Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson Reveals the Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon

[unhappycamper]

Tomgram: Chalmers Johnson Reveals the Economic Death Spiral at the Pentagon
by Tom Engelhardt | February 3, 2009 - 9:47am

Recently, reviewing lobbying disclosure reports, the Washington Times discovered "that 18 of the top 20 recipients of federal bailout money spent a combined $12.2 million lobbying the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and federal agencies during the last quarter of 2008." Citibank alone, according to the New York Times, fielded "an army of Washington lobbyists," plunking down $1.77 million in lobbying fees just in the fourth quarter of last year.

And it isn't only sinking financial institutions begging for federal dollars that have bolstered their Washington lobbying corps. So have the biggest U.S. armaments companies -- "drastically," according to reporter August Cole of the Wall Street Journal. In 2008, he found, Northrop Grumman almost doubled its lobbying budget to $20.6 million (from $10.9 million the previous year); Boeing upped its budget from $10.6 million to $16.6 million in the same period; and Lockheed-Martin, the company that received the most contracts from the Pentagon last year, hiked its lobbying efforts by a whopping 54% in 2008.

If you want to get a taste of what that means, then click here to view an ad for that company's potentially embattled boondoggle, the F-22, the most expensive jet fighter ever built. What you'll discover is not just that it will "protect" 300 million people -- that's you, if you live in the USA -- but that it will also employ 95,000 of us. In other words, the ad's threatening message implies, if the Obama administration cuts this program in bad times, it will throw another 95,000 Americans out on the street. Now that's effective lobbying for you, especially when you consider, as Chalmers Johnson does below, that for any imaginable war the U.S. might fight in the coming decades, the F-22 will be a thoroughly useless plane.

We don't usually think of the Pentagon as a jobs-and-careers scam operation, a kind of Mega-Madoff Ponzi scheme that goes BOOM!, though it is clearly designed for the well-being of defense contractors, military officers, and congressional representatives; nor do we usually consider the "defense" budget as a giant make-work jobs racket, as arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble recently suggested, but it's never too late.

Chalmers Johnson, author of the already-classic Blowback Trilogy, including most recently Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, makes vividly clear just how little the Pentagon is organized to consider the actual defense needs of the United States. In many ways, it remains a deadly organization of boys with toys that now poses a distinct economic danger to the rest of us. (Check out, as well, a TomDispatch audio interview with Johnson on the Pentagon's economic death spiral by clicking here).


Rest of really good read at: http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/20108

[HillbillyBob]

1. Way past time to cut the 'defense dept' by 75%, if they have the

money like that to spend on lobbying they are soaking the tax payer
The Pentagon is suppose to work FOR us not for their own fucking interests.
Time to dePiratize them. Then make Grumman , lockheed et al national departments and fire evern fucking dead ass there. Those fund are needed badly else where.
A friend of mine called from California last night.
She is a young teacher graduated 2 years ago and on her first job.
She gets high reviews, is dedicated to the kids..
She is going to be let go...

[Raster]

2. The Pentagon and its parasites have been bleeding this country dry for years.

"We don't usually think of the Pentagon as a jobs-and-careers scam operation, a kind of Mega-Madoff Ponzi scheme that goes BOOM!, though it is clearly designed for the well-being of defense contractors, military officers, and congressional representatives; nor do we usually consider the "defense" budget as a giant make-work jobs racket, as arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble recently suggested, but it's never too late.

Chalmers Johnson, author of the already-classic Blowback Trilogy, including most recently Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, makes vividly clear just how little the Pentagon is organized to consider the actual defense needs of the United States. In many ways, it remains a deadly organization of boys with toys that now poses a distinct economic danger to the rest of us."

[loudsue]

3. The defense dept. is NOT organized to defend the U.S.

They are organized to support the military industrial complex. Wars are designed to make sure they keep the money coming.

This whole scam has GOT to be exposed and stopped, once and for all.

K & R

:kick:

[Peace Patriot]

4. People can only take so much reality, as someone once said (can't remember who).

And THIS is the core reality of our society, our country, and our once-fabled democracy, that is the hardest of all to face: We have become a war machine. War has become an economic necessity--not just for stealing other peoples' resources, as in Iraq, but for no reason at all, as in Afghanistan. (There is NO ONE in Afghanistan that we can kill that will make us "safe"--no one!). Afghanistan is pure "military-industrial complex" boondoggle. (So, too, is the corrupt, failed, murderous U.S. "war on drugs".)

This is the core reality that my generation--the Sixties anti-war generation--could not face, or could not solve. Clearly, after Vietnam, the U.S. war machine needed to be dismantled, and the long-needed, post-WWII demobilization finally implemented. War machines are not a normal and natural condition of a well-meaning democratic society. See our Founders, who were horrified at the notion of "a standing army," and understood very well how dangerous that is. The great U.S. mobilization of soldiers, civilians and war machine, needed to defeat the Nazis (who had attacked Europe and England) and Japanese imperialists (who attacked us), accomplished its purpose, but then..but then...our capitalist greedbags could not tolerate the great social justice movements that then arose, all over the world--in China, throughout Asia, in Africa, in South America--people longing for a "New Deal" in their own countries--and which had arisen earlier, in one of our chief WW II allies, Russia, whose fighting spirit and horrendous sacrifices during WW II were likely the critical factor in winning the war in Europe.

Recommended reading: "JFK and the Unspeakable: why he died and why it matters," by James Douglass.

Douglass chronicles JFK's determination to END the Cold War and all of the proxy wars with Russia that threatened a nuclear holocaust. Stalin, the bloody dictator, was dead. There was new leadership in the Kremlin--Nikita Krushchev, with whom JFK opened backchannels of communication, after several dangerous incidents. His purpose: To END IT. Fini. Kaput. Mutual disarmament. Peace. Let the two economic systems compete, without the threat of nuclear war, and without proxy wars. And that is WHY the CIA killed JFK, on behalf of our war profiteers (also meticulously documented by Douglass).

With two more assassinations--of JFK's brother Bobby (who was the only member of his administration who was with him, on his peace initiatives), and Martin Luther King--any hope of U.S. military demobilization was eliminated, and a horrendously bloody proxy war in Southeast Asia commenced, two days--TWO DAYS--after JFK's assassination. MLK spoke out against it. Bang-bang, shoot-shoot. Bobby ran for president in 1968 to stop it. Bang-bang, shoot-shoot.

That was really it--as to hope for a peaceful United States. But we Vietnam war protesters didn't know who had killed Kennedy and why--and were just as mystified by RFK's and MLK's murders. We proceeded as if our government was still a democracy. We got the Vietnam War stopped, eventually--2 million deaths later--although what really happened was that the Vietnamese won it--and we probably prevented the nuking of Vietnam, but we didn't--as a general rule--realize that the war machine was now self-perpetuating and that that was the problem. It would pad its pockets with 'Star Wars' and more anti-communist paranoia; spread US military bases everywhere; train the fascists in other countries to torture and kill their own people; and manufacture more wars--dreadful, "dirty wars" in South America, and soon, corporate oil wars in the Middle East.

And now, here we are, with an entirely out-of-control "military-industrial complex"--that is just one great big looting machine, with the bitter irony that the only secure jobs left in the U.S. are building war toys or killing other people, for their oil or for no reason at all, as in Vietnam (an entirely CIA-manufactured war). This was the failure of my generation. We tried, we failed to bust this war machine. It was perhaps too entrenched; we were, perhaps, too young, too limited in our understanding and too traumatized by war and assassination, to do what really needed to be done. Now a new generation faces this horrible reality, with a democracy that is even more damaged and unresponsive. I can only advise--look to the mechanisms of democracy, such as this new twist, corporate 'TRADE SECRET' control of our vote counting, and our dreadful corpo/fascist media (which has never been worse), to build the strength to address this huge problem. It cannot be solved overnight, and it will certainly resist the solution: peace.

[katty]

5. Pentagon=bottomless money pit