Anniversaries are times for taking stock, to determine whether we’ve lived up to our ideals and principles, and to see how we need to change or if we have to change to get back on the right track.

That’s why this month is a good time to take a long look at President Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower’s farewell speech of Jan. 17, 1961, just before he was to return to private life. John F. Kennedy had been elected president the previous November and was about to be inaugurated as president in a few days.

Ike did warn about the growing “military-industrial complex,” but he put it into the context of the time, saying: “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.”

It was impossible for him or anyone else to know that 50 years hence, the U.S. military and defense budget would be larger than all of the other developed nations’ military and defense budgets, combined.

This is such a staggering amount that it has taken precedence over virtually every other aspect of our national life. Conducting two wars simultaneously and engaging in other hostile actions, as well as supporting some 730 bases, large and small, around the world saps the economic lifeblood of the nation and leaves the people unemployed, homeless, and without the right to medical care. All this happens while U.S. transnational corporations are enriched not only by their depredations in the developing world, but also by the plundering of the living standard of American wageworkers.

Not by any measure was the 34th president a pacifist. Rather, he believed in a strong defense, but he pointed out the horrors of war as only someone who held such power in his own hands in Europe, as the head of the victorious allied armies at the end of World War II, could.

But clearly, there were doubts about the assumption by America of global economic and military power after that war in Eisenhower’s own mind. He almost could see the drift of his country toward something that was to be feared: A nation driven by the lure of power and riches and influence, backed up by the might of the world’s most sophisticated military, with its high-tech weapons.

“The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present,” he said, adding, “and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

It’s not clear that Ike had been directly exposed to the corruption of scientific inquiry in our educational institutions by money and government contracts, but he must have had an idea that it could happen. In 2011, the revolving door between top government jobs and Corporate America make it a certainty that the influence of the military-industrial complex is joined in many ways by academia. Money flows from corporate coffers to politicians, who do the bidding of their corporate benefactors. And much of the research is, of course, done in some of our best universities.

He also mentioned, but not as prominently, the scientific research in agriculture and the attempt to “cure every ill” experienced by American farmers. Could he have anticipated that, a half-century down the road, just a handful of giant corporations would control a majority of the food we eat? Or that “farms” would begin to resemble the industrial plants that seemed to grow out of the American soil during the mobilization of World War II?

Surely, Eisenhower knew of the fears expressed by the founders, such as Thomas Jefferson, who even in his own day warned of the growing power of the “moneyed corporations.” Ike was quite specific when he said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Yet, here in the 21st Century, the power of Corporate America, particularly those in the military-industrial complex, exercise great power over the citizenry, especially after last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, which gave to corporations the same rights as human persons, citizens.

Americans must never let the growing power of the military-industrial complex “endanger our liberties or democratic processes,” he said, adding that the only power that can deter unwarranted influence by the corporations and their friends in government was “only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” to join the might of this economic force to “our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

He did not anticipate a time when our great universities would be places where students would go to get an education just to get a good job or to become affluent, not to engage in the free discussion of ideas. Nor did he anticipate a time when there was no use for tens of millions of citizens - the unemployed - or that the U.S. would become like a developing nation in some respects, such as health care and housing. Nor could he anticipate the rise of a so-called free press (or media) that now routinely fails to confront those in power. Without education and without a vigorous free press, how will the people become an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry?”

Even in that day of the rise of perennial conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, he warned against stealing from future generations for short-term goals, as a way of competing and overcoming adversaries. “As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

Although he spoke in very general terms, even about the military-industrial complex and what its overweening power would mean politically, socially, and economically, he addressed many aspects of our national life. Much of it has come to pass and is more serious than he could have anticipated. The people have lost control over most aspects of their lives, despite the government’s democratic form, and they are casting about trying to get back some control.

Many of them rail against government, but fail to see that Corporate America is largely at the helm. The gross disparity in wealth between the small elite and the rest of the people is but one example of that control. The power of the corporations comes from their free and unfettered operation all around the world, not just in America. They treat Americans the same way they treat the peoples in the developing world.

It’s the kind of power that Eisenhower was warning about and, if the people do not begin electing those who understand these power relationships (and they haven’t shown themselves to have any understanding of these things, at least in the recent election), surely American democracy will become “the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”

BlackCommentator.com Columnist, John Funiciello, is a labor organizer and former union organizer. His union work started when he became a local president of The Newspaper Guild in the early 1970s. He was a reporter for 14 years for newspapers in New York State. In addition to labor work, he is organizing family farmers as they struggle to stay on the land under enormous pressure from factory food producers and land developers. Click here to contact Mr. Funiciello.