If the US fought for the post-carbon economy the way it fights for nebulous state-building goals in foreign wars, the future would be brighter, cleaner, safer and cheaper, with more jobs and perhaps – because it would need to secure less of that foreign oil -fewer wars. If the country built new classrooms with the same urgency it built armored vehicles, more American teens could be choosing between colleges instead of choosing between minimum and sub-minimum wage jobs – and fewer would eventually need public assistance. If the government spent more on blackboards and less on bullets, it would create more jobs today and more innovation in the future.

The idea of economic conversion, of retooling and retraining pieces of the military industrial complex to build what other wealthy nations have (infrastructure, energy, education, etc.) converged with the end of the Cold War two decades back. It was time for a peace dividend as well as a little sanity in public spending. Among the cosponsors of a bill to begin economic conversion in the late 1980s was a guy by the name of Leon Panetta.

Standing in the way was Congressman Newt Gingrich (Republican, Lockheed Martin).

Fifty-one years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his final, prescient warning about the rising power of the military industrial complex. More than half a century later, we find ourselves in a political system which has ignored Eisenhower’s sound advice as the influence of the war industry on our society reaches a crescendo. Nowhere is this “disastrous rise of misplaced power” more apparent than in the debate about the Pentagon budget taking place in Washington, D.C.

An upcoming Charlottesville conference, MIC at 50, highlights the importance of whistleblowers when addressing the corruption present in military contracting.

You know how I have argued that our country does have an industrial plan, one that is commonly called the Military-Industrial Complex? The government dumps seemingly unlimited amount of money into selected projects. Defense companies make sure to spread the jobs created by defense contracts around, so members of Congress support those contracts in bipartisan fashion. And then we export things like jets–one of the few things we export anymore.

Only, if we allow defense contractors to use prison labor, then the whole scheme sort of breaks down.

For the moment it looks like just three things have worked to create jobs: the MIC, QE2 and other policies favoring commodities, and actual industrial policy.

Caldwell wanted to use a small part of the resources the Congress provided him, a $6 million psy-ops team, on Congress to in turn convince Congress to provide him with even more resources. While outrageous, this is basically just a very small scale version of how defense contractors in the military-industrial complex use political donations in the expanding growth spiral.

President Obama may really believe that we will “Win the Future” by out-innovating, out-building, and out-educating our competitors. Good. Because it’s increasingly clear the way to “Win the Future” is not by brutalizing other countries’ mobs through our investing unlimited amounts in military technology.

Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 speech on the “military-industrial complex”, that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a “Permanent War State”, with the power to keep the United States at war continuously for the indefinite future.

“A detailed accounting of all of Lockheed Martin’s government contracts could fill several large volumes,” writes William Hartung, in his new book Prophets of War, a history of the nation’s largest defense contractor. “Suffice it to say that they are involved at one level or another in nearly everything the federal government does, from providing instruments of death and destruction to collecting taxes and recruiting spies.”

For those who have followed the defense industry for years, that statement is no revelation, but for the vast majority of the American public, the notion that the maker of the radar-evading F-22 Raptor aircraft has also been involved in sorting the mail is both surprising, and important.