You Get What They Pay For, War
A Few Specifics on the MICIMATT
Readers here have heard of Ray McGovern’s MICIMATT, the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academe-think-tank complex. It’s gargantuan and lubricated with enormous sums of money.
Consider think tanks. Go to thinktankfundingtracker.org and you’ll see useful information like this:
Top 10 Think Tanks That Receive Funding from Pentagon Contractors
Atlantic Council $10,270,001
Center for a New American Security $6,665,000
Center for Strategic and International Studies $4,115,000
Brookings Institution $3,475,000
Hudson Institute $2,240,000
Council on Foreign Relations $2,095,000
Stimson Center $1,555,763
Aspen Institute $1,125,000
German Marshall Fund $871,010
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace $620,008
I wonder why these think tanks tend to favor the agendas and interests of America’s various weapons makers? Hard to offer “neutral” or “balanced” advice when so much of your funding is coming from the merchants of death.
Now consider these stats, courtesy of former Congressman Dennis Kucinich and The Kucinich Report on Substack:
Military Contractors’ Political Contributions (2023-2024)
According to OpenSecrets, the top defense contractors contributed significantly to political campaigns in the current election cycle:
Lockheed Martin – $4,470,698 total ($2,393,034 to Democrats, $2,021,283 to Republicans)
Northrop Grumman – $3,354,889 total ($1,903,884 to Democrats, $1,385,924 to Republicans)
RTX Corp (Raytheon) – $2,805,535 total ($1,472,920 to Democrats, $1,258,511 to Republicans)
General Atomics – $2,507,912 total ($595,947 to Democrats, $1,660,970 to Republicans)
L3Harris Technologies – $2,475,712 total ($1,126,096 to Democrats, $1,331,975 to Republicans)
In the presidential race, defense contractors have donated:
Kamala Harris – $4,440,605
Donald Trump – $1,787,259
In total, the defense sector has contributed over $41.4 million in the 2023-2024 election cycle. For every $1 contributed to political campaigns, these companies receive $10,000 in government contracts—a return on investment most businesses could only dream of.
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As weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and RTX throw around millions of dollars to influence Congress, presidential elections, and think tanks, peace organizations that I’m familiar with operate on shoestring budgets where a donation of $1000 is considered large.
My dad taught me the saying, He who pays the piper calls the tune. The weapons makers are paying the piper (think tanks, Congress, the media), and the tunes they’re calling are military marches.
America, we truly get what they pay for, which is war and more war.
A Coda: So far, Bracing Views has received $0.00 from weapons makers. :-)
After reading such a dark statistics, your closer made me smile.
Dear Bill;
I am just tagging this on to your most recent essay because it is important and profoundly relevant to your concern with language. I hope you have seen Chris Hedges' latest Report, interviewing Omar el-Akkad on his new book, "One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against is." Hedges starts by quoting the following passage:
“Language, too, forces the air from the lungs. Beyond the high walls and barbed wire and checkpoints that pen this place, there is the empire. And the empire as well is cocooned inside its own fortress of language. A language through the prism of which buildings are never destroyed but rather spontaneously combust in which blasts come and go like Chinooks over the mountain, and people are killed as though to be killed is the only natural and rightful ordering of their existence as though living was an aberration. And this language might protect the empire's most bloodthirsty fringe, but the fringe has no use for linguistic malpractice. It is instead the middle, the liberal, well-meaning, easily upset middle that desperately needs the protection this kind of language provides. Because it is the middle of the empire that must look upon this and say, yes, this is tragic, but necessary, because the alternative is barbarism, the alternative of the countless killed and maimed and orphaned and left without home, without school, without hospital, and the screaming from under the rubble and the corpses disposed of by vultures and dogs and days old babies left to scream and starve is barbarism.”
It may not rank with Thucydides but it certainly belongs in the discourse about the meaning of language and its relation to realities, especially in situations of war and oppression.
beth