This Is Why We Spend A Trillion Dollars A Year On 'Defense'

[unhappycamper]

Lockheed Martin's Mike Ryan embodies the tie between military contracts and the local economy. When he's working, he says, 'I'm going to hit the mall. Hire the kid down the street to cut my grass. ... There's no end to it.'



North Texas economy relies on military contracts, so cuts would hurt
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, October 24, 2010
By DAVE MICHAELS / The Dallas Morning News
[e-mail]

FORT WORTH – When the Pentagon has money to spend, so does Mike Ryan.

"Working in the defense field – it pays off. I make good money," the Lockheed Martin worker said.

"I'm going to take that money and go out there and spend it. I'm going to hit the mall. Hire the kid down the street to cut my grass – let him make some money. There's no end to it."

In ways often overlooked, North Texas' economy is buoyed by the billions of taxpayer dollars that pour annually into companies that build military aircraft, missiles and computer systems. But with the U.S. government aiming to reduce budget deficits, defense spending could be headed for a contraction.

The connection between Washington and North Texas, which has grown more significant since 2001, helped rejuvenate a Tarrant County economy weakened by big defense budget cuts during the 1990s.



unhappycamper comment: And this is why we keep buying very expensive military systems. And it's also why we spend a trillion (that's with a "T") dollars a year on this stuff.

[rucky]

1. well...

the same set of skills it takes to make advanced weapons systems can be applied to making advanced energy systems. With a little ingenuity and some retraining, we don't have to be not locked into this - we just need to reapply this monstrous public-funded economy we've been supporting into something that's more useful.

[Ilsa]

5. Good post. I'm with you on this. Re-apply the training, technology,

and money towards energy-independence so we don't have to go killing people in other countries to feed our thirst for fuel.

[WinkyDink]

7. "More useful" won't allow for world conquest.

[Pab Sungenis]

2. Yes, Pentagon spending fuels the economy

but only when our contractors hire American and have factories here in America.

If we subsidized other industries the way we do the defense industry, then they'd be creating jobs, too.

For example: contract to buy fill-in-the-number-here of electric vehicles for the Post Office from a car maker provided that they use American parts whenever possible, assemble here in America, and hire Americans. That will create jobs, too, and will have longer-term benefits.

[jp11]

3. If we didn't ship our jobs overseas, screw workers with unlivable wages

and encourage companies to keep cutting American employment maybe we wouldn't need the government to subsidize jobs through defense which is practically the only way republicans can stomach the government 'making jobs'. Having the funds spent on buying weapons technology or systems put to infrastructure and clean energy is somehow anti-business, socialist, and seven degrees of horrible that could never work, but spend it on weapons and it's vital to our defense interests and economy so no cuts can happen without dire results and cries that democrats and liberals are hurting American's 'safety' etc.

[WhiteTara]

4. I wish they would find another way to

employ people and pay them decent wages without building a death machine.

[WinkyDink]

6. Gee, who'da thunk TEXAS?!

[Scuba]

8. While money used to build bridges, highways and sewers....

...doesn't help the economy? How about nurses and teachers? Do their jobs not help?

The argument that our economy will crumble without exhorbitant military spending is without merit. It is a fallacy that fails to consider other, more beneficial jobs. However, those jobs are not profitable for the "right people".

[Lorien]

26. exactly. There are just as many (and MORE) non-miltary jobs in green energy, transportation,

education, health care, elder care, infrastructure, and on and on-a greater variety of jobs that could employ a far larger number of people (spend a million on ONE torpedo or spend a million employing 20 teachers for a year)? The reason it goes to the military is to maintain the status quo; funding the same rich f*cks who are heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry and the military industrial complex. If we spent out money on developing clean, green energy projects instead, then what would be in it for them?

[charlie]

9. You oughta see what's going on in Ft Bliss, El Paso

The funding gods pointed their fingers in its direction a couple of years ago and it's exploding in all directions with new construction, the largest base expansion in the country. In a year or two, it'll be a city within a city, with a population approaching 100,000. It's so huge, the Texas lege finally paid to build a long-needed 15 mile freeway artery to shorten commutes for soldiers. Next month, they're cutting the ribbon on a $100 million shopping complex, a Main Street styled mall with dozens of merchants and a 10-screen cinema sandwiched between the new BX and Commissary. The gummint schwag is pouring into Ft Bliss like a tsunami. It's dizzying to watch.

[zeemike]

10. I think of it as a fatal flaw in our capitalist system.

Once an industry gets big enough they become powerful in government and can not be reduced in size.
But the military industrial complex is even more dangerous because they have the power to destroy the world...and the power to take out anyone that gets in the way.

[baldguy]

11. What would the US Dept of Transportation be able to do with $1 trillion a year?

How many jobs would they be able create?

Or the Dept of Energy?

or the Dept of Education? What if we gave $12,000 to every student every year? What sort of impact would that have on the economy, now and in the future?

[Lorien]

27. Oh, I dunno; build a National high speed maglev rail system for starters

get us on to clean green renewable energy and make America competitive again? The wealthy elites don't want that, though. He who controls energy controls the world.

[charlie]

12. Reagan bankrupt the Commies with defense spending

Remember that?

Attn "Strong Defense" fetishist shitheads: There's actually a good cautionary point to your favorite Cold War fairy tale.

[hollowdweller]

13. This is why the GOP wins in the South.

Defense is their social spending. Plus since it's Defense it has an air of importance that social spending doesn't have that prevents cuts.

If Dems had their shit together they would start finding abuses and waste in the defense industry, develop a set of talking points and use it just like the GOP uses other gov't spending.

[TransitJohn]

18. Well, that and the racism. n/t

n/t

[pokercat999]

14. Just think, when we get a Democrat in the Whitehouse we'll

cut the Department of War budget by 25% the FIRST year. We'll end the "wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan and close Guantanamo Bay. In the second year we will be able to reduce the military budget by at least another 10% and every year after that by the same until we are spending only as much as the rest of the world combined instead as twice as much. All this is only possible if and when we elect a Democrat to the presidency and a Democratic majority in both houses of congress.

[Schema Thing]

15. Actually this would be a great PSA campaign theme...

Show clips of rich kids telling what private school they went to, what car/motorcycle they were given, what ritzy vacations they've taken, what high-end college they are being sent to.

And then show their father's salary as a white-collar executive in the MIC or lobbyist industry.


"This Is Why We Spend A Trillion Dollars A Year On 'Defense'"

[Chan790]

20. Oh oh oh, I'll line up first:

• Saint Paul.
• None, I don't have a driver's license. I'm a city kid: grew in Hartford, college in DC, most of my adult life in NYC, now back in DC.
• Yeah, I've been everywhere.
• I went to the Catholic University of America, but was also accepted to Georgetown and NYU.

My father's a grocer for a major supermarket chain, he makes $52,000/year (which is more than his manager) after starting as a stock-boy at age 15 in 1971. Non-management, yay for union labor!

My mother is the director of sales for a defense contractor. Base salary is just under $100K plus commissions and other value-added compensations. Total compensation comes in a mite under $200K. (She's been offered 10x that in other parts of the US but likes where she is and money isn't an object, she loves her job. The family fortunes actually came from real estate and they live in a 5000sf.ft. estate-house in the Connecticut hills overlooking the Farmington Valley.

And we're all hawkish social and economic liberals and we vote. :hi:

[Schema Thing]

21. Sorry, you don't fit the profile.

...for on-camera


But you can produce if you want to :hi:

[TransitJohn]

16. I'd say that Tarrant County's economy is more bouyed by the Barnett Shale

but that's just me.

[bemildred]

17. No, that is more the excuse for all that waste of money.

If they really cared about jobs, we would not have the unemployment rate we do now, they would not have allowed all that work to be offshored.

It is interesting to consider that California used to be a much more conservative state, but then they moved most of the defense work and money back east.

[eomer]

19. Yes, that is what I was just going to say, then I read your comment.

It's not the reason, it's part of the cover story. It's the excuse, as you say.

The real reason is because the threat that Eisenhower warned us of has come about -- the Military Industrial (add security and surveillance to bring it up to date) Complex has seized control of our country by buying, owning, and blackmailing our political system while murdering, smearing, and radicalizing their opposition.

[gmoney]

22. The "advantage" of military spending is that it's not productive

As usual, Orwell had it all figured out...

http://www.george-orwell.org/1984/16.html

"The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living."

"If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process -- by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute -- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.

"But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society."

"The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed."

[bemildred]

24. Yep, Mr Orwell has it right.

Here is another one for you:

"“Men nearly always speak and write as if riches were absolute, as if it were possible, by following certain scientific precepts, for everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself. The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends... wholly on the default of a guinea in your neighbors pocket. If he did not want it, it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends accurately on the need or desire he has for it, – and the art of making yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist's sense, is therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbor poor.” – John Ruskin “Unto the Last” "

[girl gone mad]

28. Yes, this is more accurate.

Wall Street needs a way to destroy trillions of dollars in order to keep the value of their earnings and assets from deflating.

[Jumping John]

23. I've listed some real reasons for those wanting the truth about DOD spending

$100 million for an Earth-monitoring satellite that never made it into space - $1 million a year for storing it

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-MN, says, "One in six federal tax dollars sent to rebuild Iraq has been wasted."

Wasteful military spending: $100 billion (waste, fraud, unnecessary weapons)
Running Tab: $537.5 billion + $100 billion = $637.5 billion

http://www.rd.com/content/printContent.do?contentId=50629&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=500&width=790&modal=true

WHAT HAPPENED TO $1 TRILLION?

Though Defense has long been notorious for waste, recent government reports suggest the Pentagon's money management woes have reached astronomical proportions. A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn't properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S.

Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.

http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-05-18/news/17491492_1_pentagon-gao-financial-accounting

After six years and nearly $19 billion in spending, the Pentagon task force assigned to create better ways to detect bombs has revealed their findings: The best bomb detector is...a dog.

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/after-19-billion-spent-six-years-pentagon-realizes-best-bomb-detector-dog

The story...

Donald Rumsfeld annouced that more than $2 trillion in Pentagon funds had gone missing. He made this astonishing statement on September 10th, perfect timing to keep the story from making any news.

http://www.911myths.com/html/rumsfeld__9_11_and__2_3_trilli.html

According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, every single one of the top ten weapons contractors was convicted of or admitted to defrauding the government between 1980 and 1992. For example:

* Grumman paid the government $20 million to escape criminal liability for coercing subcontractors into making political contributions.

* Lockheed was convicted of paying millions in bribes to obtain classified planning documents.

* Northrop was fined $17 million for falsifying test data on its cruise missiles and fighter jets.

* Rockwell was fined $5.5 million for committing criminal fraud against the Air Force.

In another study, the Project on Government Oversight (PGO) searched public records from October 1989 to February 1994 and found-in just that 4~/~-year period-85 instances of fraud, waste and abuse in weapons contracting. For example:

Boeing, Grumman, Hughes, Raytheon and RCA pleaded guilty to illegal trafficking in classified documents and paid a total of almost $15 million in restitution, reimbursements, fines, etc.

* Hughes pleaded guilty to procurement fraud in one case, was convicted of it in a second case and, along with McDonnell Douglas and General Motors, settled out-of-court for a total of more than $1 million dollars in a third case.

* Teledyne paid $5 million in a civil settlement for false testing, plus $5 million for repairs.

* McDonnell Douglas settled for a total of more than $22 million in four "defective pricing" cases.

But General Electric was the champ. PGO lists fourteen cases, including a conviction for mail and procurement fraud that resulted in a criminal fine of $10 million and restitution of $2.2 million.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/Military_Fraud.html

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&num=10&hl=en&q=where+defense+dollars+are+spent+waste&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=808e0896f24a30c1

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

25. No, it isn't.