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Where Our Defense Money Goes
By threatening to veto the defense appropriations bill if it included money for more F-22 stealth fighter planes, President Obama signaled that he was going to put an end to the way business has been done in Washington. We applaud the president's announcement, but so far it is more symbolic than real.
The same week the Senate voted to cut funding for additional F-22s, for a savings of $1.75 billion, the Senate Armed Services Committee added another $9 billion in earmarks to the 2010 defense authorization bill. Earmarks direct money to a specific program or company in a member's district for something that has not been requested by the Pentagon and has not been subject to any public review or hearing. It is a gift from a member to a constituent, a gesture that usually is repaid with a generous campaign contribution.
Even if the president succeeds in blocking additional funding for the F-22 and for other programs Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has identified as unnecessary, core defense spending for next year will actually increase by $21 billion. And to make matters worse, every dollar spent on the military is a dollar borrowed from the Chinese or Japanese governments, a dollar that must be repaid with interest. Including costs assigned to other departments, total United States spending on the military approaches $1 trillion a year.
The defense budget is no longer just about defense. Rather, it has become a system of corporate welfare driven by jobs and campaign contributions, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his 1961 farewell address.
Congress has moved to make the earmark process more transparent. But ever-resourceful members of Congress have found a way around tighter reporting rules. The biggest portion of money doled out by the Senate Armed Services Committee was $4.3 million for "no member request'' earmarks, a blatant move to circumvent rules requiring members of Congress to disclose the earmarks they have given out.
Last week the House had its turn at the trough. The Defense Appropriations subcommittee's bill included 1,116 earmarks added by House members worth $2.75 billion. When the bill came to the House floor on July 30, Republican Congressmen Jeff Flake of Arizona and John Campbell of California offered amendments to strip 553 earmarks worth $2.7 billion from the bill. Their amendments were overwhelmingly defeated.
Bipartisanship is the name of the game when it comes to earmarks. Because they control key chairmanships, Democrats have an edge in the current Congress, but should the Republicans regain majorities in either chamber, rest assured they will give their Democratic colleagues a run for the money.
The pay-to-play aspect of earmarks has embarrassed members of Congress, as well it should, but each year they continue to give out literally thousands of earmarks, and almost half are added to the Defense Department funding bills. In 2008, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, members of Congress added 11,234 named earmarks totaling $14.8 billion to congressional funding bills. Another $3.5 billion in earmarks were added with no sponsor identified.
In April, Democratic congressman Paul Hodes of New Hampshire introduced legislation that would break the link between earmarks and campaign contributions. His bill would prohibit a member of Congress from taking a contribution from any person or company that has gotten an earmark from that member. It is very straightforward and it would go a long way toward ensuring that our defense policy is not driven by the defense industry's spending on lobbying and campaign contributions.
So far, Hodes has gotten only six Democrats and three Republicans to cosponsor his bill, which is hardly encouraging. Both Obama and his Republican challenger, Senator John McCain, railed against earmarks during the 2008 campaign, but neither has endorsed the Hodes bill.
McCain strongly backed Obama's threat to veto the defense bill if it contained money for additional F-22s. The next logical step would be for both McCain and Obama to get behind Hodes's bill. Until they do, it is still business as usual in Washington.
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20 Comments so far
Show All"And to make matters worse, every dollar spent on the military is a dollar borrowed from the Chinese or Japanese governments, a dollar that must be repaid with interest."
"Both Obama and his Republican challenger, Senator John McCain, railed against earmarks during the 2008 campaign, but neither has endorsed the Hodes bill."
I truly live in Wonderland...if we can't profit from it, we'll kill you to keep you away from it, and if we can profit from it, we'll force you to buy it, or kill you...
We'll keep you fat, dumb and entertained, to keep you from grasping what we're doing, we'll take money anyway we can get it, and we'll lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie, lie...
odoco
dubet: you have coined the most accurate narrative of the present situation I have ever read. Simple, true.
I wish there was someway to do a national I.Q. test, pitting the US populace against the western European and Eastern European countries - I think the results would be most telling.
odoco August 5th, 2009 2:21 pm............First off, you would have to ask them to explain "I.Q" as a pre-test...that would save a few tons of wasted paper.
America, the God fearing peace loving nation.
Yes, nothing really new here. The MIC has been about corporate welfare for a long time.
"defense" is the wrong word here. National "defense" has little if anything to do with the obscene amounts of money and waste we spend on weapons and military related products, services and activities. (which is becoming ever more privatized, along with "intelligence" services).
It is not defense, rather neo-fascist corporate welfare and offensive weapons for imperial aggression and mass slaughter.
Who 'defends' Americans from our own Merchants of Death?
Not even that CIA agent, Osama, caused so much death and destruction.
Since the Department of War became the Department of Defense there has been a huge shift toward offensiveness. Mr. Eisenhower was correct in his farewell address, but it was too late. The actual shift was in action years before - with the planning for the creation of the Pentagon building. Previously, the military forces were increased when needed and were NOT to be a constant drain on the economy. Eisenhower's words basically paraphrase what was in the Constitution of the United States of America. Beware of imperial tendencies.
It seems that with World War 1 we started to develope a stronger taste for imperialism and by the end of World War 2, we were addicted. Defense/shmeefence. Our "leaders" had decided that all of the incredible abundance of natural resources within this nation was not enough, we needed to control all of the world - through threats and violence. With the ability to reach into space beyond the planet's atmosphere, imperialism's sky no longer had limits.
I wish people could stop falling for the very phony notion that there can be bi-partisonship in a government which is ruled by one corporate party. The "democrats" say mostly correct statements when the are in the minority, but with ascendence, they can always find reasons why those statements were, now, inappropriate. Other than a very small minority of exceptions, we are ruled by predatory whores.
Eisenhower enabled the military industrial media complex to become firmly established during his two terms in office.
Eisehower's first action as president in 1953 was to authorize the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected president of Iran, thereby giving the multinational oil companies first dibs on Iran's oil. This was the first of many pre-emptive CIA actions in nations around the globe. The CIA had previously pressured Harry Truman, Eisenhower's predecessor to OK the overthrow but Truman wouldn't give in.
only a commie-whacko would create such a bill that was simple, made sense, and had integrity...
Instead of saying that this is old news blah blah blah, I would like to hear "I wish/will make (Hodes bill) as known to "progressives" as HR 676.
'Defense' is what they call it, but it has little or nothing to do with actual defense. It's a system of very inefficient corporate welfare that they disguise by pretending it has something to do with national security, but the words are blatant lies.
Not very different from the Union of Soviet Social Republics - that was neither socialist or a republic in any reasonable sense of the word, the Peoples Democratic Republics of whatever which are inevitably never democratic, nor republics, but often authoritarian or totalitarian states.
You could tell they were playing the propaganda game at the Pentagon when they changed the name of the War Department (at least an honest representation of what they were all about) to the Defense Department. Witness the little mottos the services have to hide their true intentions. Of which SAC: "Peace is our Profession"; and the prison at Guantanamo - which screams in irony: "Honor bound to defend freedom" are but two examples. They are reminders of the same kind of propagandist mottos found over the gates at Nazi prison camps: "Arbeit Mach Frei" - 'work will make you free'. All of them lies.
For all its pretense about democracy, America is a totalitarian state. The government needs to not only control the populace through the threat of force - as they do in authoritarian states, but capture their minds as well - one of the differences between an authoritarn state and a totalitarian one. Which is why the propaganda is so necessary.
Sioux Rose
TIREBITER: Good post. So true about the mind control through clever sloganeering.
Sioux Rose
Hey, maybe if the powers that be declare a war on illness/disease there would be ample available earmarks. Who says IT has to be called health care? If it's under the banner of defense, based on preventing (an) attack, surely the $ can be found to minister to those in need? How far can semantics take us in a land that never shies away from spending money if the cherished CONCEPT of war is attached to its cause?
Where is the bill ending legal political bribery and instituting publicly funded campaigns and spending limits?
Where are our "progressive" politicians on this most basic of all legislation? Counting their own bribe money?
To droning people in Af/Pak for one. I got into another feisty argument with an Obamabot on that. She used to rail against Dubya on war spending but now she sounds just like him on Obama droning Af/Pak. No wonder defense spending gets such as easy pass no matter which party is in power in addition to both parties being inherently tied to war spending as Sioux Rose pointed out to me earlier. That got me thinking. So many of my otherwise cool elderlies just can't help it but say that FDR and Truman spending on war got us out of the Great Depression. I tried to question that and no matter how I tried to tell them that it was not war spending but people finally getting together and helping each other out and putting greed and war mongering aside, they wouldn't listen. It's as if war spending was framed as what saved this country from the Great Depression even when it was actually proven that war spending did little to actually pull this country out of the Great Depression and in fact paved the way for Vietnam and Iraq and now Af/Pak.
Re JenniferBedingfield August 5th, 2009 7:21 pm
The oft-heard comment "It took WWII to get us out of the Depression" isn't entirely untrue, but it needs qualification and context.
If we think of WWII as just another flavor of Keynesian deficit spending, the statement makes some sense. But unlike spending on roads, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure of universal and lasting benefit, war spending leaves behind nothing of any value---quite the reverse, in fact; except for a temporary bump in employment, war's benefits accrue to a tiny minority, and in the long run serve only to further entrench their power.
Sioux Rose
JENNIFER: Excellent reasoning! Public policy works a lot like a Rorsharch Inkblot test. To the one who is given to seeing enemies everywhere, each available dollar must serve the war-state. This underlying psychological ethos fuels militarism.
It's interesting that the U.S. incorporated as an entity on July 4 establishing itself (if unknowingly) as a Cancer entity. Cancer is the sign of family life, and while we don't have a royal family per se (as do the Brits), there's little question that those families endowed with fortunes have played a huge part in American life and politics.
Cancer has a tendency to get stuck in the past, and it reminds me of how so many hark back nostalgically to some romanticized view of the past. Veterans of war upon war speak of battles while boasting wounds to show for them.
Cancer is a feminine sign, ruled by the moon, and plenty of Cancer men (in my view) never cut the umbilical chord (symbolically) to their Mother(s). Could be this is at least one underlying reason for the uber: masculine posturing of American men, their need to identify so strongly with militarism, their production of and consumption of a kind of pornography that would sicken anyone with the remotest form of healthy sexual desires. (A form of hatred to the Mother?)
I've joked with friends and clients that a nation's astrological identity can often be found in observing which body part its men fetishize. Hugh Hefner comes to life as America's foremost BREAST boy, (Cancer rules the breast), who made a fortune on this fixation. Who knows, could it be that when modern medicine pushed the baby from the breast to the formula bottle that a lot of men got stuck at an arrested level of infantile emotional development? In A.A. they refer to the "king baby" syndrome that seems to fuel the repressed levels of anger that lead to alcoholism. Lots of acclaimed American writers were heavy drinkers, and easily depressed, much like the last president (a Cancer) who certainly was obsessed with the use of military force. Like all cowards, he supported its use on others, largely those unarmed, like women and children, today's quickly bypassed "collateral damage" legions of the damned.
Hold it, in all fairness, the defense budget doesn't just go to corporate handouts, we also drop a lot of bombs on innocent kids around the world.
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/08/05/protests-as-us-air-strike-kills-four-civilians-in-kandahar/
It resembles a global, chess game of stupidity, greed, and mostly, unbridled anger.
Like the insane parasite that eats away and destroys its host, the US government will bleed its populace, and treasury, dry. Then this [abomi]nation will implode, like the Third Reich, who may represent their treasured paradigm.
Pity our children, and their children, for the wrath they shall endure, due to the unforgivable sins of these soulless bastards. These vampires have latched onto America's body-politic at the neck, after a lengthy, and ongoing indoctrination. A vile pedagogy of chaos and deceit was, no doubt, deeply inculcated into this tight-knit core of earnest disciples. The lesson-syllabus was conceived and invented by the universal architect of suffering and death. That is, the eternal, slave-master: Satan, himself.
You have a way with words. Penetrating, incisive, truthful, and needed. I agree with every word you say with every breath I take.
Sioux
BRANT: Your post reads like a modern, anotated version of "The Screwtape Letters." I am not so sure of Satan as an entity, but evil has never had a shortage of disciples on the earth plane.