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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rickyb" data-source="post: 5186471" data-attributes="member: 56035">FDR called the mergers of corporations and govt fascism:awrence Wilkerson: It was always considered to be a progress that would go slowly. And over time, I remember Bill Perry, one of Bill Clinton's secretaries of defense, telling me as I visited him with my Marine Corps while in seminar and he'd just come back from Moscow. He'd just come back from several days in Moscow. And he was as euphoric as Powell had been before about what was happening. There was a plan that we would march very slowly with all the former Warsaw Pact countries, considering not just NATO membership but EU [European Union] membership. And that plan would unfold very, very slowly, methodically and it would unfold only as they came to be able to meet the requirements of both EU and NATO. And, by the way, NATO’s were more rigorous than the EU’s. And it would unfold only as Russia said, Okay, that's good; okay, that's good; okay, that's good. And we all nodded our heads in accordance with that initial agreement. What happened was that you have – I was just on a webinar with the Quincy Institute [for Responsible Statecraft] on this very thing. You had the CEOs and other people working for these now global – they're not just US, they're global arms manufacturers and arms merchants. You had them insinuating themselves into their equivalents, incipient though they were, within these new countries. And they become embedded with one another. And then you start getting, I need this; I need that, and you make this and you make that. And so very soon you have the kind of relationship we have with Saudi Arabia today, where you don't know the difference between the Saudi side and the US side because they're linked; they're joined at the hip and they share in the profits and they share in the ventures and they share in the weapons building and the weapons used. We've done this all over the world. And we were salivating at the prospect because some of the lines, the cruise missile line, for example, the friend-16 line, for example, were going into lowrate production or they were going coal, like the tank line recently did. And the Congress stepped in and we made tanks that are now stored up in the mountains that we'll never use, but that cost the American taxpayer a huge amount of money. So these industries all work together to build the kind of “need” and Ukraine is a perfect example of that today. Not for nothing do the New York Times report on some of the CEOs actually talking in meetings about how their shareholders and potential stock buyers ought to pay attention to Ukraine because Lockheed and Raytheon and all the rest of these guys, their stocks were just gonna skyrocket because of what was happening in Ukraine. This is a war industry. And what happened in 1994 and the years following was the war industry got a hold of the process of NATO expansion along with other interests. And it was ‘Katy bar the door’; let's go, let's go right up to the steps of Moscow, if we want to. Ralph Nader: How prescient [Dwight] Eisenhower was when he coined the phrase militaryindustrial complex. Originally, I understand in the speech where he referred to it as... Lawrence Wilkerson: Military, industrial, congressional, university, think tank, research, you name it. They are everywhere now. They're all over my campus at William & Mary now. They're all over my campus with new proposals, new money. It's very hard for these schools to turn this money down, especially a public university like William & Mary/</blockquote>

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