-industrial complex”; under Bush and Obama, a parallel “homeland security–industrial complex” has been born. The rise of the military-industrial complex had been fueled by fears of Communism. Now, another abstract fear was driving hundreds of billions of dollars a year into building the infrastructure necessary to wage a permanent war on terror, and it had grown like kudzu around the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Treasury Department, Pentagon, and dozens of other smaller offices and federal agencies.

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One 2012 estimate concluded that the decade of war had cost Americans nearly $4 trillion. Greed and power are always a dangerous combination. In wartime, power expands and greed can easily follow. The more our counterterrorism infrastructure has grown, the harder it has become to control. The traditional military-industrial complex was at least partly visible to outsiders; it comprised mammoth defense contractors that built airplanes, ships, and rockets, as well as high-tech firms that pioneered computers and advanced electronics. There were often public, aggressive congressional debates about spending on big new weapons systems, and major defense contractors frequently felt compelled to take out advertisements in newspapers and on television to generate support for their projects.

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In Harvard Law School’s National Security Journal, Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins, technology experts at George Mason University, warned that the cyber threat is being hyped by government officials seeking greater power and by outside contractors seeking more money. “A cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War,” they wrote. “This complex may serve not only to supply cyber security solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for those solutions as well.” Mike McConnell, the former director of national intelligence at the end of the Bush administration, provides a case in point.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

But it is hardly a subtle distinction to say: “I support the men and women in arms but not the agenda of the military-industrial complex.” Indeed, since it is the agenda of the military-industrial complex that gets so many soldiers needlessly killed overseas, to effectively support the former requires being against the latter. Any action that requires the sacrifice of American men and women in combat should have proper representation from all strata of society: 1 percent of the US military should be made up of folks from the 1 percent wealthiest portion of the population. Until then, there is a serious worry that the poor are being used as cannon fodder for the military-industrial complex. As with any junkie, the first step to recovery is admitting there is a problem.

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We propose to cut $400 billion from the budget. This will still leave $60 billion for those not covered by BIG and those who may need additional assistance. 34 FREE MONEY FOR ALL End the Empire: Cut the Military President Eisenhower was incredibly prescient in proclaiming the dangers of the rise of the military industrial complex. Consider that much of the current budget shortfall is due to the huge expansion of the US military budget. It went from $265 billion to $700 billion in just over a decade. It has recently inched down to $640 billion. BIG will be paid for, in part, by cutting back the budget by $300 billion to the year 2000’s level of funding.25 It may be objected that such a drastic cut would leave the country vulnerable to attack.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

What are the continuities and divergences between invocations of AI across the decades—or in Rota’s words, what were the “cataclysms and reconstructions” on this concept’s path? And who and what is served by AI’s iterations? Answering these questions requires looking at AI’s formation in the American military-industrial complex—and not from the perspective of awe. Many accounts of AI’s history, written by practitioners and invested onlookers, present it as a march of progress. AI is often treated as a philosophically charged but autonomous technical pursuit, a product of great men’s imaginations.11 My point of departure, by contrast, is one that many scholars of science and technology have argued for: that developments in computing are shaped by, and in turn shape, social conditions.

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Part 3 examines alternatives to AI’s dominant visions and epistemologies. Chapter 6 considers the prospect of an alternative science of the mind and body. In search for alternative formulations, it revisits dissident voices and streams within AI’s orbit and analyzes their relation to imperial projects and the military-industrial complex. Finally, Chapter 7 discusses ways to resist and refuse the troubling phenomena outlined in this book. Before continuing, a few clarifications. This book is not a detailed intellectual history of the academic field of AI and the computing practices found within it. My concern here is with the concept of AI and how it functions politically.

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Social movements, however, have drawn enough attention to injustices that operate across race, gender, and class lines to make these cheerful capitalist visions less tenable. The expert industry eventually had to adjust. AI’S PROGRESSIVE VENEER AND A WEB OF PARTNERSHIPS Although AI formed in the depths of the military-industrial complex, the rebranded AI of the 2010s spills far outside that world. Present-day discourse includes not only voices from the military-industrial sphere that speak in futuristic imperial tones but also commentators who present themselves as critics of corporate power and advocates for social justice.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Many leading German, French, and British companies remained in private hands at the outbreak of World War I, but as a conflict many expected would end quickly settled into a costly stalemate, governments were forced to adopt a high degree of central economic planning. The mobilization of national resources during World War II benefited what outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower christened the military-industrial complex in 1961.9 All governments, including those presiding over a relatively free market, provide for the defense of the country’s territorial integrity. b In the process, they create space for a state-guaranteed market in which privately owned defense companies can develop a privileged position, distorting the competitive playing field.

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Max Eastman (New York: Dover, 2004), ch. 9, http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/rev-bet/ch09.htm. 8 Murray N. Rothbard, “A Future of Peace and Capitalism,” in Modern Political Economy, ed. James H. Weaver (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1973), ch. 28, pp. 419-30, http://mises.org/story/1559. 9 “Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961,” http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html. 10 A definition offered by Laura LaHaye, Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Mercantilism.html. 11 The Anglo-Spanish wars of 1585-1604 were clashes not only in English and Spanish ports or on the sea between them (most notably Sir Francis Drake’s defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588) but also in and around the present-day territories of Florida, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Panama, where Drake died. 12 Mercantilism was an inherently protectionist system, but individual loyalty was an eminently tradable commodity.

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Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (2008) emerging-markets see also specific countries Emerging Markets Century, The (Agtmael) Endiama “End of History, The” (Fukuyama) Equatorial Guinea Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip Eskom European Commission European Union Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Excess Crude Account ExxonMobil Exxon Valdez Ezz, Ahmed Facebook Farouk I, king of Egypt Federal Anti-Monopoly Agency Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina financial crisis (2008) Financial Times Finland Formosa Plastic Group France Freedom House free-trade zone Fukuyama, Francis G20 Gandhi, Indira Gao Xiqing García Linera, Álvaro gas Gazprom General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) General Motors Georgia Germany Giuliani, Rudolph Glass-Steagall Act (1933) global foreign direct investment in China, see China, foreign direct investment in globalization Goldman Sachs Gorbachev, Mikhail Government Investment Corporation Government Pension Fund (NGPF) Great Britain Great Depression Great Firewall Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) program Gulf Cooperation Council Gulf of Mexico Gulf War Hamilton, Alexander Hanna, Don Harper, Stephen Hastings, Warren hedge funds He Yafei HIV/AIDS Hoover, Herbert Hormats, Robert HSBC Hudson Bay Company Hu Jintao Hume, David Hurricane Katrina Hussein, Saddam Hutchison Whampoa Hu Yaobang hypercapitalism Hyundai Iceland immigration import quotas India five-year plans of oil demand in Indonesia Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) Industrial Revolution Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) intellectual-property rights (IPR) International Arbitration Center International Criminal Court International Energy Agency International Monetary Fund (IMF) Internet Iran Iran-Iraq war Iraq Ireland Israel Italy Ivanov, Sergei Japan post-World War II economic growth in Jasser, Muhammad al- Jiang Zemin Jianlong Group Jilin, China Jiwei, Lou Kant, Immanuel Kazakhstan Kazatomprom KazMunaiGas keiretsu Kemerovo Keynes, John Maynard Keynsianism Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, Sheikh Khazanah Nasional Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Khrushchev, Nikita King Abdullah Economic City Kingdom Holding Company Klein, Naomi Kobaladze, Yuri Kovykta gas field Kuchma, Leonid Kudrin, Alexei Kuwait Kuwait Investment Authority Kuwait Petroleum Corporation Labour Party, British Latin America Lee Hsien Loong Lee Myung-bak Lehman Brothers Lenin, Vladimir Libya Liebknecht, Wilhelm Lincoln, Abraham Li Peng Louisiana Company Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio McCain, John McDonald’s Maersk Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine Mahathir Mohammad Maktoum, Mohammed bin Rashid al- Malaysia Mali Mandela, Nelson Mao Zedong Marx, Karl Marxism Medvedev, Dmitry mercantilism end of and state capitalism Merkel, Angela Merrill Lynch Mexico military-industrial complex Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Saudi Arabia Minogue, Kenneth Mississippi Bubble MITI Mitsubishi Mitsui Mitterrand, François Mohieldin, Mahmoud monopolies Morgan Stanley Mozambique Mubadala Development Company Mubarak, Gamal Mubarak, Hosni multinational corporations mutually assured economic destruction Nahyan, Khalifa bin Zayed al- Nahyan, Mohammed bin Zayed al- Nasser, Gamal Abdel National Development and Reform Commission National Development Bank (BNDES) nationalizations national oil and gas corporations (NOCs) see also specific NOCs National Petroleum Company National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) National Savings Bank nation-state NATO Nazif, Ahmed Nehru, Jawaharlal Netherlands Network (film) New Economic Policy New World Development Co.

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

It understood that arms manufacture was triggering revolutionary change at home, and so it helped create the “great divergence” between East and West. Galton felt he participated in a wider military-industrial society, a collective of interdependent economic actors tied in varying ways to the state, in which there was no economic space not in some way connected to war. This was different from the “military-industrial complex” of the twentieth century—the cozy, almost conspiratorial “iron triangle” of relationships among governments, the military, and industry, including political approval of industrial research, industrial support for military training, and the arms industry’s interest in promoting belligerent policies.

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The eighteenth-century state spurned such coziness as dangerously susceptible to manipulation by enemies within and without. Its objective was a much less exclusive relationship with arms suppliers; it actively encouraged newcomers and intervened in the private market to keep the trade attractive to amateurs even in peacetime. A military-industrial “complex” began to emerge only in the second half of the nineteenth century, when introduction of machine manufacture forced greater concentration in the industry, although wider participation in the prosecution of war remained a fact of economic life. How did sincere Quakers tolerate their participation in a military-industrial society for so long?

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And so it worked to multiply the number of domestic producers and to reduce the political leverage of individual gunmakers—not as an explicit grand plan but as a guiding principle in ad hoc decisions. The effort to diffuse arms-making skill was about preventing arms from falling into rebel hands. The resulting competition among gunmakers meant security for the state but low profits for them. The object was not a military-industrial complex, but a steadily expanding military-industrial society. To encourage competition, the state also supported the trade’s sales to chartered companies and other customers, particularly those involved in the slave trade. By the 1750s, gunmakers were dependent on the state, though the state had reduced its dependence on any one of them

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Here in wartime Germany we see the first full flowering of the military-industrial complex in its modern style, soldiers and politicians sharing their dreams of glory with scientists and mathematicians. The Prussian minister of education responds to Klein with a generous grant of money for the foundation of a Mathematical Institute in Göttingen. Less than five months later, the dreams of glory have collapsed, the German Empire is utterly defeated, the Mathematical Institute indefinitely postponed. In the new era of defeat and misery that begins in November 1918, the exact sciences are discredited together with the military-industrial complex that had sustained them.

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Now, fifty years later, the wheel has come full circle. The physics of quantum devices and the mathematics of effective computability have become everyday tools for engineers and industrialists to exploit. The new physics and the new mathematics are as friendly to the military-industrial complex of modern America as the old physics and the old mathematics were to the military-industrial complex of Germany in the days of Felix Klein. And once again we hear voices preaching revolution, a return to holistic thinking, a spiritualization of science. “Physics of Consciousness” is a fashionable slogan today, like the Lebensphilosophie of the 1920s.

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

“There is a gravy train going of people making money off this, and it sometimes aligns with government bureaucracies that are interested in heightening the perceptions of the threat to drive budget dollars for them.” The development of a cyber-industrial complex that mimics the military-industrial complex in terms of its dominance would reach into the computers, tablets, and mobile phones of every Internet user. Singer is justified in being vigilant, but I think the development of a cyber-industrial complex is unlikely for several reasons. First, the development of multibillion-dollar weapon systems characteristic of the military-industrial complex does not match up well with the nature of the weapons and conflict in cybersecurity. The ability to be fast, dexterous, and effective will matter more than which member of Congress you have a relationship with when it comes to winning a contract.

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It’s the beginning of the next big shift for the militaries, and it’s going to be different because . . . it’s much more accessible. You have only less than ten countries in the world which have nuclear arms. Every single country, in theory, can have cyber arms.” With such a big shift under way, Peter Singer cautions that there’s a danger of cybersecurity becoming the next military-industrial complex. If handled wrong, the massive growth in the cybersecurity industry could hinge on cybersecurity experts capitalizing on our lack of technical knowledge just as hackers do. “We’ve got this proto-cybersecurity industrial complex, I call it the cyber-industrial complex, that may parallel the broader defense-industrial complex, who are equally kind of taking advantage of our ignorance and fear,” he says.

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There will be a lot of money to be made from government growth in cybersecurity, but the companies that government will want to work with will be those that are innovating quickly—which puts the lumbering bureaucracies of the military-industrial giants at a disadvantage. Bronk has a hybrid view, expecting dexterous start-ups to be rolled up into large companies much as the defense giants of the military-industrial complex were, but with a modern, Silicon Valley twist. “What I’ve noticed,” he says, “is that good cybersecurity comes from smart researchers, and smart researchers tend to agglomerate with one another in small groups and start-ups.” Eventually, Bronk thinks, a big company or a big defense firm bulking up their respective cyberdefenses could buy up or invest in these smart researchers.

Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn

airport security, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, drone strike, Edward Snowden, friendly fire, Google Earth, license plate recognition, military-industrial complex, no-fly zone, RAND corporation, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, Teledyne, too big to fail, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

This alliance mounted serial campaigns against costly weapons programs of dubious utility, and the customs and practices of the weapons-buying culture that produced and nurtured them, exposing which involved revelations from whistle-blowers prepared, in many cases, to risk or sacrifice their careers for the greater good. For the most part these efforts were eventually defeated by entrenched interests in the military-industrial complex, but the movement, which for a time enjoyed potent support in Congress, did succeed in creating the post of Director, Office of Operational Test and Evaluation, mandated by law to test new weapons systems as a corrective to the services’ sorry record of buying systems that worked badly or not at all when deployed.

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But the ominous trend soon resumed, ticking up in a saw-toothed pattern, month after month, peaking at Ramadan in the fall, then dropping sharply as the Iraqi weather turned unpleasant before starting another upward climb in the spring. “Apart from when we first put armor on the vehicles,” recalled Rivolo, “nothing else we were doing was making much difference.” This was certainly not for want of effort by the burgeoning anti-IED military-industrial complex, now lavishly nurtured by JIEDDO’s multibillion-dollar budget, as well as a host of other centers and task forces across the military bureaucracy. Multiple initiatives funded by the organization included the training of bees to detect homemade bombs (soldiers had to watch screens with magnified images to see if the insects stuck their tongues out when close to explosives), sniffer dogs, and “Fido,” a $25,000 “molecular sniffer” designed to duplicate canine detection capabilities.

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Fortunately, as of 2014 the Border Patrol had not been required to buy and operate the most expensive drone of them all. “Northrop took billions and billions of dollars off us, and gave us a piece of junk,” said a high-ranking Pentagon weapons acquisition official as we breakfasted at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City (the social ground zero of the military-industrial complex). Our topic was Global Hawk, manufactured by the Northrop Grumman Corporation, the largest drone ever developed, lauded for its reach and endurance, touted as a giant step toward total situational awareness. A best-selling 2009 book on drones enthusiastically summarized its salient attributes, including the ability to “stay in the air up to 32 hours.

Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, drone strike, Jim Simons, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Project Plowshare, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Strategic Defense Initiative, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, zero day

Before the Communists took over, Sverdlovsk was called Yekaterinburg. It was there in 1918 that Czar Nicholas II and his family were lined up against a kitchen wall and shot, setting off the Communist Revolution that had made the Cold War a reality. To the Communists, the city of Sverdlovsk played an important role in the Soviet military-industrial complex, a place where tanks and rockets were built. It was also home to the Soviets’ secret bioweapons program, which on the date of Powers’s flight was not yet known to the CIA. Nearing Sverdlovsk, Powers made a ninety-degree turn. He headed toward what appeared to be an airfield not marked on his map.

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During Powers’s trial, Soviet procurator-general Rudenko asked his comrade judges if they were familiar with “the deposition of the accused Powers which he gave in the preliminary investigations and here in court on the preparations for flights in the U-2 aircraft at the Las Vegas firing range (poligon) in the Nevada desert,” and then he fingered the base as being used by the CIA for “the training in the use of special reconnaissance aircraft.” Not before the publication of this book has it been understood that the KGB clearly knew about Area 51 during the Powers trial. Further, the trial revealed that the Soviets also had a much clearer picture of the inner workings of the American military-industrial complex and its defense-contracting system than the CIA had previously known. Rudenko was able to name “Lockheed company” as the manufacturer of the U-2. He argued that the existence of the “Las Vegas firing range,” aka Area 51, and the Lockheed spy plane exemplified what he called a “criminal conspiracy” between “a major American capitalist company, an espionage and reconnaissance center, and the military of America.”

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Motivated by the public’s alarm, Senator Lyndon Johnson provided a foil to Eisenhower’s nonconfrontation, demanding a “full and exhaustive inquiry” from Congress to learn how the Russians had beaten the Americans into space. In doing so, Johnson cemented his persona as being tough on Communists. In turn, this made him an inadvertent advocate for missile defense and the military-industrial complex. Ultimately, it forced him to be a proponent for the Vietnam War. Now, six years and one month after Sputnik, Lyndon Johnson was president. Seven days after Kennedy was shot dead, Johnson sat in the Oval Office with CIA director John McCone being briefed on Oxcart and Area 51. Johnson loved the idea of the Agency’s secret spy plane, but not for the reasons anyone expected.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, David Graeber, Defenestration of Prague, deskilling, disinformation, emotional labour, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, global village, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, land tenure, late capitalism, liberation theology, means of production, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-Fordism, post-work, private military company, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Richard Stallman, Slavoj Žižek, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, union organizing, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

Not only have traditional, modern efforts of nonproliferation failed, but in fact the new productive technologies have provided the basis for what Laurent Murawiec calls “a proliferating proliferation”—an irresistible increase throughout the world of all kinds of weapons.56 When we are posing the relationship between warfare and economic production, we should be careful not to fall into the simplifications that often come under the label “military-industrial complex.” This term was created to name a confluence of interests in the imperialist phase of capitalist development between the major industrial enterprises and the state military and policy apparatus: between the Krupp steel works and the German army, for instance, Lloyds insurance and British imperialist projects, Dassault aviation manufacturing and Gaullist military policies, or Boeing and the Pentagon. Beginning in the 1960s the notion of a “military-industrial complex” became a mythical emblem for the control exerted by the war industries over human destiny as a whole.

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Beginning in the 1960s the notion of a “military-industrial complex” became a mythical emblem for the control exerted by the war industries over human destiny as a whole. It came to be considered, in other words, as the subject of history rather than the result of the complex relations among industry, warfare, and institutions in response to resistance and liberation movements.57 The acritical reference to a “military-industrial complex” in populist terms (which sometimes smacks of anti-Semitism, recalling the old stereotypes of “Jewish bankers” as “war profiteers”) has thus become a form of historical oversimplification that serves to eliminate any real considerations of class conflict, insurgency, and, today, the movements of the multitude from political and theoretical analyses of war, its causes, and its social determinations.

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These are movements that sovereign power must respond to and control in the entire range of their vital expressions, because, as we have seen, a war that seeks only to destroy the enemy is unable today to support a new form of command; it must not only destroy life but also create it. Perhaps rather than “military-industrial complex” we should start speaking of a “military-vital complex.” It is important to recognize how intimately biopower and war are connected in reality and at every level of our analysis. REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS The close relationship between the evolving technologies of economic production and those of military destruction is not only recognized by critics of the war machine.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

Citing the scale and influence of the arms industry, the three and a half million men and women working for the “defense establishment,” and the unprecedented scale of military spending, he told Americans, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Even the “free university” had become beholden to the defense industry. “A government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” he observed, noting, too, that “for every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.” What would be the consequences of the intellectuals of the nation being directed at nothing but defense?

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Kerr, an economist much admired for his fortitude in the 1950s in the face of McCar­thyism, had recently given a series of notable public addresses in which he’d described the modern research university as a corporation, part of the “knowledge industry,” a place where not education but “the production, distribution, and consumption of knowledge” happened, for the sake of economic growth.69 From the students’ vantage, Kerr had aligned the University of California with the military-industrial complex warned of by Eisenhower. He had elevated engineering and computers above art and poetry. He had abandoned long-held intellectual principles, as well as principles of university and civic life: academic freedom, the freedom of expression, the vitality of dissent, the importance of individuals and of the humanities.

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William Fulbright indicted the Johnson administration for dedicating new and ever greater resources to an unwinnable, immoral war and argued that American universities funded by the Department of Defense had abandoned the role of the university in a democracy. “The universities might have formed an effective counterweight to the military-industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy,” Fulbright said, “but many of our leading institutions have instead joined the monolith, adding greatly to its power and influence.” He denounced any university that had made “itself an appendage to the Government,” a description that fit no American university better than MIT.37 Meanwhile, the Johnson administration and its supporters sought to calm the student protest movement.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

But I’m actually standing in front of Bell Laboratories—Bell Labs—a sprawling industrial research campus built of brick the colour of a wet golden Labrador, in the centre of suburban New Jersey’s belt of once-utopian corporate campuses that began springing up here in the 1950s, the acme of the military industrial complex era. A pyramid-capped core building, maybe eight stories high, has two symmetrical wings that flank the central area and absorb what is clearly an older, 1940s utilitarian structure, visible at the complex’s rear side, to the east. The oak trees here are big; maybe they were planted back then.

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Bell Labs’ job throughout that century was to research and perfect a near-indestructible American telephone system. And to their credit, they did. They accomplished this task beneath a protective monopolistic cloak provided by the U.S. government, who deemed communications research too valuable to be left to the free-market research and development system. Thus the military industrial complex! When the Internet began, remember, it used phone lines, not the remarkable optical fibres we can no longer live without, which were invented … here at Bell Labs. So a discussion of the Internet and twenty-first-century communications starts here. To be extremely specific, the Internet was born at 10:30 p.m. on the evening of October 29, 1969, when a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles, used the telephone system devised at Bell Labs to connect with another computer at the Stanford Research Institute in what had yet to become Silicon Valley.

What's Next?: Unconventional Wisdom on the Future of the World Economy by David Hale, Lyric Hughes Hale

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversification, energy security, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, global village, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, passive investing, payday loans, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precautionary principle, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tobin tax, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yield curve

The Guard is now drawing up elaborate plans for creating revenue streams from less expensive defense alternatives for developing nations. Robert Baer, a former CIA officer specializing in the Middle East, calls the Guard “the masters of asymmetrical warfare.” In short, the IRI now has its own military-industrial complex. Upon their return from the front lines in 1988, the privileged members of the Revolutionary Guard were able to negotiate commercial favors from then-President Rafsanjani. Two decades after the war, they now own ports on both Iranian coasts: the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. These enterprises receive billions in transit fees from the newly independent landlocked countries of Central Asia with a voracious appetite for goods from abroad.

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This is a nation that has existed for twenty-five centuries on more or less the same plot of land, and whose people have a very strong sense of themselves and their nationhood.”3 In his 2010 book Reset, Kinzer advocates a more Iran-Turkey–anchored US policy in the Middle East.4 Clearly, the outside world’s sanctions-and-nuclear-tech-oriented approach to Iran since the 1980s has not worked. To paraphrase award-winning scholar Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance—The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States,5 it has most likely hurt the Iranian people more than the regime. It has created incentives for the development of a nascent military-industrial complex. Normalized relations with Iran, which closely monitor human rights, will probably do more to propel the country along the one-hundred-year-old path of democratization than isolation by the great powers. Any assessment of Iranian politics has to go beyond the chess game of personalities and take into account the role of Iranian civil society and Reformist Islam, which will likely redefine the Islamic world’s language of politics and liberate religion from the pitfalls of statecraft and its new political economy.

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Its stock exchange suffers from serious transparency and governance issues that preclude it from attracting significant international capital, despite the fact that it was one of the best performing exchanges in the world in the early 2000s and 2008. The arrest of two IRGC members by Nigerian authorities for smuggling massive amounts of armaments destined for other West African countries, through a private-sector entity, indicates that the Iranian military-industrial complex intends to reach new markets, regardless of legality and international conventions. Critical to the peaceful evolution of Iranian society will be the ability to convince the new Iranian military-business elite that their long-term interests, including the attraction of international capital, lie with the transition to a rule-of-law-based capitalism rather than a version of crony/gangster capitalism.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Government planning at a variety of scales (macroeconomic, urban, regional and local) takes centre stage sometimes in competition with but more often in partnership with private and corporate activities. A large segment of capital accumulation then passes through the state in ways that are not necessarily directed to profit-maximising but to social or geopolitical ends. Even in states most devoted to the principles of privatisation and neoliberalisation, the military-industrial complex is set apart from the rest of the economy as a lucrative trough at which private subcontracted interests freely feed. From the other end of the political spectrum, the manner of organising state finances is something libertarians clearly see as profoundly contradictory to individual liberties and freedoms.

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EU regulations have, to take one example, forced small shopkeepers and restaurants to adopt electronic machines for cash transactions for tax and record-keeping purposes, putting them at a cost disadvantage relative to chain stores. The diffusion of new technologies occurs through a mix of consent and coercion. The development of military technologies, on the other hand, has become nothing short of a scandalous racket, whereby a vast military industrial complex feeds endlessly at the trough of public finance while innovating for innovation’s sake. The path of technological evolution has not been random or accidental. As Brian Arthur points out in The Nature of Technology, new technologies become building blocks ‘for the construction of further new technologies.

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They are all too easily subverted, co-opted and corrupted by moneyed interests. Conversely, the foundational interests of the state in, for example, the case of national security can be subverted by capital and turned into a permanent feeding trough for capitalist ambitions – hence the historical role of the infamous ‘military–industrial complex’ in the development of capital. States can use their powers to orchestrate economic life not only through their command over infrastructural investments but also through their powers to create or reform basic institutions. When, for example, local banking was supplanted by national banks in Britain and France in the nineteenth century, the free flow of money capital across the national space altered regional dynamics.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The broad outlines of the Death-State, and especially its amalgamation of the State and the capitalist economy in a total war-machine, were already legible in the aftermath of World War II and were noted by figures as di­ verse as Georges Bataille, George Orwell, and Dwight Eisenhower—the general-turned-president who, in his final presidential address, coined the term military-industrial complex to designate two important components of the lethal synergy or resonance between economics and politics char­ acterizing the Death-State. Schizoanalysis completes the characterization by adding a psychological register to the economic and the political, as we shall see in chapter 2. Yet the Problems to which nomad citizenship and free-market commu­ nism respond lie deeper still.

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The object of the global-capitalist war-machine, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is no longer hot war (as means to an end furnished by the State) but capital accumulation itself, which, at the time they wrote, took the form of a cold war of deterrence in which the State-administered welfare system and military-industrial complex were no more than political means serving ultimately economic ends (capital accumulation).101 But it has taken a variety of different forms since. Of course, this neat conceptual categorization inevitably belies the complexity of actual historical states of affairs, particularly regarding the relations between the State and global capitalism, between politics and economics as ends and means, and between war-machines and war itself.

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The death that was refused within the bounds of a State now devoted not to glorious expenditure but merely to furthering capital accumulation gets projected and inflicted outside the bounds of the State through military expenditure in the service of what Eisenhower famously called the military-industrial complex. These are two very powerful accounts of the state of death in the psy­ chic and social registers, but each assigns causal priority to a different register. So how are we to understand the relation between them? Clearly an obsessive psychological future orientation in search of an impossible state of complete gratification gets captured by—or does it foster?

Culture & Empire: Digital Revolution by Pieter Hintjens

4chan, Aaron Swartz, airport security, AltaVista, anti-communist, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, bread and circuses, business climate, business intelligence, business process, Chelsea Manning, clean water, commoditize, congestion charging, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, Debian, decentralized internet, disinformation, Edward Snowden, failed state, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, gamification, German hyperinflation, global village, GnuPG, Google Chrome, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, M-Pesa, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, no silver bullet, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, packet switching, patent troll, peak oil, power law, pre–internet, private military company, race to the bottom, real-name policy, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, selection bias, Skype, slashdot, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, transaction costs, twin studies, union organizing, wealth creators, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, Zipf's Law

These men had made phony war their business for decades, and ran the largest budgets in the world, so when their era of "mutually assured destruction" ended, they were presumably looking for new work. I would, in their place. I think that by the end of the last century, Islam was selected as the best candidate for a Bad Guy to replace the crumbling East-West divide with its slowing profits for the military-industrial complex. We have the mass immigration of North Africans and Turks into Europe as the basis for anti-Islamic public policies in Europe. We have the conflicts in Chechnya, Indonesia, India, Afghanistan, ex-Yugoslavia, and of course, Palestine, to prove how Islam is the religion of hate. We had at least $600 million of American money going to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the founder of the Hezb-e Islami radical Islamic militant faction.

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Be born into a life of privilege, where luxury hotels are for the poor and outcast, and you will know to the core of your being that you are a god walking among mortals. And gods answer to no one, except perhaps higher gods. Follow the money. On the one hand, you have a political elite who are convinced the world is about to end if they don't take drastic action soon. On the other hand, you have a military-industrial complex not so keen on retirement and a 75% cut in income. And on the third hand, you have a compliant public with savings, pensions, and a shockingly innocent trust in their rulers. So a terrorist threat created and pumped up entirely to satisfy a paranoid elite's need for an external threat is not far-fetched.

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Our current web architecture, built on centralized servers, accessed through commercial broadband links, is trivial to tap. I've explained how the cost of storing everything interesting about us is falling down to zero. As to the "why," we see the Para-state -- a paranoid global political elite fighting to hold onto power -- prodded by a military-industrial complex that was running out of enemies before the terrorists, drug cartels, and on-line pedophiles conveniently came along. It doesn't even require a conspiracy. The collapsing cost of storage and computing power, combined with the centralized Web, makes global surveillance an inevitable outcome.

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, desegregation, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, glass ceiling, Gunnar Myrdal, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, women in the workforce, éminence grise

The defense establishment’s grip on the economy of southeastern Virginia had become so strong during the war, its influence so critical to the material well-being of the local residents, that just as Hampton Roads was once the very model of the war boomtown, so too had it become a warfare state, dependent on the defense industry dollars that lapped into the region like waves on the shores of its beaches. Hampton Roads had become the embodiment of what Cold War president Dwight D. Eisenhower would a decade later dub the “military-industrial complex.” The inevitable reduction in force that visited Langley—the staff had peaked at more than three thousand employees just before V-J Day—was short-lived and shallow, mostly accomplished through the natural attrition of those who decided it was time to move on from their life at Langley.

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The launch date for Project Mercury’s first manned mission slipped into 1961, a year that announced itself as unpredictable from the start: on January 3, the United States cut diplomatic relations with Cuba, another step down the road in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. President Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in January 1961, railed against the United States’ growing military-industrial complex. On March 6, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, newly inaugurated, announced Executive Order 10925, ordering the federal government and its contractors to take “affirmative action” to ensure equal opportunity for all of their employees and applicants, regardless of race, creed, color, or national origin.

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Collins, “The Wage Gains of African-American Women in the 1940s,” Journal of Economic History 66, no. 3 (September 2006): 737–77. 79 took a walk around the block: Michelle Webb, personal interview, February 10, 2016. 79 headquarters of its Tactical Air Command: “Gen. Devers Takes Command of Fort Monroe, New AGF Base,” Washington Post, October 2, 1946. 80 “military-industrial complex”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address,” January 17, 1961, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=90&page=transcript. 80 more than three thousand employees: Hansen, Engineer in Charge, 413. 80 tendered their resignations: Golemba, “Human Computers,” 90. 81 top-ranked managers: Ibid., 90–91. 81 “excellent” ratings: Ibid. 81 had been appointed shift supervisors: Fitchett Personnel File. 81 had swelled to twenty-five women: Ibid. 81 often worked the 3:00 p.m.

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, business intelligence, centralized clearinghouse, collective bargaining, Columbine, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, independent contractor, Kickstarter, military-industrial complex, multilevel marketing, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, operational security, private military company, Project for a New American Century, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, Seymour Hersh, stem cell, Timothy McVeigh, urban planning, vertical integration, zero-sum game

—Courier-Journal “At Blackwater USA, Jeremy Scahill’s is the face they love to hate . . . [He is] perhaps the private military company’s most dogged critic.” —Virginian-Pilot “Jeremy Scahill’s exhaustive Blackwater appears with perfect timing . . . Dwight Eisenhower warned decades ago against the emergence of a military-industrial complex. Scahill sees in the rise of Blackwater the fulfillment of that dark prophecy.”—Weekend Australian “Blackwater being rarely out of the news lately, this is a very useful survey of modern mercenaries—or, as they prefer to be called, ‘private security contractors’ in the ‘peace and stability industry’ . . .

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Coming as it did in the midst of an open-ended, loosely defined global war, this formal designation represented a radical rebuke of the ominous warnings laid out by President Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation decades earlier during which he envisioned the “grave implications” of the rise of “the military-industrial complex.” In 1961, Eisenhower declared, “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.”

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Three months later, the company was handed one of the U.S. government’s most valuable international security contracts: to protect diplomats and U.S. facilities. The highly publicized deaths of four of its private soldiers would prove to be the spark that set Blackwater on a path to success for years to come. The story of Blackwater’s rise is an epic one in the history of the military-industrial complex. The company is the living embodiment of the changes wrought by the revolution in military affairs and the privatization agenda radically expanded by the Bush administration under the guise of the war on terror. But more fundamentally, it is a story about the future of war, democracy, and governance.

A Theory of the Drone by Gregoire Chamayou

drone strike, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Necker cube, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, private military company, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, telepresence, Yom Kippur War

The old model of an army of citizens gave way to a “market army.”18 The key to this mutation was fundamentally economic, for “by making conscription and casualties less likely, capitalization turns arming and war into exercises of fiscal, rather then social, mobilization.”19 However, this dynamic of capitalization was not independent of political choices, which themselves were deeply intertwined with the interests of the military-industrial complex. Niklas Schörnig and Alexander Lembcke have shown, in this regard, how the ethical and political discourse of “zero losses” has been very effectively promoted by industrialists producing armaments.20 In 2002, one advertisement for the Boeing X-45A drone proclaimed, “Aircrews won’t have to be put at risk to complete the most dangerous of missions.”21 The two preoccupations—that of the industrialists wanting to sell new weapons, and that of politicians seeking to preserve their electoral capital—converged and interacted, each overdetermining the other.

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See Michel Pastoureau, Une histoire symbolique du Moyen Age occidental (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 33. 17. Kenneth Anderson and Matthew Waxman, “Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers,” Policy Review, no. 176 (December 2012). 18. Ibid. 19. For years, Ronald Arkin has been working on their development, thanks to generous financial aid from the military-industrial complex, which includes DARPA, the US Army, the Savannah River Technology Center, Honda R & D, Samsung, CS Draper Laboratory, SAIC, NAVAIR, and the Office of Naval Research, www.cc.gatech.edu/-arkin. 20. In September 2009, the physicist Jürgen Altmann, the philosopher Peter Asaro, the roboticist Noel Sharkey, and the philosopher Robert Sparrow founded the International Committee for the control of robotic weapons, the Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), which calls for the prohibition of robotic killers.

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., 60 McMahan, Jeff, 164 McNair, Rachel, 112–13 mechanical superego, 208 Mehsud, Baitullah, 70 Meilinger, Phillip, 63–64 Melzer, Yehuda, 269–70n10 metadata, 40–41 Mexico, 33 Miasnikov, Eugene, 78 Middle Ages, 74, 94 Milgram, Stanley, 118–19, 255n17 militants, suspected, 145 militarism, 184 democratic, 185–94 military atrocities, legalism of, 216–17 See also war crimes military ethics, 97, 146, 198, 216 applied, 162–63 robots and, 208 See also military ethos; necroethics “Military Ethics of Fighting Terror” (Yadlin), 131–32 military ethos, 17, 97, 107, 121 citizenship and, 132–34, 154–56 crisis in, 96–105 endangerment of civilians and, 133–34 of IDF, 131 nationalism and, 132–33 preservation of life and, 100–101, 131–33, 136–37 warfare without risk and, 129–30 military-industrial complex, 192 military law enforcement, 163, 165–66, 168, 169 military psychology, 106–24, 123 military vision, technology of, 114 See also surveillance Minima Moralia (Adorno), 205 “minimum carnage,” 216 Minsky, Marvin, 214 missiles cruise, 232n3 surface-to-air, 27–28 mission intelligence coordinators, 2, 5, 7–9 Mitchell, Pete “Maverick,” 99 mobilization, delegation of, 187–88 Mogadishu, 128 Monahan, Torin, 235n21 Monroe, Marilyn, 25, 26 Montgomery County, Texas, sheriff’s office, 203 “moral buffering” effect, 119, 255n21 moral hazard, 188–89, 190 morality technology and, 135–39 See also ethics; military ethics; military ethos; necroethics nano-drones, 56 National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 49 nationalism, military ethos and, 132–33 National Public Radio (NPR), 103 National Rifle Association, 31 Native Americans, genocide of, 202 Nazis, 205, 207 necroethics, 17, 146–48, 153–56, 163, 189 Nef, John Ulric, 254–55n12 Nellis Air Force Base, 29 network-centric warfare, 34, 215 The New York Times, 46, 64, 74–75, 107–8, 146 Nexus Topography, 34 Niciases, 102 nodes, 34 noncombatants.

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. . . . 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. • • • YET IN ENTERING “military-industrial complex” firmly into the national lexicon, Eisenhower pointed to a “technological revolution” in the business of cold-war defense, with modern research and development now requiring “hundreds of new electronic computers” at immense cost.

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The group was known as the Whiz Kids, young men with no specific industry training but who embodied the supreme technocratic idea that all organizations were simply vast collections of quantifiable information that changed minute by minute, day to day—if it could be measured, it could be managed. Of this talented group, McNamara was seen as the most brilliant, a rational man among rational men. Senator Barry Goldwater would call him “an IBM machine with legs.” It was only fitting that such a man should be entrusted with overseeing the “military-industrial complex.” • • • OF ALL COMPANIES, IBM had been the primary beneficiary of the military’s growing investment in computing research. Its 1960 revenues had grown to just a notch under $2 billion, a staggering increase from ten years earlier. Yet the company’s roots, and in a sense computing itself, could be traced back to a constitutional function as basic as national defense.

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Indeed, the once-celebrated Robert McNamara learned firsthand the tragic limits of objective facts and figures, the danger of data failing to tell the whole story or, worse, obfuscating the most basic insights of human judgment. Here was America with satellites, computers, jet fighters, and billions of dollars dedicated to defense, yet the conduct of the Vietnam War itself looked far less modern than the terms such as “military-industrial complex,” “space race,” or “electronic brains” would seem to imply. A simple count of money and weapons pointed to victory. But the intransigent North Vietnamese, with barely one foot removed from their rice paddies and agrarian roots in terms of economic development, refused to open their hearts and minds to the twin virtues of democracy and capitalism and were somehow fighting a superpower to a stalemate.

Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. . . . 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. • • • YET IN ENTERING “military-industrial complex” firmly into the national lexicon, Eisenhower pointed to a “technological revolution” in the business of cold-war defense, with modern research and development now requiring “hundreds of new electronic computers” at immense cost.

…

The group was known as the Whiz Kids, young men with no specific industry training but who embodied the supreme technocratic idea that all organizations were simply vast collections of quantifiable information that changed minute by minute, day to day—if it could be measured, it could be managed. Of this talented group, McNamara was seen as the most brilliant, a rational man among rational men. Senator Barry Goldwater would call him “an IBM machine with legs.” It was only fitting that such a man should be entrusted with overseeing the “military-industrial complex.” • • • OF ALL COMPANIES, IBM had been the primary beneficiary of the military’s growing investment in computing research. Its 1960 revenues had grown to just a notch under $2 billion, a staggering increase from ten years earlier. Yet the company’s roots, and in a sense computing itself, could be traced back to a constitutional function as basic as national defense.

…

Indeed, the once-celebrated Robert McNamara learned firsthand the tragic limits of objective facts and figures, the danger of data failing to tell the whole story or, worse, obfuscating the most basic insights of human judgment. Here was America with satellites, computers, jet fighters, and billions of dollars dedicated to defense, yet the conduct of the Vietnam War itself looked far less modern than the terms such as “military-industrial complex,” “space race,” or “electronic brains” would seem to imply. A simple count of money and weapons pointed to victory. But the intransigent North Vietnamese, with barely one foot removed from their rice paddies and agrarian roots in terms of economic development, refused to open their hearts and minds to the twin virtues of democracy and capitalism and were somehow fighting a superpower to a stalemate.

Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield by Robert H. Latiff

Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, CRISPR, cyber-physical system, Danny Hillis, defense in depth, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, failed state, friendly fire, Howard Zinn, Internet of things, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Nicholas Carr, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, post-truth, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, VTOL, Wall-E

More recently, the Defense Department inspector general found that improper grounding or faulty equipment in showers installed by a military contractor in Iraq caused soldiers’ deaths. The report concluded that multiple systems and organizations had failed the soldiers. While the weapons the military develops and buys have changed, the importance of the military-industrial complex has not. The goal is the acquisition of the best weapons possible for our soldiers, but the weapons-buying process has many interested stakeholders, who sometimes forget the primacy of that goal. Industry gets profits, members of Congress get jobs in their districts, universities get research support, and the military gets continuously updated capabilities.

…

If we continue to spend astronomical sums of money on weapons for which we get less and less in return, while ignoring or underfunding the basic human needs of our people, we may find we have a first-rate military and a second-rate society. President Eisenhower, in his oft-quoted final address to the nation, warned not only of undue influence of the military-industrial complex, but of the imperative to care for human needs, saying that “each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance.” Our leaders also must be honest with the public about the size of the military. The use of private contractors has gotten out of hand.

Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson

AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, edge city, Future Shock, imposter syndrome, informal economy, Joi Ito, means of production, megastructure, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, proxy bid, restrictive zoning, Snow Crash, space junk, technological determinism, telepresence, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog

At which point it would start to resemble…. But it’s not Steam Engine Time yet, so you can’t do that. Although you would, or anyway you’d think about it, if you were a man named Vannevar Bush, but we’ll come back to him later. Vannevar Bush almost single-handedly invented what we now think of as the military-industrial complex. He did that for Franklin Roosevelt, but it isn’t what he’ll be remembered for. I can’t remember a robot ever scaring me that much, after Dr. Satan’s robots. They continued to be part of the cultural baggage of sci-fi, but generally seemed rather neutral, at least to me. Good or bad depending on who was employing them in a given narrative.

…

Vannevar Bush, whom I mentioned earlier, was not a science-fiction writer. In World War II he was chief scientific adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, and director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, where he supervised the work that led to the creation of the atomic bomb. He more or less invented the military-industrial complex, as we call it today. In 1945, he published an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, “As We May Think.” In this article he imagined a system he called the “memex,” short for “memory extender.” If there was a more eerily prescient piece of prose, fiction or otherwise, written in the first half the twentieth century, I don’t know it.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

The book starts in the past, going back to the development of what we now call the Internet during the Vietnam War. But it quickly moves into the present, looking at the private surveillance business that powers much of Silicon Valley, investigating the ongoing overlap between the Internet and the military-industrial complex that spawned it half a century ago, and uncovering the close ties that exist between US intelligence agencies and the antigovernment privacy movement that has sprung up in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks. Surveillance Valley shows that little has changed over the years: the Internet was developed as a weapon and remains a weapon today.

…

At the University of Michigan, students attempted to block campus recruitment by Dow Chemical, which produced the napalm that rained down on Vietnam.86 Someone blew up the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin.87 The Weather Underground set off a bomb inside Harvard’s Center for International Affairs.88 They wanted to stop the Vietnam War. They also wanted to halt the cooptation of academic research by the military-industrial complex. ARPA programs were a constant target. Students protested against the ILLIAC-IV, the massive ARPA supercomputer housed at the University of Illinois.89 They targeted the Stanford Research Institute, an important ARPA contractor involved in everything from chemical weapons research to counterinsurgency work and development of the ARPANET.

…

At the same time, he experimented with LSD and dosed other computer engineers with acid to see whether it made them more efficient and creative. He also went on a tour of various communes and was highly supportive of the movement’s attempt to create new forms of decentralized societies.28 The feeling was mutual. The Bay Area hippie counterculture scene lived and breathed the cybernetic ideas pumped out by America’s military-industrial complex. Richard Brautigan, a shaggy-haired writer with a droopy mustache who lived in San Francisco, composed an ode to the coming cybernetic utopia that demonstrates the spiritual closeness of these two seemingly contradictory worlds. Published in 1967 and titled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” the poem describes a world in which computers merge with nature to create a kind of altruistic god-like being that would take care of us all—a world “where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony / like pure water / touching clear sky.”29 Brautigan handed his poem out on Height Street, the epicenter of the counterculture movement.

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The twin threads of fear and resentment created a growing sense that science might be outpacing the ability of a democracy to govern itself. The situation was alarming enough that it compelled President Eisenhower to warn the American people about it. On January 17, 1961, in his farewell address to the nation, he famously warned of the dangers of the emerging “military-industrial complex.” Ike blamed the growing funding of science by the federal government as the primary cause of the rising behemoth and complained that the solitary inventor was being overshadowed by teams of scientists in cloistered labs hidden from the watchful eye of the public and awash in taxpayer money.

…

Advances in government- and industry-funded science were viewed with increasing skepticism, and the baby boomers found their power by questioning the authority of the government and, by extension, government science. Parents didn’t have any good answers. This was new territory. The social order was being upended. Scientists and engineers as a whole were suddenly seen as vaguely jingoistic and associated with the military-industrial complex, as were traditional organized religion and other sources of authority. The general culture began moving more toward nature, hedonism, and spiritualism. And why not? Faced with what seemed like the collapse of the mainstream culture’s moral authority but lacking the power to change it, many baby boomers over the next decade either railed with rage in anarchistic riots or tuned in, turned on, and dropped out, setting the twin paths of anarchy and spiritualism that have come to define the generation.

…

It was in some senses an example of the third culture C. P. Snow had hoped for—a marriage of literary resonance with “doing the big things,” as Kennedy had urged in his United Nations address. The remainder of the 1960s and 1970s, however, brought increasing disillusionment with the authority of the mainstream culture and the military-industrial complex that science had become closely aligned with. NASA battled this growing antiscience backlash with an increasingly powerful narrative that culminated in the dramatic 1968 Apollo 8 mission, in which humans left Earth’s orbit for the first time and traveled to orbit the Moon in a capsule named the Beagle 2, after Darwin’s vessel.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Poniatoff moved into a different floor of the Dalmo Victor building, Dalmo Victor bought Ampex motors for its antennas, Ampex recruited from Stanford’s engineering graduates, and the Motorshavers had a second company. (Poniatoff’s first hire was a recent Stanford master’s graduate named Myron Stolaroff, who will play a larger role in the story once an LSD trip changes his career trajectory and perhaps world history.)9 By cleverly pursuing his self-interest, Tim Moseley made something with what the military-industrial complex made with him, and the Bay Area’s tech ecosystem benefited. In the Hoover tradition, self-interest became community interest. The Second World War allowed Moseley to make himself one of the region’s first successful electronics hustlers, but not everyone in the milieu pursued the antifascist cause with the same business zeal.

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His son Fred took up the mantle, communicating among his students, colleagues, friends: Bill Hansen at Sperry, Charles Litton at ITT (then making magnetron tubes, a contract Fred made sure Litton got), Bill Hewlett at the U.S. Army Signal Corps.15 However, Fred Terman does not seem to have kept in touch with the one fellow genius test subject who was perhaps the closest thing to a peer he had in the military-industrial complex, another golden boy from Palo Alto who was forged into a powerful scientific instrument for the Allied war effort: William Shockley Jr. When war research took over the American scientific community in 1939, Shockley was working at Bell Labs, trying to figure out why his model of a semiconducting transistor wasn’t working in real life—more on that in the next section.

…

It’s important to remember that the 1960s left-wing milieu, on campus and off, was intellectual to a fault. Despite the critiques of the RAM and other “all talk” groups, research and even scholarship were key left-wing activities. The anti-napalm campaign was a model for the Palo Alto left going into the late ’60s: direct action backed up by detailed study of the military-industrial complex. This idea fits with Aaron Manganiello’s goal for Venceremos College—to produce “revolutionary technicians” who would turn their professional-caliber training into an anticapitalist weapon and put it at the community’s disposal.60 And these technicians were not just engineers; one example was the San Jose Chicano playwright Luis Valdez, who as a San Jose State University student in the early ’60s developed a new form of street theater that he then brought into the grape fields to support farmworker organizing.61 Teatro Campesino’s syncretic agitprop started a true artistic tradition, and Valdez’s successful play about the Zoot Suit Riots secured that story’s place in the history books.xxi Could white Stanford students learn from Third World revolutionaries (at home and abroad) and put their education to work for the revolution?

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

State-sponsored, though nominally autonomous ‘learned societies’ – for example, the Académie Française and the British Royal Society – started to sponsor research initiatives, such as the celebrated search for a chronometer that would work on the high seas and thereby facilitate navigation (the aristocratic orders that still held power refused, however, to recognise the achievement of a mere artisan, John Harrison, who actually solved the problem in 1772). What later on came to be called a ‘military–industrial complex’ emerged in shadowy form early on in the history of capitalist state development (the ‘Ponts et Chaussées’ organisation, founded in 1747, became legendary in France for its scientific and technological expertise on infrastructural and military construction problems). But it was only during and after the Second World War that this aspect of innovative behaviour became paramount as Cold War arms races, space races and all the rest of it involved the state directly in research and development activity along with capitalist firms in different sectors of the economy (everything from nuclear energy to satellite imaging and public health).

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State formation and interterritorial competition sets the stage for conflicts of all sorts, with war the ultimate resort. Capital, as it were, creates some of the necessary conditions for the modern forms of warfare but the sufficient conditions lie elsewhere, within the state apparatus and with the interests that seek to use state power for their own narrow benefit (including, of course, the ‘military industrial complex’ that survives largely through promoting fear of conflict, if not the conflict itself). The coercive laws of interterritorial competition operate, however, with different effects at different geographical scales: between power blocs (such as Europe, North America, east Asia), between states, between regional entities (such as states in the United States or regional governments like Catalonia or Scotland in Europe), as well as between metropolitan regions, cities and even local townships and neighbourhoods.

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.: Limits to Growth 72 meat-based diets 73, 74 Medicare 28–9, 224 Mellon, Andrew 11, 98 mercantilism 206 merchant capitalists 40 mergers 49, 50 forced 261 Merrill Lynch 12 Merton, Robert 100 methane gas 73 Mexico debt crisis (1982) 10, 19 northern Miexico’s proximity to the US market 36 peso rescue 261 privatisation of telecommunications 29 and remittances 38 standard of living 10 Mexico City 243 microcredit schemes 145–6 microeconomics 237 microenterprises 145–6 microfinance schemes 145–6 Middle East, and oil issue 77, 170, 210 militarisation 170 ‘military-industrial complex’ 91 minorities: colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247, 248 Mitterrand, François 198 modelling of markets 262 modernism 171 monarchy 249 monetarism 237 monetisation 244 money centralised money power 49–50, 52 a form of social power 43, 44 limitlessness of 43, 47 loss of confidence in the symbols/quality of money 114 universality of 106 monoculture 186 Monopolies Commission 52 monopolisation 43, 68, 95, 113, 116, 221 Monsanto 186 Montreal Protocol (1989) 76, 187 Morgan Stanley 19 Morishima, Michio 70 Morris, William 160 mortgages annual rate of change in US mortgage debt 7 mortgage finance for housing 170 mortgage-backed bonds futures 262 mortgage-backed securities 4, 262 secondary mortgage market 173, 174 securitisation of local 42 securitisation of mortgage debt 85 subprime 49, 174 Moses, Robert 169, 171, 177 MST (Brazil) 257 multiculturalism 131, 176, 231, 238, 258 Mumbai, India anti-Muslim riots (early 1990s) 247 redevelopment 178–9 municipal budgets 5 Museum of Modern Art, New York 21 Myrdal, Gunnar 196 N Nandigram, West Bengal 180 Napoleon III, Emperor 167, 168 national debt 48 National Economic Council (US) 11, 236 national-origin quotas 14 nationalisation 2, 4, 8, 224 nationalism 55–6, 143, 194, 204 NATO 203 natural gas 188 ‘natural limits’ 47 natural resources 30, 71 natural scarcity 72, 73, 78, 80, 83, 84, 121 nature and capital 88 ‘first nature’ 184 relation to 121, 122 ‘the revenge of nature’ 185 ‘second nature’ 184, 185, 187 as a social product 188 neocolonialism 208, 212 neoliberal counter-revolution 113 neoliberalism 10, 11, 19, 66, 131, 132, 141, 172, 175, 197, 208, 218, 224, 225, 233, 237, 243, 255 Nepal: communist rule in 226 Nevada, foreclosure wave in 1 New Deal 71 ‘new economy’ (1990s) 97 New Labour 45, 255 ‘new urbanism’ movement 175 New York City 11 September 2001 attacks 41 fiscal crisis (1975) 10, 172, 261 investment banks 19, 28 New York metropolitan region 169, 196 Nicaragua 189 Niger delta 251 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 35, 253–4 non-interventionism 10 North Africa, French import of labour from 14 North America, settlement in 145 North American Free Trade Association (NAFTA) 200 Northern Ireland emergency 247 Northern Rock 2 Norway: Nordic cris (1992) 8 nuclear power 188 O Obama, Barack 11, 27, 34, 210 Obama administration 78, 121 O’Connor, Jim 77, 78 offshoring 131 Ogoni people 251 oil cheap 76–7 differential rent on oil wells 83 futures 83, 84 a non-renewable resource 82 ‘peak oil’ 38, 73, 78, 79, 80 prices 77–8, 80, 82–3, 261 and raw materials prices 6 rents 83 United States and 76–7, 79, 121, 170, 210, 261 OPEC (Organisation of Oil-Producing Countries) 83, 84 options markets currency 262 equity values 262 unregulated 99, 100 Orange County, California bankruptcy 100, 261 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 51 organisational change 98, 101 organisational forms 47, 101, 121, 127, 134, 238 Ottoman Empire 194 ‘over the counter’ trading 24, 25 overaccumulation crises 45 ozone hole 74 ozone layer 187 P Pakistan: US involvement 210 Palley, Thomas 236 Paris ‘the city of light’ 168 epicentre of 1968 confrontations 177, 243 Haussmann’s rebuilding of 49, 167–8, 169, 171, 176 municipal budget crashes (1868) 54 Paris Commune (1871) 168, 171, 176, 225, 243, 244 Partnoy, Frank: Ubfectious Greed 25 patents 221 patent laws 95 patriarchy 104 pensions pension funds 4, 5, 245 reneging on obligations 49 Péreire brothers 49, 54, 98, 174 pesticides 185, 186, 187 petty bourgeois 56 pharmaceutical sector 129, 245 philanthropy 44 Philippines: excessive urban development 8 Phillips, Kevin 206 Pinochet, General Augusto 15, 64 plant 58 Poland, lending to 19 political parties, radical 255–6 politics capitalist 76 class 62 co-revolutionary 241 commodified 219 depoliticised 219 energy 77 identity 131 labour organizing 255 left 255 transformative 207 pollution air 77 oceanic 74 rights 21 ‘Ponts et Chaussées’ organisation 92 Ponzi schemes 21, 114, 245, 246 pop music 245–6 Pope, Alexander 156 population growth 59, 72, 74, 121, 167 and capital accumulation 144–7 populism 55–6 portfolio insurance 262 poverty and capitalism 72 criminalisation and incarceration of the poor 15 feminisation of 15, 258 ‘Great Society’ anti-poverty programmes 32 Prague 243 prices commodity 37, 73 energy 78 food grain 79–80 land 8, 9, 182–3 oil 8, 28, 37–8, 77–8, 80, 82–3, 261 property 4, 182–3 raw material 37 reserve price 81–2 rising 73 share 7 primitive accumulation 58, 63–4, 108, 249 private consortia 50 private equity groups 50 private property and radical egalitarianism 233, 234 see also property markets; property rights; property values privatisation 10, 28, 29, 49, 251, 256, 257 pro-natal policies 59 production expansion of 112, 113 inadequate means of 47 investment in 114 liberating the concept 87 low-profit 29 offshore 16 production of urbanisation 87 reorganisation and relocation of 33 revolutionising of 89 surplus 45 technologies 101 productivity agreements 14, 60, 96 agricultural 119 cotton industry 67 gains 88, 89 Japan and West Germany 33 rising 96, 186 products development 95 innovation 95 new lines 94, 95 niches 94 profit squeeze 65, 66, 116 profitability constrains 30 falling 94, 131 of the financial sector 51 and wages 60 profits easy 15 excess 81, 90 falling 29, 72, 94, 116, 117 privatising 10 rates 70, 94, 101 realisation of 108 proletarianisation 60, 62 property markets crash in US and UK (1973–75) 8, 171–2, 261 overextension in 85 property market-led Nordic and Japanese bank crises 261 property-led crises (2007–10) 10, 261 real estate bubble 261 recession in UK (after 1987) 261 property rights 69, 81–2, 90, 122, 179, 198, 233, 244, 245 Property Share Price Index (UK) 7 property values 171, 181, 197, 248 prostitution 15 protectionism 31, 33, 43, 211 punctuated equilibrium theory of natural evolution 130 Putin, Vladimir 29, 80 Q Q’ing dynasty 194 quotas 16 R R&D (research and development) 92, 95–6 race issues 104 racism 61, 258 radical egalitarianism 230–34 railroads 42, 49, 191 Railwan, rise of (1970s) 35 rare earth metals 188 raw materials 6, 16, 37, 58, 77, 101, 113, 140, 144, 234 RBS 20 Reagan, Ronald 15, 64, 131, 141 Reagan-Thatcher counter revolution (early 1980s) 71 Reagan administration 1, 19 Reagan recession (1980–82) 60, 261 Real Estate Investment Trusts (US) 7 recession 1970s 171–2 language of 27 Reagan (1980–82) 60, 261 Red Brigade 254 reforestation 184 refrigeration 74 reinvestment 43, 45, 66–7, 110–12, 116 religious fundamentalism 203 religious issues 104 remittances 38, 140, 147 rentiers 40 rents differential rent 81, 82, 83 on intellectual property rights 221 land 182 monetisation of 48, 109 monopoly 51, 81–2, 83 oil 83 on patents 221 rising 181 reproduction schemas 70 Republican Party (US) 11, 141 reserve price 81 resource values 234 Ricardo, David 72, 94 risks, socialising 10 robbery 44 Robinson, Joan 238 robotisation 14, 136 Rockefeller, John D. 98 Rockefeller brothers 131 Rockefeller foundation 44, 186 Roman Empire 194 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 71 Rothschild family 98, 163 Royal Society 91, 156 royalties 40 Rubin, Robert 98 ‘rule of experts’ 99, 100–101 Russia bankruptcy (1998) 246, 261 capital flight crisis 261 defaults on its debt (1998) 6 oil and natural gas flow to Ukraine 68 oil production 6 oligarchs 29 see also Soviet Union S Saddam Hussein 210 Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de 49 Saint-Simonians 87, 168 Salomon Brothers 24 Samuelson, Robert 235, 239 Sandino, Augusto 189 Sanford, Charles 98 satellites 156 savings 140 Scholes, Myron 100 Schumer, Charles 11 Schumpeter, Joseph 46 Seattle battle of (1999) 38, 227 general strike (1918) 243 software development in 195 Second World War 32, 168–70, 214 sectarianism 252 securitisation 17, 36, 42 Sejong, South Korea 124–6 service industries 41 sexism 61 sexual preferences issues 104, 131, 176 Shanghai Commune (1967) 243 shark hunting 73, 76 Shell Oil 79, 251 Shenzhen, China 36 shop floor organisers (shop stewards) 103 Silicon Valley 162, 195, 216 Singapore follows Japanese model 92 industrialisation 68 rise of (1970s) 35 slavery 144 domestic 15 slums 16, 151–2, 176, 178–9 small operators, dispossession of 50 Smith, Adam 90, 164 The Wealth of Nations 35 social democracy 255 ‘social democratic’ consensus (1960s) 64 social inequality 224 social relations 101, 102, 104, 105, 119, 121, 122, 123, 126, 127, 135–9, 152, 240 loss of 246 social security 224 social services 256 social struggles 193 social welfarism 255 socialism 136, 223, 228, 242, 249 compared with communism 224 solidarity economy 151, 254 Soros, George 44, 98, 221 Soros foundation 44 South Korea Asian Currency Crisis 261 excessive urban development 8 falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 rise of (1970s) 35 south-east Asia: crash of 1997–8 6, 8, 49, 246 Soviet Union in alliance with US against fascism 169 break-up of 208, 217, 227 collapse of communism 16 collectivisation of agriculture 250 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 see also Russia space domination of 156–8, 207 fixed spaces 190 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 Spain property-led crisis (2007–10) 5–6, 261 unemployment 6 spatial monopoly 164–5 special drawing rights 32, 34 special economic zones 36 special investment vehicles 36, 262 special purpose entities 262 speculation 52–3 speculative binges 52 speed-up 41, 42 stagflation 113 stagnation 116 Stalin, Joseph 136, 250 Standard Oil 98 state formation 196, 197, 202 state-corporate nexus 204 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 state-finance nexus 204, 205, 237, 256 blind belief in its corrective powers 55 ‘central nervous system’ for capital accumulation 54 characteristics of a feudal institution 55 and the current crisis 118 defined 48 failure of 56–7 forms of 55 fusion of state and financial powers 115 innovation in 85 international version of 51 overwhelmed by centralised credit power 52 pressure on 54 radical reconstruction of 131 role of 51 and state-corporate research nexus 97 suburbanisation 171 tilts to favour particular interests 56 statistical arbitrage strategies 262 steam engine, invention of 78, 89 Stiglitz, Joseph 45 stimulus packages 261 stock markets crash (1929) 211, 217 crashes (2001–02) 261 massive liquidity injections (1987) 236, 261 Stockton, California 2 ’structural adjustment’ programmes vii, 19, 261 subcontracting 131 subprime loans 1 subprime mortgage crisis 2 substance abuse 151 suburbanisation 73, 74, 76–7, 106–7, 169, 170, 171, 181 Summers, Larry 11, 44–5, 236 supermarket chains 50 supply-side theory 237 surveillance 92, 204 swaps credit 21 Credit Default 24, 262 currency 262 equity index 262 interest rate 24, 262 Sweden banking system crash (1992) 8, 45 Nordic crisis 8 Yugoslav immigrants 14 Sweezey, Paul 52, 113 ‘switching crises’ 93 systematic ‘moral hazard’ 10 systemic risks vii T Taipei: computer chips and household technologies in 195 Taiwan falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 takeovers 49 Taliban 226 tariffs 16 taxation 244 favouring the rich 45 inheritance 44 progressive 44 and the state 48, 145 strong tax base 149 tax rebates 107 tax revenues 40 weak tax base 150 ‘Teamsters for Turtles’ logo 55 technological dynamism 134 technologies change/innovation/new 33, 34, 63, 67, 70, 96–7, 98, 101, 103, 121, 127, 134, 188, 193, 221, 249 electronic 131–2 ‘green’ 188, 221 inappropriate 47 labour fights new technologies 60 labour-saving 14–15, 60, 116 ‘rule of experts’ 99, 100–101 technological comparative edge 95 transport 62 tectonic movements 75 territorial associations 193–4, 195, 196 territorial logic 204–5 Thailand Asian Currency Crisis 261 excessive urban development 8 Thatcher, Margaret, Baroness 15, 38, 64, 131, 197, 255 Thatcherites 224 ‘Third Italy’, Bologna 162, 195 time-space compression 158 time-space configurations 190 Toys ‘R’ Us 17 trade barriers to 16 collapses in foreign trade (2007–10) 261 fall in global international trade 6 increase in volume of trading 262 trade wars 211 trade unions 63 productivity agreements 60 and US auto industry 56 trafficking human 44 illegal 43 training 59 transport costs 164 innovations 42, 93 systems 16, 67 technology 62 Treasury Bill futures 262 Treasury bond futures 262 Treasury instruments 262 TRIPS agreement 245 Tronti, Mario 102 Trotskyists 253, 255 Tucuman uprising (1969) 243 Turin: communal ‘houses of the people’ 243 Turin Workers Councils 243 U UBS 20 Ukraine, Russian oil and natural gas flow to 68 ultraviolet radiation 187 UN Declaration of Human Rights 234 UN development report (1996) 110 Un-American Activities Committee hearings 169 underconsumptionist traditions 116 unemployment 131, 150 benefits 60 creation of 15 in the European Union 140 job losses 93 lay-offs 60 mass 6, 66, 261 rising 15, 37, 113 and technological change 14, 60, 93 in US 5, 6, 60, 168, 215, 261 unionisation 103, 107 United Fruit Company 189 United Kingdom economy in serious difficulty 5 forced to nationalise Northern Rock 2 property market crash 261 real average earnings 13 train network 28 United Nations 31, 208 United States agricultural subsidies 79 in alliance with Soviet Union against fascism 169 anti-trust legislation 52 auto industry 56 blockbusting neighbourhoods 248 booming but debt-filled consumer markets 141 and capital surplus absorption 31–2 competition in labour markets 61 constraints to excessive concentration of money power 44–5 consumerism 109 conumer debt service ratio 18 cross-border leasing with Germany 142–3 debt 158, 206 debt bubble 18 fiscal crises of federal, state and local governments 261 health care 28–9 heavy losses in derivatives 261 home ownership 3 housing foreclosure crises 1–2, 4, 38, 166 industries dependent on trade seriously hit 141 interventionism in Iraq and Afghanistan 210 investment bankers rescued 261 investment failures in real estate 261 lack of belief in theory of evolution 129 land speculation scheme 187–8 oil issue 76–7, 79, 80, 121, 170, 210, 261 population growth 146 proletarianisation 60 property-led crisis (2007–10) 261 pursuit of science and technology 129 radical anti-authoritarianism 199 Reagan Recession 261 rescue of financial institutions 261 research universities 95 the reversing origins of US corporate profits (1950–2004) 22 the right to the city movement 257 ‘right to work’ states 65 savings and loan crisis (1984–92) 8 secondary mortgage market 173 ‘space race’ (1960s and 1970s) 156 suburbs 106–7, 149–50, 170 train network 28 unemployment 5, 6, 60, 168, 215, 261 unrestricted capitalist development 113 value of US stocks and homes, as a percentage of GDP 22 and Vietnam War 171 wages 13, 62 welfare provision 141 ‘urban crisis’ (1960s) 170 urban ‘heat islands’ 77 urban imagineering 193 urban social movements 180 urbanisation 74, 85, 87, 119, 131, 137, 166, 167, 172–3, 174, 240, 243 US Congress 5, 169, 187–8 US Declaration of Independence 199 US National Intelligence Council 34–5 US Senate 79 US Supreme Court 179 US Treasury and Goldman Sachs 11 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 V Vanderbilt family 98 Vatican 44 Veblen, Thorstein 181–2 Venezuela 256 oil production 6 Vietnam War 32, 171 Volcker, Paul 2, 236 Volcker interest rate shock 261 W wage goods 70, 107, 112, 162 wages and living standards 89 a living wage 63 national minimum wage 63 rates 13, 14, 59–64, 66, 109 real 107 repression 12, 16, 21, 107, 110, 118, 131, 172 stagnation 15 wage bargaining 63 Wal-Mart 17, 29, 64, 89 Wall Street, New York 35, 162, 200, 219, 220 banking institutions 11 bonuses 2 ‘Party of Wall Street’ 11, 20, 200 ‘War on Terror’ 34, 92 warfare 202, 204 Wasserstein, Bruce 98 waste disposal 143 Watt, James 89 wealth accumulation by capitalist class interests 12 centralisation of 10 declining 131 flow of 35 wealth transfer 109–10 weather systems 153–4 Weather Underground 254 Weill, Sandy 98 Welch, Jack 98 Westphalia, Treaty of (1648) 91 Whitehead, Alfred North 75 Wilson, Harold 56 wind turbines 188 women domestic slavery 15 mobilisation of 59, 60 prostitution 15 rights 176, 251, 258 wages 62 workers’ collectives 234 working hours 59 World Bank 36, 51, 69, 192, 200, 251 ‘Fifty Years is Enough’ campaign 55 predicts negative growth in the global economy 6 World Bank Development Report (2009) 26 World Trade Organisation (WTO) 200, 227 agreements 69 street protests against (Seattle, 1999) 55 TRIPS agreement 245 and US agricultural subsidies 79 WorldCom 8, 100, 261 worldwide web 42 Wriston, Walter 19 X X-rays 99 Y Yugoslavia dissolution of 208 ethnic cleansings 247 Z Zapatista revolutionary movement 207, 226, 252 Zola, Émile 53 The Belly of Paris 168 The Ladies’ Paradise 168

Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent by Robert F. Barsky

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, centre right, feminist movement, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, information retrieval, language acquisition, machine translation, means of production, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Norman Mailer, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strong AI, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, theory of mind, Yom Kippur War

Some remarkable people became involved, including Kurt Blumenfeld, a spokesperson for many German Jewish intellectuals, and a confidant of Hannah Arendt's. Arthur Rosenberg, the German historian, also joined forces with the group, as did Seymour Melman, who later produced extremely forward-looking work on the military-industrial complex and social responsibility as well as on worker self-management. Documentation concerning Avukah and its activities has all but disappeared (except for that contained in the Jewish section of the New York Public Library, a gift from Seymour Melman), and even those who have chronicled American Zionism or libertarian movements have apparently forgotten its existence, so I have relied heavily upon firsthand accounts.

…

The third one is economic relations of capitalism (ERC), which includes activities undertaken because we live in a peculiar society; in other words, transcendental activities." Defining tasks according to utility helped those involved in the project understand where the emphasis could be placed in the distribution of resources: If war is not absolutely necessary, then armies and the military-industrial complex become a component of the ERCthe economic relations of capitalism. Insurance companies are ERC. If you build automobiles, then that is output. If you produce food, it is output. Things that are neutral were considered outputlike restaurants, for example. Other things are there only because we live in this type of society.

…

In 1969, the Pentagon and NASA were financing two MIT laboratories; one (now called Draper) was working on inertial guidance systems, while the other (Lincoln) was (to the best of Chomsky's recollection) "engaged in some things that involved ongoing counterinsurgency" (13 Feb. 1996). Chomsky maintains that it was impossible at that time for MIT and its researchers to sever ties with the military-industrial complex and continue to function. What he proposed then he stands by even today: universities with departments that work on bacterial warfare should do so openly, by developing departments of death. His intention was to inform the general population of what was going on so that individuals could make informed and unencumbered decisions about their actions.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

It was an era when President Dwight Eisenhower could rail against the military-industrial complex and say things like “This world in arms is not spending money alone; it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children” and be thought of as a patriotic, sensible member of the Republican Party.27 It was an era of morality in plans and in speeches, and immorality in laws and practice. The civil rights movement combatted laws denying black Americans their basic rights as whites pursued their precious ambitions. The antiwar movement exposed the rapacious military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower warned.

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See Italian mafia; organized crime; Russian mafia “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Manafort, Paul access to classified intelligence announcement of cooperation with special counsel bail deal on battleground states Chalupas’ suspicions of and Cohn, Roy and Deripaska, Oleg first meeting with Trump hired by Trump and June 2016 Trump Tower meeting media inattention and denial Mueller’s indictment of and Party of Regions (Ukraine) as political operative and RNC platform 666 Fifth Avenue polling data meeting with Gates and Kilimnik and Stone, Roger “torturers’ lobby” run with Stone trial and conviction of Trump Tower residence of Maples, Marla Marcos family (Philippines) Marcus, David Martin, Trayvon Masri, Bassem Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell, Robert Mayer, Jane McCabe, Andrew McCarthy, Joseph McCaskill, Claire McConnell, Mitch McCulloch, Bob McGaughey, Tyler memory under authoritarianism of Ferguson uprising and inoculation against authoritarianism national memory of 9/11 Orwell, George, on Merkel, Angela #MeToo movement Midwest distance in as home of “real Americans” media coverage of narrative hijacking of and popular culture “Rust Belt” military-industrial complex Milosevic, Slobodan misogyny Missouri abortion law “Cave State” and Citizens United v. FEC Clean Missouri initiative and corruption and dark money divisions within and economic crash of 2008 Greitens, Eric (former governor) gun issues and laws history of voting for presidential winners influence of GOP donors Kansas City Lovejoy, Elijah, murder of Missouri Compromise New Madrid earthquake of 1811 A New Missouri “Show Me State” “stand your ground” gun law state park system and Tea Party movement as “the bellwether state” 2008 presidential election 2012 presidential election 2018 midterm elections See also Ferguson uprising; St.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

A fertile ecosystem for AI research emerged, a blend of government money, university brains and private sector entrepreneurialism. Add in the political drive from Cold War Washington, DC, and the growing popular culture fascination with robots and the result was a uniquely potent American blend. It was a military-industrial complex, certainly, but far larger than that too. Half a century on, Shakey looks rather basic to modern eyes. But its achievements were hugely impressive, especially given the problems that were becoming apparent with mainstream approaches to AI. A paradox was emerging: tasks that humans struggled with—like statistical analysis, or probabilistic reasoning—could be crunched in moments, even by these early computers.

…

The innovations built on America’s growing dominance in information technologies, and the strong links between its university research community, the Pentagon, defence contractors, and even the more freewheeling high-tech community in Silicon Valley.1 Thirty years earlier, President Eisenhower had soberly warned of a ‘military industrial complex’ that might test the social contract in America. But its unique blend of finance, research and defence had also ensured America’s post-Cold War emergence as the world’s sole superpower. And here it was in a new guise, readying America for a new generation of war. If anyone wanted to emulate that technological revolution, perhaps they would have to draw on similar societal forces.

…

A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

Then, King said, came the buildup in Vietnam: “I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.”66 Anytime you seriously dissect the issue of poverty, you have to talk about wealth and income inequality. A productive discussion about poverty must lead to common-sense conversations about wise investments in education, housing, health care, job training, and other efforts that increase poor people’s access to resources of all kinds. We have no choice but to talk about the military industrial complex and its ties to huge private-sector monopolies and war barons who produce weaponry and employ privatized security personnel at salaries that far exceed what we pay government military personnel for the same services. We think most Americans now agree with us that the more than a trillion dollars (and counting) it has cost the American taxpayer to execute and maintain our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq was a monumental mistake.

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We’re not economists, but we believe that such lofty predictions are based on 20th-century thinking. First, our history of bouncing back is no indication that we will come back more vibrant after this unprecedented Great Recession. Second, relying on our military muscle to change the economic equation will fatten the purses only of the military industrial complex, waste more resources and lives, and wind up costing the American taxpayer more. Last, it’s a sad commentary when our economy’s resurrection is based on lower wages and fewer benefits for workers already stripped of the basic necessities as they attempt to dig themselves out of debt and raise their families.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

After just eighteen successful flights, six of them for NASA, SpaceX’s relentless president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, had built a launch manifest worth $10 billion for the vehicle, winning contracts from major satellite operators from around the world. All this despite the fact that its main competitors were national champions, those heavily subsidized technology contractors embedded in the military-industrial complexes of the United States, Europe, and Russia. No longer scoffing, the aerospace establishment began to look at SpaceX in a new light. Rockets that can launch many tons into orbit are usually enormously expensive—on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars—and typically entirely disposable.

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So when the Falcon 9 exploded on June 28, 2015, two minutes and eighteen seconds into its nineteenth flight, it didn’t just signify a problem with that one contract, or even for SpaceX alone. It was a threat to the entire concept of private space business that Musk and the other entrepreneurs were trying to reinvent and to pry out of the hands of the military-industrial complex. SpaceX was in the middle of an effort to win the right to bid for launch contracts offered by the US government, not as civil exploration missions, but for national security purposes—launching spy and communications satellites on behalf of the US Air Force and the intelligence community.

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The Air Force official who had okayed the block buy at the center of the legal dispute, Roger “Scott” Correll, retired from the Pentagon shortly after making the decision. He would emerge as the vice president of government relations at Aerojet Rocketdyne, the engine maker that worked closely with ULA. It was undoubtedly a case of the revolving door at work in the military-industrial complex, but Musk suggested something worse in a series of tweets. “V[ery] likely AF official Correll was told by ULA/Rocketdyne that a rich VP job was his if he gave them a sole source contract,” Musk wrote. “Reason I believe this is likely is that Correll first tried to work at SpaceX, but we turned him down.

The Jasons: The Secret History of Science's Postwar Elite by Ann Finkbeiner

anthropic principle, anti-communist, Boeing 747, computer age, Dr. Strangelove, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, old-boy network, profit motive, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative

Gomer’s disapproving student and Garwin’s overheated colleague were part of an increasingly ugly national mood. With each fresh escalation since the mid-1960s, the country’s outlook had hardened, crystallizing into anger first against the war, then against the Johnson administration; and after that against the military, the military-industrial complex, the military-industrial-university complex; and finally against institutions in general, authority, restrictions, and rules of any kind. In the United States even now, over thirty years later, “Vietnam” is less likely to refer to the Southeast Asian country than to the mood swing in this one.

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Italian physicists circulated what they called the “Trieste letter,” saying that Jasons had helped develop plastic fragmentation bombs “aimed at producing cripples” and laser-guided bombs “used to destroy North Vietnamese dikes”; the letter demanded a discussion at a scientific meeting of “the ‘neutrality’ of science and the role of institutional science in the military-industrial complex of the big powers.” Several Jasons wrote back saying that Jason had helped develop neither plastic fragmentation bombs nor laser-guided bombs. A French physicist replied, “Imagine a discussion on the chemists who advised the Nazis as to which gas to use in the gas-chambers,” arguing about the distinction “between those who work on ‘cyclon A’; and those who work on ‘cyclon B.’”

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The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article…“moral crisis he felt from his role in Jason”: Joel Shurkin, “The Secret War Over Bombing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 4, 1973, 1. When he insisted on giving his lecture…“bodily expelled from the Institute”: Vitale, War Physicists, 112. A French poster…“the American war crimes.”: Ibid., 86. Italian physicists circulated what they called the “Trieste letter”…“military-industrial complex of the big powers”: Ibid., 115. “Imagine a discussion…and those who work on ‘cyclon B’”: Ibid., 122. “If you sincerely want…but they have no effect on the war”: Ibid., 119. Schwartz had done his doctoral work…“if not overtake them”: Charles Schwartz, interview by Finn Aaserud, AIP, May 15, 1987, 9.

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

Thus, in parallel with his decided view that the Soviet Union deserved to collapse and would collapse, he felt the premonitory menace of the arms race, which was the horse running in tandem with the ideological Cold War, and of the ‘military-industrial complex’ to which President Eisenhower gave a memorable name in 1961. But of the Cold War as an ideology, the arms race as a practice, and the military-industrial complex as an entity, James Burnham remained a devotee to the end of his days, fulfilling some of his own darkest predictions about the fate of intellectuals. In the haunted and febrile years of the late 1940s, when new fears about nuclear fission competed with fears of Stalinism and were superimposed upon the other disillusionments of the 1930s, a number of formerly pacifistic intellectuals actually proposed a preventive nuclear war with the USSR.

End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

In the presidential campaign, Barack Obama raised more than $750 million, breaking all records. This candidate was seen as a man of the people, caring for the poor, the disenfranchised. He is a man who once promised he would limit his spending by accepting public funds. By the end, Wall Street, the banks, the military-industrial complex, and the medical-industrial complex all got a piece of the action. Once it was known—very early on—that the media’s candidate was picked, the fix was in and the spigots were on. The downward spiral of the economy did nothing to slow the influence buying. As a matter of fact, the records in campaign funding were set because the government portion of the GDP is rapidly expanding and is expected to do so for years to come.

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Whether it’s fighting illegal wars or financing them with fiat money, lack of respect for the Constitution and congressional apathy for its responsibility got us into the crises in which we find ourselves. There’s strong support for the current system, especially when the boom part of the cycle is still in place. The beneficiaries are numerous and well represented in Washington. Military spending is said to be needed to make us safe. The result is that the military-industrial complex thrives—and we’re made far less safe and much poorer. Spending on housing programs and Federal Reserve–driven low interest rates are designed to get more people into homes of their own. The result is that government bureaucrats and politicians benefit. Builders, bankers, mortgage companies, insurers, and developers thrive, and when the bubble bursts, the poor for whom the programs were designed lose their homes and their jobs.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry by Peter Warren Singer

Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, conceptual framework, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, full employment, Global Witness, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market friction, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, risk/return, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, vertical integration

(Peter Warren) Corporate warriors : the rise of the privatized military industry / P. W. Singer. p. cm. — (Cornell studies in security affairs) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-7436-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Defense industries. 2. Military-industrial complex. 3. Privatization. 4. Defense industries—United States. 5. Military-industrial complex—United States. 6. Privatization— United States. 7. United States—Military policy. I. Title. II. Scries. HD9743.A2S56 2003 338-4#7355—dc2! 2003000456 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books.

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For example, during the 1990s an investor who bought stock in Armor Hold- THE GLOBAL INDUSTRY OF MILITARY SERVICFS ings would have had a rate of return roughlv 10 times better than if thev had put their money in the Standard and Poor's 500 index.14 The result is that although much of the military-industrial complex on the production side suffered from downsizing and consolidation at the end of the Cold War, the military services industry' blossomed. In fact, it has offered a means for large military-oriented companies, such as TRW or Northrop Grumman (with its Logicon services division), to maintain profitability in time of shrinking public contracts.

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So oddly enough, the emergence of the private military industry often brings me to some deep questions over the health and vitality of our democracy. Thinking about private military firms doing jobs once held by soldiers evokes the memory of former President Dwight Eisenhower, who is likely spinning in his grave at this embodiment of his worst fears of a "military industrial complex.** Yet, I actually think that the guidance of the very first American conservatives is more helpful. The authors of the Federalist Papers, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison, who helped guide our Constitution, warned about the role of anv private interests not responsive to the general interests of a broadly defined citizenry.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

There had long been a bohemian fringe in the Bay Area, dating far back to the immigrant culture that created California, and even in the fifties and early sixties there was an undercurrent that ran at cross-purposes to the middle-class mainstream. On the surface, the area’s economy was driven by the rise of the military-industrial complex. Early on, Stanford University spun off electronics companies such as Varian, Ampex, and Hewlett-Packard, and after World War II the Midpeninsula had become a center for high-technology military manufacturing and research and development. To the south, the Midpeninsula was bounded by Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation, which was building the Polaris nuclear missile; to the north was the Stanford Research Institute, serving as a think tank for both military and industrial concerns.

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The Stanford Students for a Democratic Society had organized a colorful fair on the lawn that separated the old student union from the student bookstore. They had erected a geodesic dome and a humorous display that asserted that the Stanford faculty members were the lackeys of the board of trustees, who in turn were the lackeys of the military-industrial complex. The montage included a goofy wheel of fortune, which attacked the faculty’s integrity. Walking across campus, McCarthy spied the display and stopped and examined it. He was so enraged at its insinuations that he stepped up to the wheel and tore it down. The SDSers were equally outraged.

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One of the first Free U regulars Warren met was Larry Tesler, who had closed down his independent programming business and taken a job at SAIL. By now, the Free University was speaking to a growing movement of people who were frustrated with the mainstream university system, which seemed to be increasingly in the thrall of the military-industrial complex. Thousands were attracted to the idea of education beyond the walls of the traditional classroom, and both Tesler and Warren became committed participants, with Warren serving at one point as chairman and Tesler as treasurer. In the evenings, the two frequently worked at the Free University store on El Camino Real, producing the Free University newspaper in the back room with one of the ubiquitous IBM Selectric typewriters.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

And now they were betting vast swaths of their enormous fortunes that they could make space available to the masses, and push human space travel past where governments had gone. The story of their dramatic struggle to open the frontier was an improbable one, full of risk and high adventure, a crash that cost the life of a test pilot, a rocket explosion, and suspicions of sabotage. There were lawsuits pitting an underdog upstart against the nation’s military-industrial complex, a political fight that went all the way to the White House, visions to put humans on the moon and Mars, and, of course, the historic landings that heralded what Bezos was calling a new “golden age of space exploration.” At its heart, the story was fueled by a budding rivalry between the two leaders of this new space movement.

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National security launches paid big money—the multiyear program could be worth as much as $70 billion—and SpaceX knew it could undercut Lockheed’s and Boeing’s prices, disrupting the market, giving it a stream of revenue that could sustain it for years and help it get to Mars. But the clock was ticking. If the company was going to protest the contract, it had to act quickly. “Suing the military industrial complex is something you do not take lightly,” Musk recalled. During a visit to Washington, DC, while sitting in the back of a sedan after a speech, a pair of his advisors asked him what he wanted to do. Musk went quiet, closed his eyes, and put his head back. He stayed that way for two minutes, then three.

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… “Can you imagine if you went back forty years ago and told people that in 2014 the United States would be at the mercy of Russia for access to low Earth orbit, let alone the moon or anything else? People would have thought you were insane. It’s just incredible that we’re in this position. Something needs to be done to get us out of this.” In response to a question about the wisdom of going up against the Alliance, he said that “Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, and he ought to know. Has it gotten better or worse since Eisenhower? It hasn’t gotten better.… Lockheed and Boeing are used to stomping on new companies, and they certainly tried to stomp on us. I think we’ve got a shot at prevailing. We’re certainly a small up-and-comer going against giants.”

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Retrieved from https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled; Bernays, E. L. (Ed.). (1955). The engineering of consent. University of Oklahoma Press. “Much of the classic, foundational research … was funded during the cold war”: Shaw, T. (2018, March 21). The new military-industrial complex of big data psy-ops. Retrieved from https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/21/the-digital-military-industrial-complex/; Krishnan, A. (2014, November). From Psyops to Neurowar: What Are the Dangers?. In ISAC-ISSS 2014 Annual Conference; Giordano, J., & Wurzman, R. (2011). Neurotechnologies as weapons in national intelligence and defense–An overview.

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Most agree that republican-inspired restraint experiments reached their apex and had their fullest articulation around the founding of the United States of America. (Sadly, those founding principles have been gradually eroded by the steady concentration of power and authority in the executive branch, and the massive military-industrial complex president Dwight Eisenhower warned about at the height of the Cold War.) Republican principles of restraint also inspired such innovations in international relations as the League of Nations, the United Nations, and later the European Union, which were explicitly conceptualized as systems of mutual restraint accomplished through co-binding arrangements entered into by sovereign states.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

While the United States can best any other country in the four physical domains—land, sea, air, and space—it faces a much more level playing field in cyberspace. The Pentagon has been slower to adopt national security technologies like artificial intelligence than certain other countries including China. One major reason is that the leading developers of these new digital tools are not members of the traditional military-industrial complex—companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Instead, they are in the technology industry. This is a major difference. Traditional military contractors have worked for decades in lockstep with the Pentagon. But the leaders in the tech industry were people like Chris Lynch, skeptical of government bloat and bureaucracy, whose hackles were raised by the ways in which the same technology they were making could be turned toward destructive ends.

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As we have discussed, today’s geopolitical landscape is not as binary as it was during the Cold War, and countries cannot be classified as either “allies of democracy” or “allies of communism.” Political and economic models fall on a spectrum from open to closed, and national alliances are not as fixed as they once were. The members of the new cyber-military-industrial complex are navigating this new world largely on their own. This puts them in a unique position where they need to formulate clear principles for the types of technology they are willing to develop, and what goes too far. This is a lot to ask of a company, and they cannot handle it wholly on their own.

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See also corporate power; specific corporations anti-union behavior of cybersecurity and foreign policy and government bailouts for philanthropy and principles of regulations and social contract and social responsibility and tax havens and wartime and worker equity in COVID-19 Cowper-Coles, Sherard Cucinelli, Brunello cyber-military-industrial complex cybersecurity cyber war Daimler-Benz data Daws, Gavan Defense Digital Service De Grisogono Delaware Delmarva Peninsula Deloitte Delta Air Lines democracy vs. authoritarianism generational attitudes toward inefficiency of social contract and surveillance and Democrats De Niro, Robert Denmark developing nations.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

By late 2005 China was regarded as the likeliest imminent superpower by two-thirds of the American electorate.41 And during the National Space Symposium of April 2006 at the Broadmoor, Griffin’s counterpart at the China National Space Administration delivered a quite stunning list of his agency’s achievements, projects, and goals to a huge and extremely attentive crowd that looked like the very embodiment of “industry unity”—lots of blue uniforms and good suits, with a scattering of low-fashion engineers—except that this crowd seemed to be radiating consternation rather than excitement. “Industry unity,” by the way, is simply a suaver way of referring to the emergent space-industrial complex, akin to the oft-referenced military-industrial complex named by General Dwight D. Eisenhower in his presidential exit speech. Consider, then, the second of my April 2006 emails. In this one, Michael Griffin announces the appointment of Simon P. “Pete” Worden, a retired US Air Force brigadier general and research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, as the next director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.42 Worden is pedigreed: a PhD in astronomy; a past director of the Air Force Space Command; a commander of the 50th Space Wing of the Air Force Space Command; an official with the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, home of “Star Wars” missile defense; and director of the 1994 Clementine lunar probe, a collaboration between NASA and the Department of Defense.

…

The novelist John Dos Passos had already memorably warned America about the military-financial complex, with a pointed reference to the wealth of J. P. Morgan: “Wars and panics on the stock exchange, machinegunfire and arson, bankruptcies, warloans . . . good growing weather for the House of Morgan.”125 Now Eisenhower warned America about the military-industrial complex: the underbelly of necessary cooperation among political, scientific, defense, and productive forces. Not the first to issue such warnings but certainly the highest-profile person to do so, he referred to “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought” and to the “prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.”

…

Secrecy and lies—“small lies for a noble cause”—were customary (not that the USSR invented the tactic) and continued into the Gorbachev era. Sagdeev does not mince words, calling the managers of his nation’s space program “the corrupt barons of the Soviet space mafia” and “men from the stone age.” Near the end of the memoir, he distinguishes between the agenda of science and the agenda of the military-industrial complex, a phrase he embraces, even using it as the title of one of his chapters: The difference between the space science community and the space industry community rests on the fact that while industry instinctively prefers contracts that repeat projects and models already in existence, scientists need novelty.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan

additive manufacturing, back-to-the-land, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, food desert, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, index card, informal economy, invention of agriculture, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

The 129 people who depend on George Naylor for their sustenance are all strangers, living at the far end of a food chain so long, intricate, and obscure that neither producer nor consumer has any reason to know the first thing about the other. Ask one of those eaters where their steak THE FARM * 3 5 or soda comes from and she'll tell you "the supermarket." Ask George Naylor whom he's growing all that corn for and he'll tell you "the military-industrial complex." Both are partly right. I came to George Naylor's farm as an unelected representative of the Group of 129, curious to learn whom, and what, I'd find at the far end of the food chain that keeps me alive. There's no way of knowing whether George Naylor is literally growing the corn that feeds the steer that becomes my steak, or that sweetened my son's soft drink, or supplied the dozen or so corn-derived ingredients from which his chicken nugget is constructed.

…

Watching a pile of corn stream over the lip of a hopper car painted with Cargill's blue-and-yellow logo, a car destined to join a train more than a mile long and holding 440,000 bushels of corn, I began to see what George Naylor was getting at when he'd told me whom it was he grew his corn for: "the military-industrial complex." The immense pyramid of corn I stood before in Jefferson is of course only a tiny part of an infinitely more immense mountain of corn dispersed over thousands of grain elevators across the American Corn Belt every autumn. That mountain is the product of the astounding efficiency of American corn farmers, who—with their technology, machinery, chemicals, hybrid genetics, and sheer skill—can coax five tons of corn from an acre of Iowa soil.

…

Rodale, a health-food fanatic from New York City's Lower East Side, the magazine devoted its pages to the agricultural methods and health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals—"organically." Joel Salatin's grandfather was a charter subscriber. Organic Gardening and Farming struggled along in obscurity until 1969, when an ecstatic review in the Whole Earth Catalog brought it to the attention of hippies trying to figure out how to grow vegetables without patronizing the military-industrial complex. "If I were a dictator determined to control the national press," the Whole Earth correspondent wrote, Organic Gardening would be the first publication I'd squash, because it's the most subversive. I believe that organic gardeners are in the forefront of a serious effort to save the world by changing man's orientation to it, to move away from the collective, centrist, superindustrial state, toward a simpler, realer one-to-one relationship with the earth itself.

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, IFF: identification friend or foe, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

The United States had used the same methods against the Soviet Union.9 At the same time, the United States was eager for insight and intelligence about Soviet military plans and intentions. If Tolkachev’s access was real and his documents genuine, the payoff could be handsome: blueprints and research files from the most advanced laboratories in the Soviet military-industrial complex. The United States enjoyed an advantage over the Soviet Union in weapons technology, but there was always a fear of surprise by the other side. The spy could provide early warning about Soviet weapons development years in the future. After the seminar was over, a brief summary was cabled by headquarters to Guilsher and Hathaway in Moscow.

…

There were three other storage areas in the apartment, all of which he had built. Adik was thirty years old when he married, late for a young Russian man of his generation. His wife was then twenty-two years old. Tolkachev wrote to the CIA, “I apparently belong to those who love once.”4 Adik and Natasha lived and worked in the closed cocoon of the military-industrial complex, a sprawling archipelago of ministries, institutes, factories, and testing ranges. Tolkachev had the highest-level access to state secrets. Their way of thinking and their public behavior were governed by survival in the Soviet party-state system, which dictated conformity. By day, they played by the rules.

…

Once in the city, Howard’s wife dropped him off at the UN office.4 But that was just a cover story; Howard had earlier called the United Nations and canceled his interview.5 He apparently met with the Soviet officers again at this time. Howard later wrote that he also went to Zurich, Switzerland, and “indulged a long-time fantasy of mine and spent $600 on a Rolex watch.”6 Howard had much to offer the KGB. He knew of the presence of a spy for the United States deep in the Soviet military-industrial complex, and he knew of the presence of a wiretap on one of the Soviet Union’s most sensitive underground communications lines. Howard was trained at the CIA for both operations. He knew much of the CIA’s operational tradecraft and technology, such as the use of the tiny radios, disguises, surveillance detection runs, and the Jack-in-the-Box.

Anatomy of the Bear: Lessons From Wall Street's Four Great Bottoms by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, collective bargaining, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, diversified portfolio, fake news, financial engineering, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, hindsight bias, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Money creation, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, price stability, reserve currency, risk free rate, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stocks for the long run, yield curve, Yogi Berra

The US began to build its first permanent armaments business separate from wartime exigencies, and this promised great profits for investors in selected stocks. The rise of the industry was rapid, so much so that outgoing President Dwight D Eisenhower’s final public address in January 1961 warned of ‘unwarranted influence’ by this ‘military-industrial complex’. Investors in this ‘military-industrial complex’ had been reaping financial rewards throughout the second half of the 1950s. The high growth levels of some of these companies were rewarded with high valuations by Wall Street and, with listed equities trading at discounts to replacement value throughout the 1950s, there was growing takeover activity.

…

His fateful purchase almost coincided with gold’s all-time high. Can it be coincidence that the four years covered in this book - 1921, 1932, 1949, 1982 - also mark momentous change in American society. There was the birth of the consumer society (1921), the birth of big government (1932), the birth of the military-industrial complex (1949) and the rebirth of free markets (1982). Each of the fictional characters in this book struggles with a particular societal transition, all the while wrestling with the impact of that change on their financial future. I had lunch with a man who has come across quite a few bears in his time, polar explorer and mountaineer David Hempleman-Adams.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture by Marvin Harris

colonial exploitation, land tenure, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, stakhanovite, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

They rap, encounter, or chant in order to “freak out” with Jesus, Buddha, Mao Tse-tung. The aim is to express consciousness, demonstrate consciousness, alter consciousness, raise consciousness, expand consciousness—anything but objectify consciousness. To the Aquarian, mind-blown, stoned, freaked-out partisans of Consciousness III, reason is an invention of the military-industrial complex. It should be “offed” like any other “pig.” Psychedelic drugs are useful because they allow “illogical” relationships to seem “perfectly natural.” They are good because, in Reich’s words, they make “unreal what society takes most seriously: time schedules, rational connections, competition, anger, excellence, authority, private property, law, status, the primacy of the state.”

…

Theodore Roszak says the primary goal of counter-culture is to proclaim “a new heaven and a new earth,” and in its formative phase, Consciousness III brought crowds of dissenting youth together at rock concerts and antiwar protests. But even at the peak of its organizational efficiency, counter-culture lacked the fundamentals of messianism. It had no charismatic leaders and it lacked a vision of a well-defined moral order. In Consciousness III, leadership is another trick of the military-industrial complex, and as I indicated a moment ago, a set of well-defined moral goals cannot be reconciled with the amoral relativism of shamans like Don Juan. The flight from objectivity, amoral relativism, and acceptance of the omnipotence of thought speak of the witch and not the savior. Consciousness III has all the classic symptoms of a lifestyle dreamwork whose social function is to dissolve and fragment the energies of dissent.

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

“No Exception; Apple ‘Must’ Install Chinese ‘Green Dam Youth Escort’ Filtering Software,” International Business Times, June 12, 2009, http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/20090612/no-exception-apple-039-must-039-install-chinese-039-green-dam-youth-escort-039-filtering-software.htm. 17. Quoted in Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, “The New Cyber Military-Industrial Complex,” Globe and Mail, March 28, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/the-new-cyber-military-industrial-complex/article1957159/. 18. David Bosco, “A Looming Turf War over Internet Governance?,” Foreign Policy, August 17, 2011, http://bosco.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/17/a_looming_turf_war_over_internet_governance. 19. Schott’s Vocab, “Splinternet,” New York Times, February 9, 2010, http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/splinternet/. 20.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

The security firm went into damage control mode. Barr canceled his talk at the BSides conference and stopped giving press interviews. Hoglund canceled a talk of his own at the simultaneous RSA conference in San Francisco. As the company went silent, Glenn Greenwald and others wrote excoriating essays on the military-industrial complex’s dirty tactics in the digital realm. The Colbert Report aired a segment mocking Barr. A few days later, he resigned from his position at HBGary Federal. (A year later, the small company would persist in name alone, without employees or customers. And in February 2012, its parent firm, HBGary, would be swallowed up by the larger defense contractor ManTech for an undisclosed price.)

…

I spend my first two hours at the Chaos Communication Camp wandering in the dusk around the surreal ruins: past a statue of Lenin with headphones and turntables added to convert him into a socialist DJ, a rusting fighter jet with elaborate rainbow-knitted caps for its pointed engines and nose. Hackers have bivouacked in the shelter of defunct missiles and helicopter engines, like survivors of the apocalypse who have rebuilt a simpler digital society amid the remains of the military-industrial complex. It’s only after nightfall that I find Daniel Domscheit-Berg standing in the dark at the edge of the airfield, wearing a long reflective yellow coat, his face looking rather forlorn as it’s lit by another hacker’s headlamp. I call out his name and he turns and greets me with a wide-eyed smile and a handshake.

…

ITWorld.com, February 16, 2011. severing relations with HBGary Federal Robert McMillan. “Hacked and now vandalized, HBGary pulls out of RSA,” IDG News, February 16, 2011. Hoglund canceled a talk of his own at the simultaneous RSA conference in San Francisco Ibid. excoriating essays on the military-industrial complex’s dirty tactics in the digital realm Glenn Greenwald. “The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters.” Salon.com, February 11, 2011. The Colbert Report aired a segment mocking Barr. “Corporate Hacker Tries to Take Down WikiLeaks.” ColbertNation.com, February 24, 2011. he resigned from his position at HBGary Federal Andy Greenberg.

Red Moon Rising by Matthew Brzezinski

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Columbine, company town, cuban missile crisis, guns versus butter model, Kitchen Debate, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, skunkworks, trade route, Vanguard fund, walking around money, white picket fence

The jobs of five thousand skilled workers and much of the local economy had hung in limbo since Wilson’s November 1956 edict had effectively robbed the army of the big missile brief, and the uncertainty had devastated morale and depressed the once-booming real estate market. Huntsville, which had dubbed itself “Rocket City, USA,” was learning the harsh reality of the military-industrial complex: with the stroke of a pen in Washington, entire communities could be wiped out as quickly as they were created. To keep his company town afloat and his rocket team intact, Medaris had waged increasingly inventive bureaucratic guerrilla campaigns that were beginning to take their toll on his standing with the power brokers at the Pentagon.

…

It was the dichotomy that Richard Bissell had noticed, when he first assumed that John Foster Dulles ran the show, but after careful observation concluded that Ike was very much his own man. In hindsight, Ike’s subdued response to Sputnik probably owed as much to his instinctive fear of the rise of the “military-industrial complex” as to his failing health and his longing for a peaceful retirement. His farewell address to the nation in January 1961 highlighted the danger of allowing the political and economic interests of military contractors and bureaucrats to hijack the national security agenda for their own gain.

…

., 164–68, 219, 244, 247–48, 250, 265, 276 Medaris, Jessie, 163 Medaris, John Bruce, 224 ABMA satellite and Jupiter C programs kept alive by, 129, 134, 161–68, 178, 186–87, 218–20 background of, 45–47, 51, 162–63 Explorer launch and, 248–50, 253–56, 258–59, 261, 263–67 heads ABMA and resists spending cuts, 46–48, 50–52, 54–55, 79–83 later career and death of, 276–77 Meet the Press (TV show), 132, 242 Meisenheimer, John, 264 Mexico, 200 MiG-19 and MiG-21 jets, 124, 130 Mikoyan, Anastas, 207, 209 military-industrial complex, 276 military spending U.S. 50, 52, 57–59, 79, 170, 174, 219, 223–24, 226–27, 274–76 USSR, 38, 71, 191 Miller, Herbert I., 127–28 Milwaukee Sentinel, 173 missiles and rockets. See also intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM); intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM); and specific agencies, individuals, missiles, and nations accelerometer calibrators and, 7 accuracy of targeting, 35 aluminum alloys and, 52 apex predictor for, 262, 266 boosters for, 99 combustion chambers of, 13–14, 34, 69 engines of, 34–35, 69–72, 102–3, 150, 158, 225–28, 271 escape velocity and, 146, 158 fuel or propellant for, 12–14, 34, 69–72, 101, 150–51, 154–56, 205, 233–34, 247–48, 254, 260, 263–64 “gap,” 131–32, 221–22, 247–48, 251–53, 274 guidance and steering systems of, 3, 5, 13, 30, 70, 82, 95–97, 101–2, 151, 254 heat shield and nose cone of, 34–35, 70, 96, 113–14, 129–30, 144, 147–50, 163, 166, 211, 218, 220, 246, 249 pressurized with nitrogen, 151, 155, 156 range of, 35–36, 40 reentry problem of, 96 “spinning bucket” on, 254, 262, 265 “sweet” point and, 96 transmitters, 151, 159, 255 weight of satellites and, 167–68, 172–73, 185, 214–15 Mittelwerk factory, 11–13, 87, 277 Moldovans, 63 Molotov, Vyacheslav, 18, 27, 30, 32, 38, 41–42, 44, 62–64, 72, 74, 76, 109, 111–12, 149 Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact (1939), 8, 27 Mongolia, 189 moon flight, 185, 215, 247, 249, 273–75, 277 Moscow Higher Technical School, 107 Moscow Institute of Power Engineering, 22 Mosley, Leonard, 230 Mozzhorin, Yuri, 144 Mrykin, Aleksander, 143 Murrow, Edward R., 4–7 Mzhavanadze, Vasil, 61 N-1 lunar rocket, 273 NAACP, 139 Nagy, Imre, 75–76 Napoleon, 22, 190 Nashville Tennessean, 177 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 76 National Academy of Sciences, U.S., 92 National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), 223 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 223, 248–49, 274, 277 National Defense Education Act (1958), 274 National Guard, U.S., 50–93 National Intelligence Estimate (September 15, 1954), 23 National Science Foundation, 227 National Security Agency (NSA), 59, 129 National Security Council (NSC), 53, 78, 117, 132, 180, 184, 221, 240, 244, 254 document NSC 162/2, 50 National Space Establishment (NSE), proposed, 223 Naval Political Department, USSR, 111 Naval Research Center, U.S., 134 Naval Research Laboratory, U.S., 179 Navy, U.S., 47, 79, 166 Vanguard and, 133–34, 162–63, 225–28 Nazi Germany, 1–15, 26, 30, 39, 83–88, 166, 234–38, 258, 261, 277 USSR invaded by, 189–90 NBC, 132, 171, 181, 242 Nedelin, Mitrofan, 102–3, 147, 153–55, 205, 246–47, 271 Nesmeyanov, A.

The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy

affirmative action, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, language acquisition, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Sinatra Doctrine, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Transnistria

Finally, the minister of defense, Marshal Dmitrii Yazov, was also absent, having sent his deputy to represent him.13 Gorbachev’s road to the summit was anything but easy. What he saw as a moment of triumph for his new foreign policy was regarded by some of the most powerful members of the ruling elite as a sellout of Soviet interests. While the Soviet military brass had always grumbled about budget reductions, Gorbachev was more out of tune with his military-industrial complex than any of his predecessors, including Nikita Khrushchev, who was still remembered with hatred by the military for his huge reduction of conventional forces in the early 1960s. But it was not only the Soviet military who believed that the Americans had gotten their way on almost every major issue pertaining to the nuclear arms treaty.

…

Talbott offered an answer: “The U.S.S.R. has conceded so much and the U.S. reciprocated so little for a simple reason: the Gorbachev revolution is history’s greatest fire sale. In such transactions, prices are always very low.”14 Gorbachev had charged his defense minister with the difficult if not impossible task of convincing the General Staff and the military-industrial complex to accept treaty conditions that cut the number of missiles on both sides but excluded aviation, giving the Americans clear superiority in means of delivering nuclear warheads—they indeed had a preponderance of heavy bombers. The Soviet military eventually gave its consent.15 The last sticky issue of the treaty was resolved less than two weeks before the start of the Moscow summit.

…

Born in the Urals in 1931 to a family of blue-collar workers, Yeltsin was a self-made man who attained the highest levels of power thanks to, among other things, his boundless energy. An engineer by education, he first made a name for himself in the construction industry, arguably the toughest sector of the Soviet economy. Always underfunded and understaffed, unlike the military-industrial complex, construction companies fulfilled their five-year plans by relying on the work of recent convicts and riffraff sent to building sites by party officials. Much depended on the individual construction chief’s sheer strength of personality, of which Yeltsin had no shortage. He began his career in 1955 as a foreman in the city of Sverdlovsk in the Urals and bulldozed his way to the top by showing better-than-average results.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

For the United States to even conceivably regain a global leadership role, it needs to think along three dimensions in all its foreign activities: which agencies to bring together (the “whole of government” approach), which nations to cooperate and coordinate with (the “multi-partner” approach), and how to leverage private sector and NGO resources and talent (the “public-private” approach). Combining public and private resources can generate a sophisticated diplomatic-industrial complex. America already has a military-industrial complex: the “iron triangle” of industry, politicians, and the military assailed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address. Now it must do the same for diplomacy. From oil companies to chambers of commerce to environmental activists, America’s corporations, civic organizations, universities, churches, youth groups, and charities already have their own foreign policies—and Americans are expressing their diplomatic voice through these channels more than any other.

…

They debated whether war originates in the human mind or if it is inherent in social existence, but agreed that war has been a permanent feature of human activity because communities naturally struggle to assert their identities and control territory. Intergenerational, cross-border political disputes fuel the world’s exploding military-industrial complex—even in countries that can’t afford their militaries and have little industry. Today, any enemy, near or far, real or imagined, justifies stockpiling more nuclear weapons, warplanes, ballistic missiles, tanks, and surface-to-air rockets. More often than not, conflicts are over borders—either within or between countries.

Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

As Gorbachev stepped onto American soil at the Washington airport before the TV cameras, CBS anchorman Dan Rather commented that Gorbachev will focus on arms reduction, but “Reagan will press the Soviet Union on broader issues such as human rights, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua.”40 Few were so gauche as to raise questions about Reagan’s stellar human rights record (in Central America, for example), though not everyone went as far as Dan Rather, often denounced for his “ultraliberalism,” in interpreting what has happened to Nicaragua as a Soviet transgression.41 In a front-page news story in the New York Times, Philip Taubman observed from Moscow that despite his promise, Gorbachev still has a good deal to learn. He continues to “articulate the orthodox Soviet view of life in the United States: A ruling class, dominated by a military-industrial complex, controls the Government and exploits the vast majority of Americans, creating a society of economic inequity and injustice.” This “ideologically slanted” view is inconsistent with the “more sophisticated outlook of Soviet analysts and senior colleagues who are familiar with the United States” and therefore understand how remote this conception is from reality.

…

Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Dietmar Rothermund, An Economic History of India (London: Croom Helm, 1993); Bairoch, op. cit. 52. Hutton, The State We’re In (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 128f. On the wartime revival of the U.S. economy, laying the basis for postwar economic growth, see Gregory Hooks, Forging the Military-Industrial Complex (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 53. See, inter alia, Gerald Haines, The Americanization of Brazil (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1989); Nathan Godfried, Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987); Michael Weis, Cold Warriors and Coups d’Etat (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); David Rock, Argentina (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 269, 292f. 54.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cosmological principle, dark matter, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, double helix, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Extropian, friendly AI, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, impulse control, income inequality, invention of the wheel, Jacques de Vaucanson, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Lyft, Mars Rover, means of production, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, profit motive, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Skype, SoftBank, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, superintelligent machines, tech billionaire, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vernor Vinge

A few hundred yards from the racetrack, in the massive hangarlike building from which the robots were directed by their engineers, a squad of Boston Dynamics technicians was also on hand to tend to the contusions and malfunctions of the Atlas humanoids. Boston Dynamics, with its weird techno-fauna, was itself a hybrid specimen of the relationship between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley; its machines were the unnatural creatures of a new military-industrial complex. Google’s links with DARPA were numerous and far-reaching. DARPA’s previous director, Regina Dugan, for instance, had left her government job to work at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, where she now leads something called the Advanced Technology and Projects Team. For a while now, I had been fascinated by the creatures produced by this robotics firm, founded in the early 1990s by Marc Raibert (a former colleague of Hans Moravec at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute).

…

DARPA’s interest in technology was, it seemed clear, always an interest in the methodology of efficient violence. — The grinder movement is characterized by both an internalization and a subversion of this cybernetic ideal. Grinders want the same things as DARPA, but for individualistic reasons; the aim, in this sense, is a kind of personalized military-industrial complex. “The main trouble with cyborgs,” as Haraway puts it, “is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often extremely unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

Somehow we have to be able to sort out the chicken-and-egg causality problem: the risk of violence affects military spending, and military spending affects the risk of violence. If military spending keeps a society safe it is worth every cent. But before slipping into such easy thought patterns I decided to investigate what has actually been driving it. By this I do not mean answers such as “the military-industrial complex” about which the Marxists of my youth used to fantasize. During the Cold War there used to be an academic industry that studied the arms race between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. But with the end of the Cold War, that collapsed, and nothing has replaced it. There were scarcely any recent studies on military spending in developing countries, so Anke and I decided to do it ourselves.

…

Anke and I developed a model of the risk of rebellion and used the estimates to see whether governments responded to a heightened risk of rebellion with increased spending. We found a large effect: governments tried to buy security from the threat of rebellion by building a big army. This is a case of out of the frying pan into the fire. A big army is not just a source of defense, it is an interest group. The nearest we got to the military-industrial complex was to investigate whether the military was concerned to look after itself. Quite commonly, professions tend to lobby in their own interests. Plato had the brilliant idea that the ideal government would be composed of philosopher kings: government by professors. Unfortunately, Plato’s splendid idea has not been implemented with sufficient frequency for it to be amenable to statistical testing, but I hazard that a government of professors would spend significantly more on universities.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

Many environmentalists focused instead on the technology’s environmental benefits; in terms of cleaning up the air people breathed nuclear plants promised to be a great step forward from coal plants. In the 1970s, though, the original fear of nuclear business-as-usual was at first reinforced, and then displaced, by a fear of nuclear accidents. The notion of the meltdown focused nuclear anxiety on specific events, and relied on increasingly widespread concerns about the military-industrial complex and the technocratic hubris of governments. At the same time, it maintained the underlying sense of an invisible, intangible and global threat that makes all concerns about radiation so unsettling and prone to irrational exaggeration. The double vision in which specific accidents were also global threats reflected the sheer scope of the effects imagined: a ball of radioactive slag produced in a meltdown passing right through the Earth (the ‘China Syndrome’); a meltdown poisoning its surroundings for geological periods of time.

…

It has not experienced anything quite like the flaps over newly discovered asteroids, but it has from time to time had its internal divisions thrown into focus by bursts of media attention – not, in itself, at all a bad thing. In both cases a particular source of worry to many outsiders – and to some insiders, too – was the closeness of the clique to the military–industrial complex, and in particular to the part of that complex centred on Livermore. It was hard to look at analyses of the impact risk from the lab (some of which greatly overstated it) without thinking that this was some sort of an attempt to find a partial replacement for the lab’s original cold-war mission.

…

It’s hard to imagine that that work did not feed his later interest in making sure that humans didn’t set off one of von Neumann’s supernovae. Sagan’s main contribution to the asteroid-deflection debate, though, was rooted not in aesthetics or the impropriety of playing God, but in a later-developed distrust of the military–industrial complex. There are, he argued in the 1990s, many more asteroids on courses that just miss the Earth than there are on courses that hit it – the outer ring of a target is necessarily bigger than the bull’s-eye. If people could nudge away the rare asteroids that would otherwise hit the Earth, they could just as easily nudge the more common asteroids that miss it on to trajectories that would hit.

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

A noble sentiment, but he couldn’t do it, and when the time came to leave office, he delivered a farewell address which stands as one of the most bizarre in his country’s history. In it, he warned of the creeping influence of a “military-industrial complex” – a phrase that would have sounded easier on the lips of Noam Chomsky or Marshall McLuhan, or for that matter Chairman Mao, than coming from this Republican ex-military man with little apparent taste for drama. The thing I love about this story, though, is how badly the agitators underestimated Ike. His public image was of a nice guy who was no good at politics, but people close to him say the opposite was true. To him, this military-industrial complex appeared to be less a conspiracy than a condition arising spontaneously from the U.S. economy, rather as class does from the English education system.

…

You have giant corporations working with a very elite insider group that has a quasi-militaristic leaning. You have to bear in mind that, in the beginning at least, NASA was a partial fig leaf to cover the Cold War antagonisms of the Fifties and Sixties. There was all that ‘We came in peace for all mankind’ stuff, but they literally were part of the military-industrial complex – it was the same companies designing and making the military hardware and all that. If you were an antiwar hippy protester, they looked like the same group of people.” So I seemed to have happened upon a space Country Joe McDonald, who went on to tell me about the Foundation’s recent “Return to the Moon” conference and their sophisticated “jujitsu” lobbying model (an idea I first heard being used by environmental groups in Naomi Klein’s antiglobalization tract No Logo); about being part of MirCorp, the private, Amsterdam-based company partly run by people who’d marched against the war in their youth, which actually managed to lease the Mir space station from the Russian government for a brief period, only to be brutally “taken out” by the dark forces of the space establishment; about testifying before Congress and meeting high-level Russian officials in Moscow; about the various flashpoints within the organization, and all in a language that I understood.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

By the late 1980s, over 20,000 major defense contracting corporations and an additional 100,000 subcontractors were working on Pentagon projects. 54 The military share of total goods consumption was more than 10 percent during the Reagan-Bush years. The military-industrial complex had swelled to such monstrous proportions that if it were a separate nation, it would rank as the world's thirteenth-largest power. In the 1980s the United States spent more than $2.3 trillion on military security. Nearly $46 out of every $100 of new capital went to the military economy.55 Even with the addition of a permanent military-industrial complex, the postwar boom was threatened by continued technological unemployment in the 1950S and 1960s resulting from breakthroughs in automation.

…

Concerns over deficit spending and mushrooming debt are being heard in other countries as well. Allover the world, nations are 38 THE TWO F ACE S 0 F TEe H N 0 LOG Y beginning to cut their budgets in order to address the problem of deficits and national debts. In the United States many of the cuts are occurring in defense. The military-industrial complex, which played a critical role in maintaining the economic prosperity of the country for more than half a century, is now being downsized in the aftermath of the Cold War. The dismantling has occurred suddenly, largely in response to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the 1980s the Pentagon budget was still growing by 5 percent a year, reaching a high of $371 billion in 1986.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Marxism’s apologists resorted to notions of ‘alienation’ and ‘false consciousness’ in order to try and explain away the lack of interest of the ‘proletariat’ in class struggle. At the cultural level, many new ideas were fermenting on the Left. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills called on academics and intellectuals to resist the System. He had revised Marxism by opposing the notion of a power elite to the class model and by stressing the role of the military-industrial complex in American society. His ‘Letter to the New Left’ in 1961 was strongly libertarian in spirit, reflecting a Utopian yearning for social justice and spontaneity. The work of the maverick psychoanalyst and Marxist Wilhelm Reich was rediscovered. His argument that the authoritarian personality is the sine qua non of authoritarian regimes and that a sexual revolution must accompany the next political revolution was taken to heart.

…

He went on to portray vividly the alienation of the One-Dimensional Man (1964) of Western society whose creativity and ability to dissent had been undermined. He concluded that only a non-repressive civilization would be able to give natural expression to unfettered human nature although he did not go so far as to reject the need for government. At the same time, social critics like Lewis Mumford were denouncing the ‘megamachine’ of the new military-industrial complex in the United States, while Paul Goodman was reminding people of the advantages of decentralized communities. During the early part of the 1960s the ideology of the New Left remained ambiguous. The reigning orthodoxies of Liberalism and Marxism seemed exhausted and irrelevant, but there was no clear alternative.

…

The military draft became terminally emblematic of the authoritarian State in the United States, for on signing one not only pledged service to a State which was killing mindlessly and pointlessly in Vietnam, but also signed oneself over to the System in all its poisonous finery. The counter-culture was also anarchist in its critique of the centralized and technological State and in its widespread desire to see a return to a simpler life closer to nature.10 Faced with the prospect of collusion with suburbia and the military-industrial complex, American youth set up communes and collectives in the city centres or in the country. In the midst of affluence and consumerism, they chose voluntary poverty, like Thoreau in Walden, like the monastics of old, preferring to go without, borrow, improvise or steal rather than work. The counter-culture was tolerant of diversity and eclecticism.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Society must become one great “military factory,” Burckhardt predicted, with the masses conscripted into great and destructive armies and its rulers dealing out mass death in the same way as its industries deal out mass production and its press mass propaganda.15 Jacob Burckhardt was not only the first prophet of the totalitarian state and the military-industrial complex. He was also describing the triumph of a debased mass culture that comes to dominate all of society. That culture destabilizes the social order, with its traditional and organic balance of institutions and ideals. Modern democracy was destroying a European civilization that he believed was “decadent” and had lost its raison d’être .

…

He later welcomed America’s entry into World War I in 1917 precisely because he believed it would force America to make the hard choices involved in building the omnipotent administrative state, as Germany already had.79 In his novel Democracy, Henry Adams had evoked George Washington as the symbol of a graceful, aristocratic social and moral order that had vanished forever. By contrast, Brooks Adams evoked General Washington as an example of what the fusion of military and political power could accomplish in the future. And who would run the new leviathan, America’s military-industrial complex? It is not difficult to discern in Brooks Adams’s “powerful administrative minds” a postliberal version of America’s natural aristocracy, organizing and adjusting a relentlessly interventionist government in accordance with the dynamic social forces of the future. These best and brightest would not be cultivated gentlemen of letters, however.

…

Linked by wealth and old school ties (Harvard, Yale, Groton, and West Point), they effected America’s economic, political, and military decision-making through a single ruthless “political directorate.”32 What Brooks Adams had only dreamed of, “that one day we shall be reorganized by soldiers,” Mills claimed had already come about. This “military-industrial complex,” however, was not distinctively American. It reflected the modern nation’s industrial and therefore foreign character. Like Stalin’s Russia, the sins of Eisenhower’s United States formed part of a larger historical totality. “There is,” Mills wrote, “a fairly straight line running upward throughout the history of the West; that oppression and exploitation, violence and destruction, as well as the means of production, have been progressively enlarged and increasingly centralized.”

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon by Neil Sheehan

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Macrae, nuclear winter, operation paperclip, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

A number of the other leading physicists, engineers, and managers were similarly rewarded with the honor of Hero of Socialist Labor and with money, cars, and sundry other privileges in lesser degrees. Khariton was eventually also to be awarded his own private railway car. In time, through the remaining years of Stalin and during the rule of his successors, Arzamas-16, its sister sites in the atomic industry network, and research centers for other branches of the Soviet military-industrial complex were to grow into self-contained cities, with their own schools, concert halls, hospitals, and, by Russian standards, first-class shops for food and clothing. Although officially secret, they became known as the “white archipelago,” and their privileged inhabitants, the scientists and engineers and their families, were referred to as chocolatniki by less fortunate Russians.

…

The assumption behind his appointment was that a man who ran the largest private corporation in the world, which General Motors then was, could use his skills as an industrial manager to oversee and reform the biggest of government departments. That June, in one of his efforts to try to bring efficiency to the military-industrial complex, Wilson instructed Harold Talbott to form a committee to review the confused and confusing array of missile projects the Army, Navy, and Air Force had under way. These encompassed air-to-air, surface-to-air, and both short-range surface-to-surface tactical and long-range surface-to-surface strategic weapons.

…

He rarely appeared at his Culver City property, knew little of what went on there, and understood less. Hughes Aircraft had been transformed into something quite different from an ordinary aircraft company by two men, Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, who were to become immensely wealthy princes of the American military-industrial complex as co-founders of one of its preeminent firms, TRW, Inc. And the ICBM project, for which Ramo was to serve as Bennie Schriever’s chief technical director and engineer, was to launch them. Simon Ramo was a technological entrepreneur. He had an eye for the main chance of the future and understood how to exploit it.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

It’s not just the fossil fuel companies— although obviously they lay the crucial foundation— but it’s also the automobile industry, the aerospace industry, the electrical utilities, the folks who supply asphalt for roads . . . you get the picture. At the same time we were writing this piece, Erik and I were also working on a volume on Cold War science. You can’t talk about the Cold War without talking about the military-industrial complex. The carbon-combustion complex was a natural analog. 68 I N t e r v I e w w I t h t h e A u t h O r s eC: The carbon-combustion complex, as Naomi describes, was a convenient formulation for deal- ing with the intersecting political and economic interests surrounding fossil energy production and use, though my own tendency is to refer to them as the fossil industry complex.

The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

American ideology, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Day of the Dead, desegregation, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, drone strike, electricity market, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Golden Gate Park, Herman Kahn, jitney, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, War on Poverty, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who had once worked for Lansdale at the Pentagon, went so far as to suggest that he was part of a right-wing conspiracy that was responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy.6 These sinister animadversions were picked up by the director Oliver Stone in his conspiratorially themed 1991 film, JFK, which features a shadowy Lansdale stand-in referred to only as General Y running the assassination on behalf of the “military-industrial complex.” This is symptomatic of the long concatenation of misunderstanding and misinformation that still clouds Lansdale and his legacy. His was an epochal, if ultimately tragic, story—one that sheds considerable light not only on the course of the Vietnam War, a conflict whose bitter legacy still haunts American foreign policy, but also on such vital issues as how the United States can effectively fight insurgencies abroad, how it can deal with autocratic allies, and how it can most effectively dispense military and political advice to foreign partners of dubious reliability.

…

In the decades after Kennedy’s murder, phrases such as “grassy knoll” and “the Zapruder film” would enter the popular culture, thanks to an industry of conspiracy-mongers, their work culminating in 1991 with the release of the director Oliver Stone’s $40 million epic JFK. The film features a shadowy character, played by Donald Sutherland and identified only as X, who claims that Kennedy was killed by the “military industrial complex” in a plot orchestrated by “General Y.” The movie furnishes some telltale clues to Y’s identity. X says that Allen Dulles was Y’s benefactor and that Y was in charge of Operation Mongoose. In case there is any further doubt of Y’s identity, the camera briefly pans to his office desk. His nameplate is obscured but the visible part reads “M/GEN.

…

He claimed that Lansdale had concocted the entire Huk threat—that so-called Huk attacks were actually carried out by Philippine army special forces in order to elect Ramon Magsaysay president, although he never explained why Washington would want to elect Magsaysay if there was no Huk threat.8 In a similar vein, he claimed that the members of Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission were “a band of superterrorists” who deliberately created the Vietcong by moving a million Vietnamese from the North to the South in 1954–55. Their goal, Prouty explained, was to spark a war that could profit the military-industrial complex.9 (In reality, as we have seen, most of the refugees were Catholics who were staunchly anti-Communist.) To back up his grave accusation that Lansdale was the mastermind of the Kennedy assassination, Prouty could offer but one piece of “evidence”: a photograph taken on November 22, 1963, near Dealey Plaza, showing a man in a suit walking by three tramps who are being escorted by two police officers.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

The nuclear test ban was voluntary, but he hoped to make it permanent. In the words of one adviser, Eisenhower had become “entirely preoccupied by the horror of nuclear war.” The harsh criticism of his policies—not just by Democrats but also by defense contractors—led Eisenhower to believe in the existence of a “military-industrial complex,” a set of powerful interest groups that threatened American democracy and sought new weapons regardless of the actual need. The Air Force was in a bind. The hydrogen bomb scheduled to become its workhorse, deployed at air bases throughout the United States and Europe, might be prone to detonate during a plane crash.

…

And yet they were both self-confident, transformational leaders, willing to defy expectations and challenge the status quo. During their first meeting, at a Geneva summit conference in November 1985, the two men established a personal rapport and discussed how to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both nations. Gorbachev left Geneva viewing Reagan not as a right-wing caricature, a puppet of the military-industrial complex, but as a human being who seemed eager to avoid a nuclear war. A year later, at a summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, the discussion strayed onto a topic that alarmed many of Reagan’s close advisers: huge reductions in the number of nuclear weapons. Secretary of State George P. Shultz was elated by the possibility.

…

An executive at the General Dynamics Corporation, manufacturer of the Atlas missile, accused Eisenhower of taking “a dangerous gamble with the survival of our people.” Among other sins, Eisenhower had not ordered enough Atlas missiles. See Bill Becker, “’Gamble’ Charged in Defense Policy,” New York Times, February 5, 1960. “military-industrial complex”: See “Transcript of President Eisenhower’s Farewell Message to Nation,” Washington Post and Times Herald, January 18, 1961. “hydronuclear experiments”: My account of these tests is based on my interview with Harold Agnew as well as this report: “Hydronuclear Experiments,” Robert N. Thorn, Donald R.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, debt deflation, declining real wages, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, financial repression, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, labour market flexibility, land tenure, late capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Chicago School, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, union organizing, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Winter of Discontent

In the US this entails triggering what Hofstadter refers to as ‘the paranoid style of American politics’ in which the nation is depicted as besieged and threatened by enemies from within and without.21 This style of politics has had a long history in the US. Neoconservatism is not new, and since the Second World War it has found a particular home in a powerful military-industrial complex that has a vested interest in permanent militarization. But the end of the Cold War posed the question of where the threat to US security was coming from. Radical Islam and China emerged as the top two candidates externally, and dissident internal movements (the Branch Dravidians incinerated at Waco, militia movements that gave succour to the Oklahoma bombing, the riots that followed the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, and finally the disorders that broke out in Seattle in 1999) had to be targeted internally by stronger surveillance and policing.

…

A few of them may get caught and end up jumping out of Wall Street windows, but that is not the norm. The only fear they have is of political movements that threaten them with expropriation or revolutionary violence. While they can hope that the sophisticated military apparatus they now possess (thanks to the military industrial complex) will protect their wealth and power, the failure of that apparatus to easily pacify Iraq on the ground should give them pause. But ruling classes rarely, if ever, voluntarily surrender any of their power and I see no reason to believe they will do so this time. Paradoxically, a strong and powerful social democratic and working-class movement is in a better position to redeem capitalism than is capitalist class power itself.

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels, Chris Wimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, fear of failure, financial innovation, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, offshore financial centre, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, rent-seeking, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, time value of money, very high income

It will be very difficult to significantly improve the compensation levels of the lesseducated, blue-collar workforce. Are you in general optimistic or pessimistic? I am pessimistic so long as the government is so focused on the financial sector to the detriment of the industrial sector. Eisenhower used to talk about a military-industrial complex. We have a Washington-Wall Street complex, and it is at the heart of a lot of the problems. What are the causes of inequality? I think that you have a tax code where interest is deductible and you have the pooling of the world’s savings into a single market, and that means that relatively small amounts of capital can be leveraged up incredibly to engage in financial services and speculation.

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There is a complete mismatch between the needs of the bluecollar sector for the kinds of government policies that create investment and skill sets to increase their earning power relative to government policies that prejudice the system toward government and the financial sector. … I am pessimistic so long as the government is so focused on the financial sector to the detriment of the industrial sector. Eisenhower used to talk about a military-industrial complex. We have a Washington-Wall Street complex, and it is at the heart of a lot of the problems. The tax code favors the financial sector and Smith recommends reforms to promote industrial investments. Specifically, he advocates that capital equipment should be expensed immediately and the corporate tax rate lowered to 25% to be globally competitive because “what makes blue-collar people able to sustain a reasonable standard of living, the investment in the industrial sector, and that is treated poorly by our tax code and our government policy.” 176 T.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The book’s cover art—a raised fist, à la the Black Panthers—left little doubt about its intended radicalism. Computer science was burgeoning as a discipline at major universities. At the same time, much of the country was still caught up in the turmoil of antiwar protests and other social movements. Many young people were arguing that the government and the military-industrial complex had fundamentally betrayed the people by pursuing war in Southeast Asia. Students had gone so far as to organize protests against construction of large Defense Department supercomputers.11 In this environment, Nelson’s book landed like a tab of Alka-Seltzer in a tall, cold glass of water.

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We might cheer when Internet-savvy opposition movements overthrow oppressive, authoritarian regimes, but overall radical connectivity sows chaos and instability, undoing the traditional advantages of powerful militaries. With Big Armies (both good guys and bad guys) fighting to a standstill against ragtag but tech-savvy groups, we must take a cold hard look at our military-industrial complex and reconsider some previously unassailable assumptions of military might. Our approach to national security and to the stability of the nation-state needs to fundamentally change if we are to reckon with the realities of the digital age. Fighting Al Qaeda Before 9/11, Cold War thinking maintained a decisive influence over America’s institutional approach to national security and foreign policy.

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China by Desmond Shum

Asian financial crisis, call centre, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, family office, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, high-speed rail, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, pirate software, plutocrats, race to the bottom, rolodex, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South China Sea, special economic zone, walking around money, WikiLeaks

Under his leadership, Tsinghua became the most prestigious university in China and a political heavyweight. In the mid-2000s, all seven members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo were graduates, a fact that Chen never let anyone forget. Chen encouraged students to study military technology, especially rocket science, and join China’s military-industrial complex. He played a leading role in the Thousand Talents Program, a Chinese government effort to entice leading scientists, both Chinese and foreign, to move to China to teach and conduct cutting-edge research. Having studied for two years in California, he was particularly intent on bringing talent from the USA.

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., 42, 93 Carlyle Group, 93 Carnegie, Dale, 63 Chen Liangyu, 202 Chen Shui-bian, 170 Chen Tonghai, 197 Chen Weida, 197 Chen Xi, 183–87, 252, 253, 259 Chen Xitong, 56–57 Chen Yun, 239–40 Chen Zuo’er, 247 Chiang Kai-shek, 6, 46, 240 China airport construction boom, 137 average height for men in, 27 capitalism and entrepreneurship in, 50, 169–70, 171, 180, 182, 189, 192, 194, 196, 197, 201, 282, 283 CCP control of all non-Communist elements in society, 205, 208 censorship in, 237 charities in, 182 Christianity in, 71, 182 “common good” fantasy of, 282–83 concept of “face,” 28, 109–10, 212 constitution of, 2 consumption boom, 2000s, 161 consumer goods in, 57 crackdown on Western ideas, 195–97 “Crazy rich Asians” in, 161 democracy and, 86–87, 94, 169–70, 189, 194, 283 Deng and reforms, 18, 45, 55, 170, 216, 251, 283 doing business in, 46, 47, 112–13, 194 (see also Shum, Desmond) economic growth, 45, 51, 55–57, 113, 124, 171–72 economic system of state control, 132, 141 emigration from, mid-1990s, 59–60 exporting its system overseas, 282 extralegal kidnappings in, 2, 254–55, 280, 281 financial crisis of 2008 and, 195 first generation of wealthy, 218 first private research institute, 182 five “black categories,” 5, 11, 170 foreign relations and, 189, 194, 254 Gang of Four, 18, 52 Great Leap Forward, 273 guanxi (connections), importance of, 46, 74, 120, 121, 139, 149–50, 155, 164–65, 181, 204, 217, 247, 271 Gu Mu and economic reforms, 272 Heineken beer and Marlboro cigarettes, sales of, 46 hotels, popularity of, 228 indefinite detention (shuanggui), 281 influence peddling and, 164 intellectual property theft in, 62 Internet and broadband in, 49, 51 islands in South China Sea and, 197 jewelry start-ups in, 89 Jiang’s policy on capitalists, 170 laws as ambiguous, 150, 258 Leninist system of total societal control, 281–82 Li Peng and economic slowdown, 45 medical system, 153–56 military-industrial complex, 185 mobile phones in, 60 modernization of, 77, 169–70, 188 moral vacuum in, 158 motorcycle production, 48 the “New China,” 3, 6, 49, 180 nouveau riche in, 158, 161 one-child policy, 154 Overseas Chinese Affairs, 19–20 parenting philosophy in, 15 as patriarchal society, 3, 64, 103, 173, 246 “patriotic overseas Chinese” as source for foreign currency, 9 politics as the key to riches, 215 pollution in, 188 privatization in, 174 pro-democracy protests in 1989, 272 real estate business, 56, 123–24, 216 relatives overseas, as stigma, 5 secrecy and fear in, 120 shock-and-awe hospitality of, 48 southern clans, diaspora of, 8 Special Economic Zones, 201 sports bureaucracy, 16 state-owned banks, 224 state-owned businesses, 126–27, 142, 171–72, 174, 192, 195, 199, 223 state-run work unit system, 56 state-subsidies of exports, 134 status symbols, 60, 114–15 stock markets of, 240 the “system” and, 95, 274, 282 tariff revenues, 46, 133 tax system, 197 theory of zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong, 77 tuhuangdi or dirt emperor, 128, 193 universities run by the CCP, 183 US-China relations, 32, 182 Western businesses in, pretense of ignorance and, 47 Western private equity investment in, 45, 51, 56, 57, 91, 101 woman’s average age to marry, 69 women and power in, 173 women’s repression in, 71 WTO and, 57, 134 Xi Jinping’s repressive rule, 251–55 See also Chinese Communist Party China Central Television, 124 China Democratic League, 52 China Duty Free Group, 126–27 China Mineral and Gem Corp., 89 China National Petroleum Corp., 8 China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO), 75, 110, 165 China Telecom, 172 ChinaVest, 44–54, 60, 134 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, 189 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 2, 7, 53, 57 ability to drink and, 128 anti-American stance, 197, 237–38 battle against Western ideas, 195–96, 253 Beijing vs.

The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption - Endangering Our Democracy by Frank Vogl

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, corporate governance, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Global Witness, Greensill Capital, income inequality, information security, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Londongrad, low interest rates, market clearing, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, profit maximization, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stock buybacks, too big to fail, WikiLeaks

Also see data from the Arms Control Association and background on 2020 arms sales by the US. 12. CNN News, August 20, 2020, headline: “Kushner’s Secret Push to Sell F-35 Jets to UAE Causes Frustration among US Agencies and Lawmakers.” 13. Jodi Vittori, Defense and Security Department, TI-UK, report: “A Mutual Extortion Racket: The Military Industrial Complex and US Foreign Policy—The Cases of Saudi Arabia & UAE.” 14. Prepared remarks, John F. Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), “The Perilous State of Afghan Reconstruction: Lessons from Fifteen Years,” Harvard University, April 7, 2016. 15. See “Corruption in Conflict: Lessons from the U.S.

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“The 2018 National Strategy for Combating Terrorist and Other Illicit Financing (Illicit Finance Strategy).” Report. US Department of the Treasury. “2018 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment.” Report. US Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. “The Art Industry and U.S. Policies That Undermine Sanctions.” Report. 2020. Vittori. Jodi. “A Mutual Extortion Racket: The Military Industrial Complex and US Foreign Policy: The Cases of Saudi Arabia & UAE.” Report from the Defense and Security Department, Transparency International-UK. 2019. Volcker, Paul A., with Christine Harper. Keeping at It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government. Public Affairs. 2018. Volcker, Paul, Richard J.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream by R. Christopher Whalen

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Swan, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, commoditize, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, debt deflation, falling living standards, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce

Once business and government became fully aware of the risks and the possibilities for profit created by statism in such formulations as price controls and government allocation schemes, an alliance of convenience was created that was far more extensive than the particular influence of a J.P. Morgan or Standard Oil in the pre-WWI era. The template for this government-private sector cooperation was the defense sector, which Dwight Eisenhower called the “defense military industrial complex” as he left office in January 1961. He warned: Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.

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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 the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. 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.

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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. Eisenhower’s warning was prescient and not limited to the defense sector. Not only had the defense industry become intertwined with the federal government during WWII, but what Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex” was entirely subsumed inside the government. The late William C. Green, formerly of CalState San Bernadino, commented years ago when we both worked at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC that during the Cold War the U.S. defense sector became the least competitive part of the U.S. economy, while the Soviet defense sector was the most competitive part of that nation’s economy.

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics by Mark Lilla

affirmative action, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Gordon Gekko, It's morning again in America, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior

Ronald Reagan has been elected and Republican activists are setting out on the road to spread the new individualist gospel of small government and to campaign in out-of-the-way county, state, and congressional elections. Also on the road, though taking a different exit off the interstate, you see former New Left activists in rusting, multicolored VW buses. Having failed to overturn capitalism and the military-industrial complex, they are heading for college towns all over America, where they hope to practice a very different sort of politics within educational institutions. Both groups were successful and both left their mark on the country. The retreat of the post-1960s left was strategic. Already in 1962 the authors of the Port Huron Statement argued that, given the power of the Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party and the quiescence of the labor movement, “we believe that the universities are an overlooked seat of influence.”

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Invented by National Institutes of Health researcher and neuroscientist John Lilly26 in the 1960s, these tanks were specifically designed to help people shut off the self (since the brain uses sensory inputs to help create our sense of self, by removing those inputs, you can dial down this sense). After Lilly began using these tanks to explore the effects of LSD and ketamine on consciousness, they fell out of favor with the establishment and devolved into a countercultural curiosity. But here they were again, in the red-hot center of the military-industrial complex, being used to train supersoldiers. And the SEALs have been iterating on Lilly’s original technology. Working with researchers at Advanced Brain Monitoring, in Carlsbad, California, they’ve hotwired neural and cardiac feedback loops, digital displays, and high-fidelity sound into the experience.

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In the same way that it takes a far less developed society to detonate a nuclear bomb than to invent one, the power of ecstasis constantly tempts those who would have no idea how to replicate it on their own. But once they see it in action, once they can map the fundamental logic, it doesn’t take much to turn it to ends that would mortify its original creators. Soma, Delicious Soma! If the prospect of the military-industrial complex hijacking ecstasis to pursue its own agenda is sobering, an equally likely outcome is that we end up seduced by our own desires. In fact, control not through coercion—as totalitarian states have done—but through persuasion is an even more likely prospect. In 2007, a collection of the world’s biggest brands33—Apple, Coca-Cola, American Express, Nike, Samsung, Sony, and Ford—put up $7 million to fund a study into the neuroscience of buying behavior.

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

A bizarre constellation of places resonated fearsomely with even the youngest schoolchildren, Russian and American, Asian as well as European: Saigon. Hanoi. Seoul. Pyongyang. Kabul. Katanga. Tehran. Phnom Penh. Budapest. Prague. Warsaw. Salvador. Santiago. Honduras. Guatemala. Berlin. The Cold War was a uniquely total war, not in movements of armies but in its social and economic effects. Dwight Eisenhower warned against a “military-industrial complex,” with its vast army, intelligence apparatus and defense industries mobilized for a war that would wipe out human civilization. For the better part of five decades it absorbed anywhere from a quarter to a half of all U.S. government spending and 10 percent of the nation’s GNP. The Cold War shaped America, in ways not always obvious.

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., 163–164, 230–231, 232, 234, 235 Manifesto for the Earth (Gorbachev), 222–223 Mann, James, 13, 222 Mao Zedong, 23, 27 Marshall Plan, 4, 21 Marx, Karl, 34 Marxist Leninism, 31 Masur, Kurt, 155 Matlock, Jack, 63, 227 May Day (1989), 65–66, 69–70, 228 Mazilu, Dumitru, 197 Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 47, 129 Mecklenburg, 121 Meine Letzte Mission (Kochemasov), 234 Mejstrik, Martin, 176–178, 180, 182–183, 187 Meszaros, Ferenc, 97–98 Michnik, Adam, 63, 128–129, 227 Mielke, Erich fall of of GDR, 163 Order No. 2 and, 25–27 rise of opposition in GDR, 150, 154, 155, 156 as Stasi chief, 25, 65, 134, 157 Milea, Vasile, 194, 195 Military-industrial complex, 21 Missouri (battleship), 10 Mitterand, François, 126, 213 Mock, Alois, 100 modernization debate, 74–75 Modern Romania (Gallagher), 236 Modrow, Hans, 163 Mongolia, Polish embassy in, 81 Moscow. See Soviet Union, former Musial, Stan, 94 mutual nuclear deterrence, 5 Nagy, Imre in Hungarian revolt of 1956, 34–35, 84–85, 230 reburial of, 84–88 Nagy, Laszlo, 102–103, 231 National Defense Education Act (1958), 21 National Defense University, 75 National Endowment for Democracy, 2, 222 National Gallery of Art (Budapest), 86 National Salvation Front (Romania), 197 National Security Archive, 231 National Security Council fall of Berlin Wall and, 10, 13 National Security Archive, 230–231 U.S.

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile