No wonder so many of us are sick of this shit

[hedda_foil]

42. I think you're both right.

There have always been war profiteers, as you say, merrily, as long as standing armies have existed. The Bush family is a prime example, starting with good old great, great grampy Sam and the company that vaulted him into the industrial stratosphere of Rockefeller, Harrington and Remington. (the Buckeye Steel Castings Company of Ohio.

..snip..

In the spring of 1918, Bush became chief of the Ordnance, Small Arms and Ammunition Section of the War Industries Board of Bernard Baruch and Clarence Dillon, with national responsibility for government assistance to and relations with Remington and other weapons companies.BUsh was essentially taking national responsibility for government assistance to his own Remington Arms Company and other weapon makers. Through these weapons manufacturers, Samuel Bush made and sold arms to 75% of the WWI combatants on both sides.

..snip..
Samuel Bush was labeled a "Merchant of Death" in the years following the Great War as investigations began into the instigators of the war and of the new emerging world militarism. The German Army under the Kaiser was the largest and most well armed in the world in 1914, and they were largely armed by Samuel Bush. After WWI, Germany was stripped of their arms, but Samuel Bush was allowed to keep his millions, and his arms business was allowed to grow and prosper. In 1944 he was awarded a huge government contract to make armor casings for WWII. He died shortly after the war ended in 1948, within months of the passage of the National Security Act.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x633661

And great grampy Prescott, who followed the family tradition of treason by trading with the Nazi enemy.

But there really wasn't a standing army until after WW II because, basically, it's unconstitutional. So after the war, there wasn't much of what could be considered a MIC. Fortunately, the Dulles boys and the generals were on the job, and managed to scare Truman about the red menace quickly enough that he jumped into the Korean War just a few years later. At least Truman caught on when General MacArthur wanted to expand his little war into China. Ike was brought in to stop the war, but the Rosenbergs gave Russia the recipe for the H bomb, and the arms race started, but even Ike had a lead time to figure out WTF was going on. It wasn't until sputnik, though that the arms industry really took off.

So Eisenhower publicly warned his successor, and Kennedy obviously took him at his word, trying to end the cold war and prevent atomic devastation, as well as firing Alan Dulles from the CIA. There's a lot of folks think those were the reasons behind the assassination.