Militant US and the Military Industrial Complex

Everyone should be into politics, we live in a democracy and our participation in the governmental process is the cornerstone of our country.  Yet, there are many flaws in the system.  I often frustrated because the will of the people is often trumped by special interests, partisan politics and idealists.  The area in which it seems the people have the least say is when it comes to war.  Historically, in the Vietnam War as early as July 1967 the majority of Americans opposed the war, yet we did not leave Vietnam until around August of 1973.  In Iraq, public opinion turned against the war as early as June 2005 and even earlier the majority started to believe that we went into Iraq for the wrong reasons (ie. there were no weapons of mass destruction! Bush, you dumbass).  Since the end of WWII the US has not seen a single decade without conflict.  If you want to learn more about how our politicians are able to dupe us into conflict and the way they prolong these conflicts, watch this documentary, it is truly eye opening.

War Made Easy


Why?  Why do we have to be subject to constant conflict?  What happened to our stance as a non-interventionist state?  Unfortunately,  WWI and WWII proved that we could not just sit by while conflict affects the rest of the world and that we would not survive without a standing military.  But, that hardly justifies our governments rush to enter new conflicts.  The solution may be simple.  Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about it in his farewell address to the nation, the Military Industrial Complex.  The military industrial complex means that our industry is dominated by military industries and includes the relationship between these industries, our armies, and our legislators.  Recognize any of these names?  Boeing. General Electric. Lockheed-Martin. Northrop-Grumman Corporation.  These are just the most well-known of the fifteen major military corporations in the US.  These companies have a lot of power and drive our economy.  Through political contributions and lobbying, these companies have a lot of control over our politics and military.  It is ironic that the former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe would later warn us about our dependence on war, but he was right.  In my opinion, one of the major reasons that so many countries hate us is because we tend to be bullies and we are too quick to use preemptive force when diplomacy may be more effective.  Look at current events in Egypt, all we needed to do to help was talk, not Shock and Awe.  We have so much money invested in international aid, we can have a great influence on other governments without the use of force.  Not to mention the travesty of funding other countries and groups corrupt militaries (ie. the Taliban).

I digress.  What does the military industrial complex really mean for citizens?  Debt.  Our government is constantly talking about what programs can be cut...well our defense budget.  For the 2011 budget (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/), discretionary spending for security programs is $895 billion and non-security is only $520 billion (note this does not include such programs as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. which are considered and should always be considered mandatory programs.  The budget for mandatory programs is $2.165 trillion)*.  The Department of Defense has a massive $718.8 billion budget; while the Department of Education gets $71.5 billion and the Department of Housing and Urban Regeneration gets $47.5 billion--both are programs I believe are much more important than defense.  Just for you Irene, the NASA budget is only a paltry $17.7 billion.  The greatest investment we can make as a country is in education.  Better education makes many other programs obsolete.  Better education improves health and lowers crime and poverty.  The program cost (purchase, maintenance, use, etc.) of a F-22 Raptor is $339 million, for that price we could hire approximately 170 teachers for fifty years at the current average yearly income for teachers (average yearly salary used for calculation $40,000, actual average ranges from $40,000-$44,000 based on level [http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary]).  Double teachers salaries and we could still hire 85 teachers.  In total we have 183 F-22 Raptors for a total program cost of $65 billion.  F-22s are even considered useless because F-18 are still more advanced than any of the aircraft used by other countries and F-22s will not be challenged for at least thirty years.  You do the math and figure out how much we can increase teacher salaries and how many teachers we could hire if we just eliminated our F-22s.

*Table of proposed budget by category from Budget of the U.S.
Government: Fiscal Year 2011, Cick for larger image.
(http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/)

The sad fact of our defense budget is we do not pay for it.  It is common knowledge that our spending on the wars in the Middle East is the major contributor to our national deficit**.  In the past we used to raise taxes to pay for wars, specifically taxes on the rich***.  Now, even tax cuts contribute $53 billion to the deficit.  Taxes are a different different story, but just as a note to all you flat tax proponents out there, we practically have a flat tax right now.  Our top level of taxation has dropped from $2.5 million to $200,000 per year, hardly a progressive tax system if you ask me.  To think the top level of taxation in the US used to be 91%! and now the rich are complaining about Obama raising taxes to 37%!  Yet I digress as I often do.  The point I am trying to get across is we should not cut spending in education or social programs before we cut our military budget, especially since the majority of it goes to wars that the people do not support.  We can be a global powerhouse without resorting to violence every few years.

**Budget deficit since 1963, the war in Afghanistan started in 2001
and the war in Iraq started in 2004

***Tax rate for the highest income bracket with tax hikes during
WWI, WWII and Korean War and tax cuts during wars in the
Middle East highlighted

Why does our government push war agendas besides influence from industry?  I have a theory based on Plato's Republic.  In Plato's description of a tyrant:

When "all is calm on that front [exiling his enemies from the state], his primary concern, I imagine, is to be constantly stirring up some war or other, so that the people need a leader [...] And also, wouldn't you say, so that impoverished by war taxes, they will be compelled to concentrate on their daily needs and be less likely to plot against him? [...] And in addition, I suppose, so that if there are some free-thinking people he suspects of rejecting his rule, he can find pretexts for putting them at the mercy of the enemy and destroying them?  For all these reasons, isn't a tyrant compelled to be always stirring up war?"

Is our government distracting us with war, so that they can push an unpopular agenda in other policy areas?  It is possible.  During President Bush's time in office the majority of news coverage was focused on the two wars in the Middle East; now our economy is in the dumps because of deregulation legislation passed at the same time.  Maybe Bush was a tyrant, or at least he fits Plato's definition well.  He stirred up war, destroyed our economy, bankrupted our country and ostracized anti-war views as un-patriotic.  As a citizen it is difficult to stand up to our government; as they explain in the documentary, we are uninformed, misled and berated by our "liberal" media.  Yet, we must always question.  We must always stand up for what we believe in and pressure our legislators to listen.  Challenging our governments decisions to go to war is not anti-patriotic, it is DEMOCRACY!  Julian Asange should not be persecuted for leaking information that should have been presented to the public before we decided whether we wanted to enter war or not.  Ultimately, our system of government does not give much power to the individual, but still we must try.  I cannot live in a country where the will of the people is so disregarded by the government we intrust to act on our will (besides war look at socialized medicine, which had majority support by the population, but we still do not have it).

Support our troops, not our government that puts them in harms way for unjust causes.  My favorite bumper sticker is:

Support our troops, Bring them home

Special thanks are due to my recent history professor Craig Harlan for teaching us so much about our government process and thus providing me for most of this information.

Deserted City - 28 Days Later

While 28 Days Later does not have much of a commentary on what the future of architecture may be, it does contain an awesome scene of an empty London.  Something we may never see, the empty streets of London are a moving visual.  Is it swine flu?  Bird flu?  No, it is rage!  I imagine any number of rage-infected zombies would be able to scare off an entire city.  That is what happens when you infect chimps with rage and Greenpeace gets involved.  The movie is filled with images of a deserted city including aerial pans and the like.  One gets a totally different perspective on the city watching two lonely survivors navigate its streets.  Plus, I love the camera angles in this movie.  At times it feels like you are watching the movie from the angle of a security camera.  Something about the still camera not moving with the actors, makes for some really cool visuals.

Exploring an empty London

For a little contrast, here is a joiner I took of the same bridge he is on near the beginning of the clip from my most recent trip to London.  As you can see, there is a lot more people in my joiner than in the clip.

Parliament and Big Ben from Westminster Bridge

If you are into zombie horror movies this is your movie.  Still the images of the city they use are breathtaking and I would recommend them to anyone.  Here is a few more of my favorites:

Explosion in the center of London

Epic loneliness

Gotta love those buckets

Enjoy!

Visions of the Future - Blade Runner

Architecture is a huge part of all forms of media.  Just look at car commercials.  They show the car either driving down Highway 1 in California or in front of famous buildings.  Just the other day I saw one where the car was parked in the plaza of Morphosis's Caltrans building in Los Angeles.  In movies, architecture often plays an even more integral role.  Science fiction movies often show us a vision of our future, whether it be robots or spaceships, they always include a commentary on the environment we will inhabit in the future.  One of my favorite such movies is Bladerunner.

It stars such sci-fi greats as Harrison Ford (possibly my favorite actor) and Edward James Olmos, so you know it will be good.  But, more striking than the great actors, is the vivid world in which it is set.  To help set the scene, here is the text from the opening:

Early in the 21st Century, The Tyrell

Coporation advanced Robot evolution

into the Nexus phase--a being virtually

identical to a human--known as a Replicant.

The Nexus 6 Replicants were superior

in strength and agility, and at least equal

in intelligence, to the genetic engineers

who created them.

Replicants were used Off-world as

slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and

colonization of other planets.

After a bloody mutiny by a Nexus 6

combat team in an Off-world colony,

Replicants were declared illegal

on earth--under penalty of death.

Special Police Squads--Blade Runner

Units--had orders to shoot to kill, upon

detection, any trespassing Replicant.

This was not called execution.

It was called retirement.

I love those last two lines, there is something very erie about them.  Anyways, the movie is set in Los Angeles in November of 2019.  Los Angeles does not look like it does today.  It is dark, polluted and wet.  The city has been built up to an incredible density and the skyline is dominated by the two pyramid like buildings of the Tyrell Corporation.  Its a fascinating portrayal of what our world might turn to as the human population continues to sky rocket.  Certainly, if we continue developing land through sprawl as we have been, there will soon be no open land left.  Once we can no longer spread horizontally, we must go vertically.  What does this vertical expansion mean for a city?

These are stunning visuals of the city of the future (and I love that it is not CGI).  The movie presents a city that is dark and gloomy.  There is a social stratification just in the hierarchy of where people live, yet the rich no longer live in gated communities, but in the sky.  They are probably the only people that get to see the sun.  The entire movie is dark and one can only ponder why, after all it cannot be all set at night.  Instead it seems to be a mixture of the pollution, buildings, and rain that make it so dark.  With buildings as tall and as dense as is in the movie, no sunlight can reach the street.  Instead the poor live in a world flooded by neon and fluorescent light--hardly an environment I would like to live in.  Even Deckard who lives on the 97th floor of his building barely gets any light into his apartment.  This type of scene could certainly be the New York of today if they had never enacted their zoning envelope law that prevent buildings from being so bulky that they block light and air from the street.  Los Angeles in this films makes the watcher ponder what the future of of cities will be like, and especially for me, how to expand our cities and make them more dense without making them unlivable?

I love the style of the buildings in this movie as well.  The buildings look both ancient and futuristic.  The style of the ornament is very geometric and resembles old styles of Greece, Asia, Egypt and Central America.  It is all those styles combined, yet completely new.  It gives the buildings a sense of permanence and age.  On their exteriors, the buildings are laden with neon advertisements for small shops on the street and major corporations in the air.  In the dark it is difficult to make out much of the buildings except for lit windows, warning lights, and what is illuminated by search lights from passing blimps with advertisements to move Off-world, where there is ample space for recreation.  Earth seems spent.  Her open space has turned to endless city (at the end of the movie Deckard is driving through woods, but it is not clear whether he is still on Earth or on a colony), her animals have become extremely rare and instead are manufactured by genetic engineers in the street, and her buildings look old, run down and patched together with new technology.  Giving to the appearance of the decrepit buildings is the movie's use of current architecture.  Much of the movie, including the climax, is set in the now nearly abandoned Bradbury Building and the interior of the police station is LA's Union Station, I believe.  It is not the best scenario for our future and one that can be avoided with some simple planning and preservation.

This movie is definitely one of my favorites.  The setting and music give us any erie sense of what our future might look like.  My only suggestion is watch the director's cut, then you don't have to listen to Deckard's inner thoughts as he narrates--which was not supposed to be a part of the movie originally.  I watched the director's cut the first time I saw the movie and there were some things I did not understand, but that was all right.  Anything you need to know and understand to make sense of the movie is explained in the movie with out the narration.  Besides, its a movie about the future and we cannot be expected to understand everything that happens in the future, like the street language that sounds like gibberish.  The future is unknown and this movie really does feel like the future when some much is unfamiliar, strange and incomprehensible.  Besides then you don't have to hear Harrison Ford say this wonderful little nugget:

"Sushi, that's what my ex-wife calls me.  Cold fish." 

TOWARDS A NEW ARCHITECTURE - Le Corbusier

I'm starting a competition in Long Beach for a sustainable building with shipping containers.  Shipping containers are an obvious move in the ideas of prefabricated buildings and sustainable design.  The key to prefabricated design is modularity.  In my search for information on design tools related to modularity I found this interesting book by Le Corbusier:

Le Corbusier is arguably the most influential architect of the modern movement.  His treatise, Toward a New Architecture, is a must read for architects.  In it he outlines his five points of architecture: 1. Pilotis 2. Free Facade 3. Open Floor Plan 4. Ribbon Windows 5. Roof Garden.  Pilotis are columns that raise the building off the ground.  This structural system derives from his famous domino house diagram, a structural system of columns and floor plates.  This structural system allows his next three points to be possible.  With out any structure within the facade, it allows for a curtain wall that is free of constraints and can be designed in whichever way the architect chooses, including ribbon windows (his fourth point).  Ribbon windows are more of a style point, but do allow for large vistas.  Finally this structural system allows the plan to be free of load bearing walls and the only limits to an completely open space is the columns and any partitions the architect might choose to include.

Dom-ino House

       

His fifth point is the roof as a garden.  This idea we see pervading architecture today with green roofs.  Le Corbusier's idea is certainly the inspiration for such garden although the ones he designed were much less than grass and flower covered spaces.  They were more sculptural and concrete with only planters.  Yet the idea is one that lives on today.  The prime example of his five points is Villa Savoye just outside of Paris, France.  The building is elevated on pilotis with an entrance and carport on the first floor.  The ribbon windows, free facade, and roof garden.  The house has both an open and flowing plan, with curvilinear partitions and large open spaces.

Corbusier had an affinity for the machine aesthetic.  A functional aesthetic which he saw in the design of ships, airplanes and cars.  "The engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and governed by mathematical calculation, puts us in accord with universal law.  He achieves harmony." If the engineer's job is harmony, then the architect's is order.  Corbu poses that the architect must learn from the law of Economy and combine it with his skills in order.  After this combination, "we shall arrive at the 'House-Machine,' the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful."  He mirrored the Bauhaus and Mies Van Der Rohe in their strive for the modern aesthetic, where everything is both functional and beautiful.

Le Corbusier's work is certainly both influential and beautiful.  His ideas continue to inspire architects to this day, but read this book with a grain of salt.  While his ideas were forward thinking, many were proved false.  Le Corbusier designed many of his buildings and ideas with the hope to achieve social change through architecture.  Unfortunately while many of his buildings are aesthetically pleasing, they do not function, like the Unite d'Habitation.  Even worse are his ideas on urbanism.  Through the end of his career he became more and more interested in the planning of cities.  He saw the future as being dominated by the car and in an attempt to prevent the unsavory conditions of the dense and increasingly clogged cities like New York, London, and Paris; he presented a city of massive towers spread out in a greenscape and connected by high-speed motor ways.  The prime example is Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.  He was able to design and build the entire city according to his ideas, but in the end, the immensity of the spaced out buildings destroys any sense of community and the apartments are considered lifeless with their typical white walls.

Ultimately, Le Corbusier was a genius and an entrepreneur.  Many of his ideas thrive today and his works are as relevant now as they were in the World War II era.  Every architect should take time to become acquainted with his theory and if approached with a critical eye, they will learn many of the important ideas that have shaped our built environment for the past many decades.

Le Corbusier with his awesome glasses
10/6/1887 - 8/271965