Martin Luther King and Dwight David Eisenhower are not usually mentioned in the same sentence. But through a quirk of history, we should remember them both today for speeches they gave. One changed history; the other should have but we’ve forgotten it.

King’s I Have a Dream Speech is memorized by schoolchildren and historians alike and deservedly so.

Delivered fifty years ago today (January 17, 1961), Eisenhower’s farewell speech to the nation warned of the dangerous rise of the military-industrial complex (or as I call it the War-for-Profit private sector). Looking back, it’s clear now that we didn’t listen to him. As a result, private contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics have a lock on the budget of the US government taking a huge slice of the pie every year and ensuring that war-for-profit will be an everlasting value of the American way.