Galbraith went on to write, "Such expenditure is not the result of detached analysis. From the relevant
industrial firms come proposed designs for new weapons, and to them are
awarded production and profit. In an impressive flow of influence and
command, the weapons industry accords valued employment, management
pay and profit in its political constituency, and indirectly it is a treasured
source of political funds. The gratitude and the promise of political help
go to Washington and to the defense budget. And to foreign policy or, as in
Vietnam and Iraq, to war. That the private sector moves to a dominant
public-sector role is apparent."
Today, the MIC is operating full-blast. For example, President Bush is determined to keep the Texas factories that make the F-18 fighter-bombers humming by selling the planes to India and Pakistan. No matter these planes can deliver nuclear warheads and will only escalate tensions between the touchy neighbors. America today has the unenviable distinction of being the world's No. One arms peddler. Uncle Sam, the hardware king!
What's more, under Bush, military spending climbed from $290-billion in 2001 to $437-billion in 2004 and, counting the separate appropriations for the Iraq War and the tens of billions spent on the intelligence agencies, it could top $600-billion this year.
Arms makers are becoming millionaires overnight. United for Fair Economy and Institute for Policy Studies reported in 2004 the Iraq War is leading to "huge average raises (for CEOs) at the biggest defense contractors. One CEO of a bulletproof vest firm increased his salary from $525,000 in 2001 to $70-million in 2004, the report said. As for "free enterprise," so cherished by Republican lawgivers, only one of the top 10 defense contractors "won a majority of its contracts through 'full and open' competition," according to the Center for Public Integrity, of Washington. "All the rest collected most of their contract dollars through sole source contracts or other no-bid procedures."
The exception was SAIC. The other contractors who cashed in largely without competing are Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, United Technologies, General Electric Carlyle Group, and Newport News, CPI said.
Taxpayers typically do not know of the lack of competitive bidding or recognize that much of what is spent is lavished on obsolete technology. William D. Hartung, co-author of a World Policy Institute Special Report at the New School University, found "Contracts for the top 10 weapons contracts were up 75% in the first three years of the Bush Administration alone," --- much of it apparently wasted on obsolete technologies.
When the Pentagon is informed of wasteful practices, it commonly ignores them. As Knight-Ridder reported last January 24, Congressman Walter Jones, (R-N.C.) is quoted as understating, "We've got an agency that is not doing its job of being a watchdog for the taxpayers." Retired Army Reserve officer Paul Fellencer Sr. complained to the Pentagon's fraud hot line last year about $200-million worth of outrageous overpayments for ordinary supplies. Pentagon investigators never bothered to call him and dismissed his tip as "unsubstantiated," the news service said.
The failure to perform by contractor Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been well documented. Now it appears, according to the Los Angeles Times, President Bush's uncle, William H.T. Bush, better known as "Uncle Bucky," collected just under $1.9-million in cash plus stock valued at more than $800,000 from the sale of Engineered Support Systems Inc. The Times said ESSI "experienced record growth as a result of expanded U.S. military contracts --- many to supply U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan." The paper also noted some of the contracts were awarded on a no-bid basis, including a $77-million deal to refit military vehicles with armor for use in Iraq and the firm is under investigation because equipment it was supposed to supply didn't work properly.
Author Johnson quotes Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, of Oakland, Calif., as describing the MIC as "a vast cesspool of mismanagement, waste, and transgressions not only bordering on but often entering deeply into criminal conduct... The great arms firs have managed to slough off much of the normal risks of doing business in a genuine market, passing on many of their excessive costs to the taxpayers while still realizing extraordinary rates of return on investment."
Meanwhile, President Bush chops away at the domestic budget, even cutting back funds for cancer research, veterans, and education. Several million Americans are homeless. Forty million do not have medical insurance. Thirty million slave at jobs that do not pay them enough to afford decent housing. Millions of potentially valuable young people cannot afford to start college. And the man responsible for much of today's record $8-trillion national debt, as part of his plan to gut Social Security, has the temerity to warn the country this solvent and self-sustaining system will be in trouble 25 years from now!
Let us recall Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein were told during their Watergate probe to "follow the money." Apparently, that's what government in America is all about. It surely is what the MIC is all about. Of the estimated $1-trillion wrung from taxpayers on April 17th, about half will find its way into the coffers of the MIC. The American public is being victimized by defense spending while its domestic needs for affordable housing, fair wages, medical care, and social justice are unmet. As Charlie Wilson knew long ago, MIC can be a perpetual money machine. To keep the military cauldron boiling, the Pentagon is plowing $1.5-trillion dollars into research to create a witches' brew of 80 new advanced warfare systems.
In so many ways, the invasion of Iraq is all about money. WMD was just the lie to bring it about. Not only is the MIC cashing in big time but oil companies, such as Exxon-Mobil are gorging themselves on record high profits. Other Anglo-American oil companies are waiting in the wings for regimes friendly to the U.S. to push through pipeline deals the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the Hussein regime in Iraq refused to permit. As war-related damage to Iraq's oil infrastructure has reduced its oil output below pre-war levels, thus tightening supplies, the price of gas charged at the pump to American motorists goes up and up.
In sum, Americans have a problem. What Hamilton and the other Founders feared long ago is now reality. The MIC has thrived for nearly a half century thanks to a compliant Congress, but never so much as today when Republican congressmen and lobbyists are being jailed wholesale for greed. The MIC has transformed an isolationist nation that didn't want to get involved in WWII into a global bully with 725 acknowledged military bases in 130 foreign nations. (That's in addition to nearly 1,000 bases in the USA.) Actually, writes historian Chalmers Johnson in his best-seller "The Sorrows of Empire"(Henry Holt), "there are many more, since some bases exist under leaseholds, informal agreements, or disguises of various kinds."
On Okinawa alone, he writes the Pentagon operates 38 separate bases on the choicest 20 percent of the island." In South Korea, there are more than 100 bases. Johnson says Okinawa is typical: "The conditions there --- expropriation of the island's most valuable land for bases, extraterritorial status for American troops who committed crimes against local civilians, bars and brothels crowding around the main gates of the bases, endless accidents, noise, sexual violence, drunk driving crashes, drug use, and environmental pollution---are replicated anywhere there are American garrisons." That Okinawa's people, and others unhappy with the American presence, would like the U.S. "gone" is irrelevant to the Pentagon. As Johnson notes, "After more than fifty years, the air force shows no signs of leaving (Greenland) despite continuous protests by the Inuit of Greenland and numerous lawsuits filed in the Danish Supreme Court."
"Our country deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations and just under a dozen carrier task forces in all the oceans and seas of the world," Johnson writes. "We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, arte saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another. Our globe-girding military and intelligence installations bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts." What's more, the State Department's International Military Education and Training Program has been providing instruction to the armies of 133 out of 189 countries around the globe. Johnson writes, "The Pentagon finds it convenient to train foreign military forces and police to carry out secret programs of state terrorism, including the assassination of foreign leaders, without being charged with war crimes and violations of the Geneva Convention."
Unfortunately, Americans seem as indifferent to military control as antelope grazing on the South Dakota prairie. The question is: Will Americans take action to rein in the MIC? As President Bush was deaf to the cries of the UN's Hans Blix that Iraq had no WMD, as he did not listen to the UN Secretary-General and the Pope when they pleaded with him not to invade Iraq, as he paid no heed to the millions of common folk around the world who demonstrated against his Iraq invasion, he is not likely to listen to any critics now. He is threatening Iran with "the nuclear option" because Iran, with its paltry $3.5-billion military budget, might be capable of making one atomic bomb five to ten years from now. All the while President Bush sits on an obscene nuclear stockpile of 10,000 bombs, repudiating nuclear arms control treaties on his own and reigniting the arms race!
Not surprisingly, people the world over, as historian Johnson writes, have caught on to the fact that the U.S. is "something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination."
What can people do? One effective response each individual can take is to boycott American-made cars and other manufactured goods, cancel vacations and business travel in USA, refuse to educate children in America, and stop patronizing American fast food restaurants and buying Hollywood films. By following the nonviolent path shown by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, peace-seeking people in every nation can send President Bush a message even he can read. #
(Sherwood Ross, a former executive in the U.S. civil rights movement, reporter for the Chicago Daily News, and wire service columnist, is founder of the League for Nonviolent Solutions, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Contact him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
industrial firms come proposed designs for new weapons, and to them are
awarded production and profit. In an impressive flow of influence and
command, the weapons industry accords valued employment, management
pay and profit in its political constituency, and indirectly it is a treasured
source of political funds. The gratitude and the promise of political help
go to Washington and to the defense budget. And to foreign policy or, as in
Vietnam and Iraq, to war. That the private sector moves to a dominant
public-sector role is apparent."
Today, the MIC is operating full-blast. For example, President Bush is determined to keep the Texas factories that make the F-18 fighter-bombers humming by selling the planes to India and Pakistan. No matter these planes can deliver nuclear warheads and will only escalate tensions between the touchy neighbors. America today has the unenviable distinction of being the world's No. One arms peddler. Uncle Sam, the hardware king!
What's more, under Bush, military spending climbed from $290-billion in 2001 to $437-billion in 2004 and, counting the separate appropriations for the Iraq War and the tens of billions spent on the intelligence agencies, it could top $600-billion this year.
Arms makers are becoming millionaires overnight. United for Fair Economy and Institute for Policy Studies reported in 2004 the Iraq War is leading to "huge average raises (for CEOs) at the biggest defense contractors. One CEO of a bulletproof vest firm increased his salary from $525,000 in 2001 to $70-million in 2004, the report said. As for "free enterprise," so cherished by Republican lawgivers, only one of the top 10 defense contractors "won a majority of its contracts through 'full and open' competition," according to the Center for Public Integrity, of Washington. "All the rest collected most of their contract dollars through sole source contracts or other no-bid procedures."
Taxpayers typically do not know of the lack of competitive bidding or recognize that much of what is spent is lavished on obsolete technology. William D. Hartung, co-author of a World Policy Institute Special Report at the New School University, found "Contracts for the top 10 weapons contracts were up 75% in the first three years of the Bush Administration alone," --- much of it apparently wasted on obsolete technologies.
When the Pentagon is informed of wasteful practices, it commonly ignores them. As Knight-Ridder reported last January 24, Congressman Walter Jones, (R-N.C.) is quoted as understating, "We've got an agency that is not doing its job of being a watchdog for the taxpayers." Retired Army Reserve officer Paul Fellencer Sr. complained to the Pentagon's fraud hot line last year about $200-million worth of outrageous overpayments for ordinary supplies. Pentagon investigators never bothered to call him and dismissed his tip as "unsubstantiated," the news service said.
The failure to perform by contractor Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been well documented. Now it appears, according to the Los Angeles Times, President Bush's uncle, William H.T. Bush, better known as "Uncle Bucky," collected just under $1.9-million in cash plus stock valued at more than $800,000 from the sale of Engineered Support Systems Inc. The Times said ESSI "experienced record growth as a result of expanded U.S. military contracts --- many to supply U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan." The paper also noted some of the contracts were awarded on a no-bid basis, including a $77-million deal to refit military vehicles with armor for use in Iraq and the firm is under investigation because equipment it was supposed to supply didn't work properly.
Author Johnson quotes Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, of Oakland, Calif., as describing the MIC as "a vast cesspool of mismanagement, waste, and transgressions not only bordering on but often entering deeply into criminal conduct... The great arms firs have managed to slough off much of the normal risks of doing business in a genuine market, passing on many of their excessive costs to the taxpayers while still realizing extraordinary rates of return on investment."
Meanwhile, President Bush chops away at the domestic budget, even cutting back funds for cancer research, veterans, and education. Several million Americans are homeless. Forty million do not have medical insurance. Thirty million slave at jobs that do not pay them enough to afford decent housing. Millions of potentially valuable young people cannot afford to start college. And the man responsible for much of today's record $8-trillion national debt, as part of his plan to gut Social Security, has the temerity to warn the country this solvent and self-sustaining system will be in trouble 25 years from now!
Let us recall Washington Post reporters Woodward and Bernstein were told during their Watergate probe to "follow the money." Apparently, that's what government in America is all about. It surely is what the MIC is all about. Of the estimated $1-trillion wrung from taxpayers on April 17th, about half will find its way into the coffers of the MIC. The American public is being victimized by defense spending while its domestic needs for affordable housing, fair wages, medical care, and social justice are unmet. As Charlie Wilson knew long ago, MIC can be a perpetual money machine. To keep the military cauldron boiling, the Pentagon is plowing $1.5-trillion dollars into research to create a witches' brew of 80 new advanced warfare systems.
In so many ways, the invasion of Iraq is all about money. WMD was just the lie to bring it about. Not only is the MIC cashing in big time but oil companies, such as Exxon-Mobil are gorging themselves on record high profits. Other Anglo-American oil companies are waiting in the wings for regimes friendly to the U.S. to push through pipeline deals the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the Hussein regime in Iraq refused to permit. As war-related damage to Iraq's oil infrastructure has reduced its oil output below pre-war levels, thus tightening supplies, the price of gas charged at the pump to American motorists goes up and up.
In sum, Americans have a problem. What Hamilton and the other Founders feared long ago is now reality. The MIC has thrived for nearly a half century thanks to a compliant Congress, but never so much as today when Republican congressmen and lobbyists are being jailed wholesale for greed. The MIC has transformed an isolationist nation that didn't want to get involved in WWII into a global bully with 725 acknowledged military bases in 130 foreign nations. (That's in addition to nearly 1,000 bases in the USA.) Actually, writes historian Chalmers Johnson in his best-seller "The Sorrows of Empire"(Henry Holt), "there are many more, since some bases exist under leaseholds, informal agreements, or disguises of various kinds."
On Okinawa alone, he writes the Pentagon operates 38 separate bases on the choicest 20 percent of the island." In South Korea, there are more than 100 bases. Johnson says Okinawa is typical: "The conditions there --- expropriation of the island's most valuable land for bases, extraterritorial status for American troops who committed crimes against local civilians, bars and brothels crowding around the main gates of the bases, endless accidents, noise, sexual violence, drunk driving crashes, drug use, and environmental pollution---are replicated anywhere there are American garrisons." That Okinawa's people, and others unhappy with the American presence, would like the U.S. "gone" is irrelevant to the Pentagon. As Johnson notes, "After more than fifty years, the air force shows no signs of leaving (Greenland) despite continuous protests by the Inuit of Greenland and numerous lawsuits filed in the Danish Supreme Court."
"Our country deploys well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations and just under a dozen carrier task forces in all the oceans and seas of the world," Johnson writes. "We operate numerous secret bases outside our territory to monitor what the people of the world, including our own citizens, arte saying, faxing, or e-mailing to one another. Our globe-girding military and intelligence installations bring profits to civilian industries, which design and manufacture weapons for the armed forces or undertake contract services to build and maintain our far-flung outposts." What's more, the State Department's International Military Education and Training Program has been providing instruction to the armies of 133 out of 189 countries around the globe. Johnson writes, "The Pentagon finds it convenient to train foreign military forces and police to carry out secret programs of state terrorism, including the assassination of foreign leaders, without being charged with war crimes and violations of the Geneva Convention."
Unfortunately, Americans seem as indifferent to military control as antelope grazing on the South Dakota prairie. The question is: Will Americans take action to rein in the MIC? As President Bush was deaf to the cries of the UN's Hans Blix that Iraq had no WMD, as he did not listen to the UN Secretary-General and the Pope when they pleaded with him not to invade Iraq, as he paid no heed to the millions of common folk around the world who demonstrated against his Iraq invasion, he is not likely to listen to any critics now. He is threatening Iran with "the nuclear option" because Iran, with its paltry $3.5-billion military budget, might be capable of making one atomic bomb five to ten years from now. All the while President Bush sits on an obscene nuclear stockpile of 10,000 bombs, repudiating nuclear arms control treaties on his own and reigniting the arms race!
Not surprisingly, people the world over, as historian Johnson writes, have caught on to the fact that the U.S. is "something other than what it professed to be, that it was, in fact, a military juggernaut intent on world domination."
What can people do? One effective response each individual can take is to boycott American-made cars and other manufactured goods, cancel vacations and business travel in USA, refuse to educate children in America, and stop patronizing American fast food restaurants and buying Hollywood films. By following the nonviolent path shown by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, peace-seeking people in every nation can send President Bush a message even he can read. #
(Sherwood Ross, a former executive in the U.S. civil rights movement, reporter for the Chicago Daily News, and wire service columnist, is founder of the League for Nonviolent Solutions, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Contact him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
