Kim and Ike

So the beat goes on and on – the beat of American war drums, incessant, relentless, and, of course, very very profitable. War is good for certain businesses.

We’ve been throwing young men and women into the endless maw of  Afghanistan for 16 years without moving the needle a decimeter. National Guardsmen and Guardswomen are seeing three and four tours there, ruining their families’ lives. The CIA is now a paramilitary force there, to little avail. Elsewhere, SEALS are killing Green Berets.

And if you get fucked up along the way – maimed, driven to madness – you’re on your own. The VA is a bureaucratic joke despite all the happy talk from the Pentagon. Twenty-two vets a day kill themselves.

Business as usual, folks.

Remember Dwight Eisenhower – old “Ike” – from the distant “Leave It to Beaver” American past? Probably not.

Anyhow, during his farewell Presidential address, Ike issued his famous warning regarding “the military-industrial” complex and evidently no one listened because they’re still riding high.

Now Trump’s Far Eastern tour is almost over and he played some golf in Japan,   let Putin play him, talked tough to the Chinese once he was out of China, and kissed Duterte’s murderous ass. Business as usual.

The really important thing he did, if you ask American arms makers, was give the green light for vastly increased sales of “sophisticated” weapons to Japan and South Korea to protect them against North Korea and Trump’s “Little Rocket Man” nemesis, Kim Jong Un.

Kim called Trump a “destroyer” and said he “begged for nuclear war” on the Korean peninsula with all his tough-guy blather.

Then Kim hit the nail pretty much on the head with this comment on Trump’s Far East tour: “It is nothing but a business trip by a warmonger to enrich the monopolies of the United States defense industry by milking the moneybags from its subordinate allies.”

The strange rhetoric aside, he had something there. Pumping up “sophisticated” arms sales to Japan and South Korea is just what American arms makers are looking for because, of course, “sophisticated” weapons are far more expensive than conventional weapons.

Always the diplomat and the phrase-maker, our president responded to Kim by not calling him “short and fat.” Brilliant.

Back home, the military-industrial complex was licking its chops over the potential windfall of hundreds of billions of dollars. They’re probably already gearing up to make billion-dollar fighters that don’t fly right, helicopters that can’t levitate, and other slipshod examples of American high-tech at its best. Don’t worry, though, they’ll get the bugs out at some point before shipping this stuff off to our “subordinate allies.” (Good phrase, Kim-o.)

And if it takes a few billion here and there to get this stuff right – no problem, they’ve got virtually a blank check from the Pentagon.

Trump has surrounded himself with a lot of generals and ex-generals – “my generals” he calls them.

Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe these generals and their industrial complex buddies are calling Trump “our president” because he is securely in their bottomless pockets, endlessly pouring our money into them.

Turns out Donald Trump is providing a fantastic ROI – return on investment – to the military-industrial complex.

Sorry, Ike.