"You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon
Nixon was certainly an enigma compared to other US Presidents:
Advocated for "Universal Healthcare" by basically mandating the Federal government to provide stop loss reinsurance to employers and creating a marketplace for poor people with income adjusted premiums... sounds familiar.
Families often raise a concern about how they never knew member X to be a baddie (eg The Golden State Killer). This is not a compelling refutation. Whether anyone can be wrong or lying about anything, is equally weak.
The part about "enriching the military industrial complex" is certainly a conspiracy theory though. The MIC has only ever shrunk in importance in the American economy, and giving people their used products is like the opposite of enriching them.
That’s not even an uncharitable interpretation of what I wrote.
I was talking about the domestic law enforcement continuing to use the stuff they got for cheap/federally subsidized, or free, because “it’s effective.”
They generally don't actually use it or have a use for it though, that's part of the problem. And I don't think buying replacement tires for an MRAP is a lot of subscription revenue.
Please tell me more about Congress spending money on equipment the military doesn't need or want isn't corporate welfare for Defense Contractors.
Eisenhower even warned us to such actions in 1961, and literally if there was ever someone who would know: it would be a man that was on both sides as a high-ranking general and President.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower%27s_farewell_addres...
This article is not about giving used equipment to police departments.
> Eisenhower even warned us to such actions in 1961
Yeah, and we did what he said. US military spending as % GDP has gone straight down since ~1985. (Except around 2008 - but that's because our GDP went down.)
Since 1997, the 1033 program has handed $7.4bn worth of surplus equipment from the Department of Defense (DoD) to more than 8,000 law enforcement agencies across America.
"You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying?
We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
~ John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon