The Empire Files: Abby Martin Interviews Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (video)

Discussion of the post-WWII Military/Industrial Complex with Colonel Wilkerson who has deep knowledge and experience from combat in multiple theaters and also high levels of the government from the Reagan administration forward.  (WIKI: Lawrence Wilkerson)

Abby Martin has been featured multiple times here and she was vilified for leading "Breaking the Set" on Russia Today with the standard litany: she's a Communist, she spews propaganda, etc, etc.  Little of that was based on an honest review of her consistently incisive broadcasts.

Wilkerson has been attacked by Fox News and that crew but the attacks do nothing to touch the credibility of the things he says, much of which is self-evident or obvious now based on things known since the original misrepresentations for Iraq, etc.

Failing to respect the knowledge he gives is related to the 'information bubbles' from another article, "Avoiding Information Bubblers on Social Networks," insofar as cloistering within limited sources prevents this type of knowledge from penetrating.

The reason for mentioning the bubbles is not all conservatives are lost to statist dogma or Fox News cheerleading.  The economic problems created by an out-of-control military are obvious and inevitable.  Fundamental to conservative thinking is the preservation of the state and a major collapse of the economy is more of a threat than whatever may lie overseas.

Wilkerson makes multiple non-military points, one of which is the way wealth in the United States is not so much re-invested in the economy but rather is used to generate more wealth artificially through the stock market without producing anything at all.  When work goes overseas, it doesn't matter to them because they aren't reliant on a workforce to make a product for them to sell.

Conservatives, the non-hysterical ones, see the need for change and part of what they want to know is what will this Military/Industrial Complex support structure do if it's not making weapons, all those jobs are lost and we will be screwed.

So find an answer ... what will they do.  The favorite here at the Rockhouse is the Industrial aspect of the complex has an enormous number of high brainweight individuals plus a huge, highly-talented manufacturing workforce so they should be able to make just about anything.  Surely they can come up with something better for the country at a cost of a trillion dollars than, for example, the F-35 fighter program.  That's only one program out of some countless number of them.

We aren't for a moment going to accept any idea America can't think of anything better for them to do.