11/19/13 – Michael Ostrolenk – The Scott Horton Show

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That's councilforthenationalinterest.org All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Next up is Michael Osterlenk.
He's a trans-partisan public policy consultant who works on issues such as transparency and anti-war stuff.
Lots of anti-war stuff, anti-military spending.
Here he is at the American Conservative Magazine, a huge archive at the American Conservative Magazine as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, great to be with you, Scott.
It's been a long time.
Nice to be back on your show.
Yeah, yeah, good to have you back.
So listen, I started off this path to getting you back on the show with this article by Denny Mertz from the Kalam Foundation, is that what it's called?
Kalam.
Kalam.
And the article is, can the Pentagon be tamed?
And it's about what she calls unlikely, but I like to think that it's more and more likely all the time, alliance of liberal and conservative groups determined to rein in Pentagon spending.
And it's, you know, I don't know, maybe she's just a really optimistic writer or something like that, but it seems like there's some real progress to brag about.
There actually is.
It's kind of a change of pace and it's quite nice since the Tea Party came to power that we can actually now on the right, and I don't mean the libertarian right, because the libertarians have always been good on Pentagon spending, but on the conservative right to start talking about the Pentagon and the billions of dollars that are wasted there.
The fact that more money is spent does not equal the increased ability to defend ourselves.
So it's a good time.
Definitely so.
All right, now it seems like, well, the biggest success in military cuts would just be the sequester, right?
So the Congress's gridlock and inability to agree how bad to rob us all has resulted in some automatic cuts across the board at the Pentagon.
Is that right?
Exactly.
The Budget Control Act, speaking of this coming fiscal year 2014, it caps spending at $498 billion, which is still quite high, but it's much better than the requested amount from the Obama administration, which is 550.
And unfortunately McCain and Sessions in the Senate are requesting $524 billion.
So if we can keep it at least at the BCA levels, we're cutting increasing growth.
If we keep it at $498, that'd be definitely a good start.
Boy, that's still a lot of money.
And now- Still a lot of money.
Yeah.
Definitely so.
And now- It's actually- Oh, go ahead.
It's actually 2007 levels.
So anyone who argues that we can't survive at 2007 levels when we're fighting two wars is delusional.
And that's- I guess I like to throw around the number of trillion a lot on the show, which I got three great sources for.
On the left, Mother Jones Magazine, and from the Libertarians, Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute, and then the nonpartisan Chris Hellman at the National Priorities Project.
They all say that total military spending is approximately a trillion dollars a year, but that's not just the Pentagon budget.
That's the war budgets, which I think are still kept separate.
Maybe they changed that.
I know Obama promised to change that.
I don't know if they ever did.
But then also that's the care and feeding of all the nukes and the homeland security state and all of that too, right?
Exactly right.
I think it might be a little bit higher than a trillion dollars, and that covers the whole national security state, not just the Department of Defense.
And you're right.
It includes overseas contingency operations, includes the nuclear power, the nuclear weapon systems, includes homeland security, et cetera, et cetera.
And I think due to the leaks from Snowden, we now know that there's about $80 billion from the intelligence spent on the intelligence community.
Oh, right.
Because one of his leaks was the black budget, right?
Exactly.
So how much is a trillion dollars?
A trillion dollars.
How much is that?
Well, do you remember on September 10th, 2001, then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had a press conference where he declared war on the Pentagon budget?
And this is just a day before 9-11.
And he said at the time that $2.3 trillion was unaccountable.
That is a lot of money.
And then, of course, 9-11 happened, and we increased military spending, and we lost the ability to even think about what the Pentagon is spending money on.
It's really kind of disturbing, as you know, and you've talked about on your show for years now.
Well, did you see this new thing in the Reuters today?
What was that?
Special report, the Pentagon's doctored ledgers conceal epic waste.
And I only got, it's a huge thing, I only got a fifth of the way through it or something.
It begins with every month on Cook the Books Day, they make up a bunch of numbers to try to make the numbers make sense.
And they do this once a month.
And it's a lot of fun.
And nobody gets in trouble.
And yeah, by the way, they don't even know how many hundreds of billions of dollars they can't account for.
Which I got to ask you, where does it all go?
I mean, when it comes to like black budgets and whatever, they already have as much money as they want, right?
So is this just, are there secret golf courses around that we don't know about?
Or what are they doing with all this money?
Well, let's even step back before we get into it, how they spend the money, because it's required by law.
The missing money is the stuff I'm talking about, you know, because that's got to be getting funneled off to some purpose, right?
Yeah, but just in terms of an audit of the Pentagon, so we know where the money goes, it's required by law, 1992, that the DOD be audited by 1996.
And it has missed every requirement since then to be audited.
So, you know, you and I can have conversations and we can bring in experts who know about particular programs that are wasteful and there's tons of them and billions of dollars spent, but we actually don't know for sure where every penny goes.
And you mentioned golf courses and stuff.
A lot of our brass, you know, admirals and generals do live quite high on the hog.
I mean, nice buildings, nice complexes, they have their own chefs, they do have golf courses.
I mean, and this is not the average everyday soldier, I'm a Marine, we're talking about the officers.
So there is a lot of waste there, a lot of abuse.
And as taxpayers, you know, it's just irresponsible, it's inappropriate.
And I think it's criminal to some degree or another.
You know, what's funny, too, about this is the ratios.
I remember, I guess this was maybe spring 2011 now, 2012 could have been.
I think it was spring 2011, there was a report came out.
Shocking numbers, everyone.
Look, Lockheed spent $14 million on lobbying in just the first quarter of, again, I think it was 2011.
And I thought, well, that's hilarious because, of course, they probably got $140 billion worth of profits in the contracts there.
And this is the best racket in the history of the world if you can get in on it, right?
I mean, whoever heard of an investment with such turnaround?
Yeah, except for the Federal Reserve, I think the defense spending is the biggest racket around.
I would agree with you there.
Unfortunately, we have quite a few groups within our coalition who do a good job of tracking some parts of these issues, which I would suggest some of your listeners go check out if you don't mind me plugging some of our coalition partners.
By all means, go right ahead.
So National Taxpayers Union and R Street Institute put out a report about six months ago called Defending America, Defending Taxpayers.
And it found $1.9 trillion in defense cuts possible over 10 years.
So they went through all the weapon systems that either Congress didn't want, the Defense Department didn't want, that experts on the outside said you're responsible to spend money on, $1.9 trillion worth that could be cut over 10 years.
So that's an important report for your listeners to check out.
I also would suggest to you to check out POGO, Project on Government Oversight.
And they do a lot of research into what you just suggested in terms of Lockheed Martin and some of these other companies in terms of their contracts and things along those lines.
So fortunately, there's a lot of groups out there on the right and the left, Libertarian, Progressive, Conservative and Liberal, who are doing their jobs trying to track these things down.
Right.
Well, you know, easy job.
I think someone who is clearly identifiable as a conservative, it packs so much more punch when they come out against military spending, just because the assumption is that, of course, they take every precaution for the national defense first before they would ever say such a thing.
Whereas anyone on the left saying such a thing, the assumption is, oh, yeah, all you're saying is give peace a chance.
But that's not an adult take on it.
So when a conservative says, hey, we don't need this, we have to stop this, it's bad for the following six reasons or whatever.
I think that makes an impression on, well, on the population, but also on the Congress and on the pollsters, the people with their finger in the wind trying to figure out what's what and who believes what.
You could have just one person stand up and say, I'm a conservative Christian businessman and I say scale back the Pentagon.
And I think that can really have a big effect.
So I want to encourage people to do that.
And I want to encourage liberals to embrace them instead of saying that, oh, no, you know, the conservatives are so bad on so many things.
I don't want anything to do with them.
How about, hey, look, even the conservatives are saying that we're right and that we've got to do this.
So that really proves how smart we are.
Right.
Give them some of that and let's really do this.
I think it's possible.
It's not completely too late.
I think your analysis is right on because liberals and progressives can only get so far because they get blocked out by saying that you don't you don't care about the national security and defense.
And it's really it does rely on the conservative voices to come out who are seen, at least perceptually, as strong on defense to be able to say exactly what you said.
You know, enough is enough.
Like, for instance, we were close with Grover Norquist, an American tax reform, who's a fiscal hawk.
And he came out about two years ago commenting that the Pentagon needs to be looked at really closely and there can be easily meet cuts to the budget and that every other program gets looked at.
You know, it's funny because conservatives will say money does not equal success.
When you put more money in education, department education, you don't get more kids educated, more money into a healthy human services doesn't make people more healthy.
You know, that's kind of their argument.
And Grover came out and said the same thing.
And it's true with defense.
Just because you spend more money on defense doesn't mean you have a better opportunity to defend yourself and more secure.
And that was very helpful for us because, you know, he's a big name on the right.
And there's others, too.
David Williams from the Taxpayer Protection Alliance has come out strongly in support of Pentagon spending reform.
And I already mentioned NTU, the Republican Liberty Caucus, the R Street Institute, Freedom Works.
You know, all these good groups on the right have really stood on the ground and said, enough is enough.
Hey, you know what?
With some names like that, you can get even better names, too.
What about going to alliances of corporate, you know, businesses who are aligned on their export policies and approaching them?
Because and this I don't mean weapons sales to foreign governments, but I mean in the civilian marketplace, because as we all know, the terror war has just killed brand America around the world.
Jeans and sodas and Nintendo's.
Well, those are Japanese, whatever, you know, things.
If Americans do make anything anymore, food, people are turning against it.
I think in Iraq, it was that they used to all drink Pepsi.
That was the official, you know, no alcohol out as the official drink of Iraq.
But after we bombed them for 20 years, now they all drink some cheap Egyptian knockoff and wouldn't be caught dead drinking an American soda, that kind of stuff.
I bet you could get I mean, and that represents a lot of money to the people at Pepsi who don't care about anything else other than making money for Pepsi, because that's their job.
So seems like, you know, try to recruit people like that.
And then you got some real power behind you.
That's actually a great idea.
And I think that's also a good idea in terms of like the NSA domestic spying, because a lot of companies are now having difficulties in foreign markets, you know, the tech companies, because the foreigners are going to say, well, why should we buy Apple or Google or, you know, Microsoft products when we know the NSA has snuck into the back of those products and can easily access what we're doing with those products.
So I think that's very true, what you're saying in terms of just general American market power.
Right.
I mean, hey, the business of America is business, but which businesses?
The market ones or Lockheed still gets whatever they want at the expense of everyone else?
You know, I would also suggest that you want to check this out.
And it speaks exactly to what you're just saying.
There's a gal named Veronique DeRuby.
She's an economist at the Mercatus Center.
And about six months ago or so, she just released a report showing that every dollar that's pulled from the Department of Defense, the budget, adds about $1.30 to the market.
So just in terms of, you know, increasing the growth of our own market here domestically, every dollar you pull out of the Defense Department increases $1.30 in the American marketplace.
Oh, that's great.
That's exactly what we've been talking about on the show for the last few days.
I asked Bob Murphy about that.
You know, what if I could magically just abolish the entire national security state, the Pentagon and the Homeland Security and all the rest of it all at once?
And all those people were thrown out of work and how bad of a dislocation it would be.
And he talked about the unseen and all the great jobs and all the increased standard of living that would result in how it would all be okay and in relatively short order and whatever.
But now you're telling me there's a great study with some numbers I can cite.
So I'm going to definitely have to look into that.
Yeah, of course, that makes sense.
Why should it be profitable to take a bunch of resources, put in labor and time and mix it all together to make high explosives and then kill somebody and destroy some property with it?
That doesn't sound like an economic positive for anyone.
No, definitely not.
And, you know, keep in mind that we're not saying we don't want to get rid of the whole budget.
We don't want to go down to zero.
You know, we recognize, at least as part of our project, that we will have a standing army.
We will have a Navy.
We'll have an Air Force.
We will have the Marines.
We'll have Coast Guard.
But we can spend a lot less and make it that much more effective in what they do.
And I think you and I would agree what they do needs to be discussed more clearly in terms of moving away from a kind of a neoconnish foreign policy and being a little bit non interventionist.
That's my personal take.
That's not necessarily the totality of the Pentagon budget campaign's take.
But I think that would also save us a lot of money, too, if we weren't so invested in other countries' internal politics, militarily, that is.
You know, I'm sorry I don't remember who the author was, but I just read a thing the other day where they had compiled a bunch of block quotes from different military officials.
I guess the Secretary of Defense and some other military officials where the threat is over and over again, as they put it.
You know, if these sequester cuts go into effect, I won't be able to field an army on the other side of the planet at a moment's notice like you want me to all the time.
And that's what they were all saying.
None of them.
I guess it hadn't occurred to them that a lot of us would be saying good and that and that maybe if they really want the money, they should threaten that they won't be able to protect the homeland anymore or whatever their myth is that their job is.
But they weren't even bothering.
They were just saying, listen, we're not going to be able to impose a world empire on this kind of budget.
So you're kind of going to have to choose.
And I sort of wonder whether they meant to say it that way quite deliberately that maybe they don't want to field armies on such a moment's notice as often anymore for now.
Anyway, maybe they want to come home, rebuild a little bit or whatever their interest is.
But nobody's saying that poor America, the homeland between the homeland, the space between Canada and Mexico will all be under permanent threat from the dangerous rest of the world coming for us.
Right.
Well, you know, you open this conversation by talking about the opportunities we now have in terms of cutting the Pentagon budget.
But we have incredible opportunities now to reshape how we deal with the rest of the world.
And it's a division within the Republican Party.
And the debate that's taking place is great.
And I'm hoping that the Justin Amash, Rand Paul, Senator Lee side, which encourages us to engage the world diplomatically and commercially and culturally and not militarily as much wins out and the McCain side dies off.
That's at least my hope.
Yeah.
Well, what's funny is it's in times of crisis like this that the lines get a lot more clear about who's on whose side.
And I think more and more, you know, this argument has much less to do with liberalism and conservatism among the people and which side they choose, as it has to do with the powerful versus everyone else.
And people who, you know, typically are pretty hawkish are now over it and are, you know, OK, we had our fun for 13 years blowing stuff up.
But now let's, you know, my mom's welfare is getting cut now.
You know, my my Medicare, my benefit is now under threat.
It's time to go ahead and knock this off here.
And it's only, you know, people like John McCain who don't even represent their constituency, you know, their popular constituency whatsoever, but only the special interests are the ones kind of sort of left standing out there in the wind by themselves where we can all see them very plainly for who they are and what they represent.
It's not the will of the American people.
It's something else.
Very true.
And, you know, and actually, would you mind if I gave the switchboard number to the Senate?
I encourage your listeners to call and call their senators, encourage them to keep the Budget Control Act numbers and not to go over sequestration numbers and get us more in debt.
Yeah, well, first of all, tell us specifically where they can read that so that they get it, you know, all their soundbites right when they call in.
Sure.
I would suggest a few different places.
You can and I'm just going to give some places on the right.
I'll give a couple on the right, a couple on the left if you want to find, depending on your predilection, some information.
So you can go to National Tax Creditors Union.
They have a blog post, an action alert on the Budget Control Act, which provides a lot of good information.
Freedom Works, the same, as well as the Taxpayer Protection Alliance.
And on the left, I'm thinking, when without war, might have something on their website, might be a good place to go.
And you have to go to Pentagon Budget Campaign, the non-partisan website, which just has a lot of really good information.
But what you want to do is call and after you read all the information, call them, call your senators and say, you know, keep the Budget Control Act number of $498 billion.
You can even suggest you like it less, which I would encourage you to do, but don't let any of the senators go above it and get us even more in debt, increase our deficit.
And the number is 202-224-3121.
And that's the Congressional Switchboard.
All you got to do is ask for your particular senator.
And that'd be very helpful.
Well, now talk a little bit about how helpful it'll be because, you know, senators, they're a bunch of senators.
What do they care about what we say to them?
Well, you know, it's funny because yes and no.
They do care and they don't care.
So I've had conversations with a member of Congress and they'll say, all we need is 10 phone calls and we'll pay attention on an issue.
And if they get a lot more than they pay that much more attention.
Now, there are some issues for ideological reasons or for political reasons, and they're not going to give a crap how many calls they get.
But there are enough members in the House and the Senate who care enough just for political reasons because they want their constituents to be happy.
At 10, 15, 20 phone calls on a particular issue will move them.
Like I said, it doesn't move everyone on all issues, but it will help for sure.
Yeah, it just kind of changes the atmosphere a little bit, the background to their discussions.
Well, you know, the people have been calling in saying this and that, however much weight they give that it sort of means something, right?
No, it really does.
It really does.
Mm hmm.
All right.
And now, I'm sorry, this is sort of belongs back at the beginning of the interview, but could you give us some examples of the kinds of stuff where they're just throwing money away in ways that people wouldn't believe, except it really is true?
Because, you know, we hear about the $900 hammer or whatever, but that was a long time ago.
Sure.
So there's Abrams A1.
It's a tank and the Department of Defense actually does not want it because all it does is sit in the desert.
I think in Nevada, there's a place that they sit there.
And I think they're spending about $3 billion on either new ones or revamping the old ones.
And the Department of Defense doesn't want it because they're not going to be used.
My understanding is that it keeps getting funded because at least one of the production facilities is in Ohio, where Representative Boehner, you know, head of the House side resides.
So it's at least that piece of it is very political.
Why they keep funding it.
Another project, which is tens of billions of dollars, and it's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars when it's all said and done, is the F-35, which is a combat aircraft that has been proven mostly ineffective, high cost overruns.
And a lot of people are just saying it's just a waste of our money.
And they'd rather go back to the older versions of aircraft that have proved effective in combat, including in combat more recently in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But unfortunately, we're moving forward with the F-35.
So if any of your listeners want to, you know, there's actually a side effort as part of the effort on part of the transportation effort that is focusing in on, you know, reforming the F-35.
Some people want to get rid of it.
I would go that far.
Just get rid of it because I think it's just a complete waste of money.
But that's another example of tens of billions, and soon enough, be hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers' money is flushed on the toilet.
Well, and then didn't they announce that they were quitting making the F-22?
Because at least the F-22 can drop a bomb on the ground.
The F-22 can't even shoot at the ground.
So and but then they announced that now we're going to keep making them anyway.
The F-22 I'm not so familiar with.
But what I can speak to is that the F-35 is supposed to replace the A-10.
And I'm actually heading to a conference on Friday on the A-10.
The Air Force wants to get rid of them.
But the guys on the ground, especially in Afghanistan, have been very pleased with the A-10 because it can fly really slow and drop a lot of ordnance.
And it's been very helpful for close quarters, protecting our guys who are under threat by the Taliban, where the F-35 cannot do that kind of combat mission.
So I can't speak to the F-22, but I can say that there are other aircraft that would better replace the F-35 than we already have.
So we don't even have to, you know, the only thing you might have to do is update them, which is all expensive and creating a whole new aircraft.
Right.
And, you know, I got this one here just to finish up here.
We're almost out of time for the show.
But I just thought this one was hilarious from Fox News on October the 7th.
New Air Force cargo planes fly straight into mothballs.
And these C-27Js are flying out of Italy, landing in Arizona and going straight to the boneyard.
At a cost of 50 million bucks each.
All right.
Good times.
Thanks again for your time.
Michael Osterlenk, everybody.
Appreciate it.
And check him out at the American Conservative Magazine.
And check out this great piece.
Can the Pentagon be tamed?
At opendemocracy.net.
They got links to all the different groups he's mentioned for you there.
Thanks for listening.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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