Let’s Dismantle the Existential Threat Known as the Military-Industrial Complex

...President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

...The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

The bulk of our taxpayer dollars are seized by a relatively small group of corporate war profiteers led by the five biggest companies profiting off the war industry: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), Boeing, and General Dynamics...

Oglala Sioux Tribe Rejects ICE Conditions for Information on Detained Members

Leaders of the Oglala Sioux Tribe are demanding the immediate release of tribal citizens held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and are pushing back on federal conditions for information about their whereabouts...

Comes Out said the tribe sought detailed information from federal authorities about the detainees’ identities and legal status, but was provided only first names and was told additional information would be released only if the tribe agreed to enter into a formal “immigration agreement” with ICE. Tribe officials said they have no intention of signing such an agreement.

ICE Jails Oglala Sioux Members at Fort Snelling, Site of 19th-Century Concentration Camp

Among nonimmigrants who’ve been swept up by ICE’s campaign of racial profiling are four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, three of whom remain jailed at an ICE facility at Fort Snelling south of the Twin Cities. It’s the same site where, in 1862, U.S. forces imprisoned about 1,700 Indigenous men, women, children and elders following the U.S.-Dakota War, where many died of torture, starvation and disease; survivors were exiled to reservations in what’s now South Dakota.

ICE detaining Native American tribal citizens at concentration camp

"The irony is not lost on us," said Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out. "Lakota citizens… at Fort Snelling — a site forever tied to the Dakota 38+2." He's referring to the 38 Dakota men executed in the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, plus two more killed later.