| Cover letter, Resume and essay attached. |
How the Military Industrial Complex Has Impacted My life as a Citizen
I think that I come from a slightly different perspective on this subject since my father worked for the Department of Defense, so every bit of food I ate as a child and indeed my education itself was paid for indirectly by the military spending. However, that is not to say that not aware of the sociopolitical ramifications of U.S military aggression both domestically and across the world.
Ultimately, this impacts every American citizen both economically and politically, when one considers that military infrastructure has been carefully distributed into virtually every congressional district and thus represents a perpetual lobbying influence. Essentially you have a self-sustaining funding mechanism, where every Representative and U.S. Senator has an invested interest in protecting that super structure in order to preserve jobs and funding in their home districts. In a broader financial sense, this of course affects how both the Federal and State governments distribute funds as the sheer orbit of military spending diverts funding from larger social programs such as education and healthcare. The scope of this becomes even more magnified as one examines the U.S. budget and discovers that defense spending accounts for the greatest share of personal income tax.
The influence of the military industrial complex on American foreign policy is of paramount concern, as unchecked, it has the potential to enflame international conflict in order to preserve its own political power structure. The mergence of military power and corporate interests also has truly global implications as was seen recently in the Iraq War and most famously during the Spanish-American War when American business interests were freely allowed to incite warfare.
The frequent intermingling of national media and the military industrial complex is yet another pressing factor as this union of mass media obeisance and military affairs has manipulated public perception for decades, if not longer. Such an alliance, both from a historic and contemporary perspective aides in engendering public sentiment in favor of military endeavors as was recently seen when critics of the Iraq War were habitually marginalized in most news outlets. This was even more pronounced during the Abu Ghraib scandal when news medias abetted the ongoing narrative that prisoner abuses where isolated and localized incidents rather than systematic of a larger, permissive stance of U.S. intelligence operations at the time. It’s almost impossible not to draw parallels between the Post 9/11 decade and the politics of the Cold War as recent American foreign policy has mirrored the unilateral aggressiveness of the Domino theory. The recent narratives parroted out of corporate news outlets has also borne a striking reminiscence to its cold war counterpart as contemporary wartime reporting has been colored by a myopic, militaristic lens similar to CIA director Allen Dulles tenure when he was able to shape the course of foreign news reporting to his own ends in the 1950’s. The “War on Terror” which is itself a term perpetuated by the corporate media, has also altered the nature of global warfare as it has led to a greater tolerance on the part of the American people in regards to human rights abuses perpetrated by both U.S. military and intelligence agencies.
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