02/24/10 – Frida Berrigan – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
It's Freda Berrigan.
She's got an article here under Tom Englehardt's name at Antiwar.com.
It's called Pimping Weapons to the World or America's Global Weapons Monopoly.
And Freda is the Senior Program Associate at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Institute.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thanks very much for joining us on the show today.
Oh, definitely.
Wow, so you say it's not even fair to call it a global arms trade anymore.
We're going to have to change our lingo to fit the new circumstances?
Well, yes.
We have to change our lingo to fit the new circumstances.
And, you know, it's a neat, easy way of talking about it.
It just slides right off the tongue to talk about the global arms trade.
We don't even really think about what each of those words mean.
But the United States essentially has the corner on the market, and not 50%, not half, but nearly 70% of the weapons sold in the last year for which we have full data, which is 2008, came from the United States.
So we sold more than $30 billion worth of weapons, and our next largest competitor, if you can call it that, was Italy with a little over $3 billion worth of weapons sales that year.
So we're sort of the only game in town.
And global weapons monopoly doesn't have the same kind of ring to it.
It's got bigger words and more syllables, but it's a much more accurate way of talking about this part of our economy, this part of our trade, this part of the military-industrial complex.
Yeah.
It almost seems like it's all we ever make anymore is weapons.
Well, you know, I really wanted to find out what the numbers were on everything else that the United States exports.
And I think I need another degree after my name in order to understand the overall export of stuff from the Department of Labor and the statistics that they put out.
But most of what else we sell is food.
Grains is a lot of what we export.
We export a lot of recycled metal.
We export a lot of used paper.
We export a lot of things that are essentially trash in this country but are useful to other countries.
But in terms of, like, advanced manufactured goods, certainly weapons are right up there at the top of the list if they're not at the actual top.
Well, it's sort of part of that unipolar world such as it was for 20 years or so there, right, where basically without the Soviet Union there's just our side.
And at least as far as anybody else who's independent from us, like Russia or China, who still maintain their independence in many ways, they're far below what the military would call a near-peer competitor.
We are the only game in town, so we're only selling all these arms to all our friends, right?
And there's no danger of a lot of people being killed with them, except by our army when we use them, right?
Right, or when they turn against us and use them against the United States.
I mean, yeah, we're no longer in competition with the Soviet Union, and China is, as you said, not up to near-peer rival status.
So in a sense we compete with ourselves, and we sell more and more advanced technology, and we create more and more advanced technology because, for example, we've sold F-16 fighter planes all over the world.
Dozens of countries fly Lockheed Martin's F-16 fighter plane.
And then a rationale develops back here on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon.
Oh, well, all these other countries have F-16 fighter planes.
We need something more sophisticated.
We need something more cutting-edge.
We need the Joint Strike Fighter.
We need the F-22 Raptor.
And we wouldn't need that plane if we hadn't sold F-16s to all these other countries.
And so that rationale works for a while, and then the military-industrial complex wants to sell even those systems abroad.
So there's a push that I write about in the piece.
There's a push now to export the F-22 to Australia and to Japan.
And then if that ends up happening, other countries will clamor for it as well.
So we compete with ourselves.
Yeah, then we'll need F-55s.
That's right, F-200s.
And no one really wins in this competition except for Lockheed Martin and a few members of Congress.
And that's about it.
You know, there's a great article about Lockheed Martin.
It's by Richard Cummings, and it's called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
It was published on Playboy.com.
Have you ever read that?
That is a really good article.
I did read that.
And for those with virgin eyes and ears, you can go and read it at CorpWatch.org as well.
And in this article, he talks about how—I just love the way he portrays this, too.
He says, so Lockheed tried to make this plane.
I forget what it's called, but it was supposed to compete with the DC-10 and regular commercial airliners back in the 1970s.
And I think they sold a few to Delta, but then that was it.
Nobody wanted the plane, and it was a big bust.
So they just lost tons of money, billions that they had invested in developing this plane that nobody wanted.
They couldn't sell to anyone.
And so they decided, you know what?
Forget the market.
We just need to sell to the Pentagon.
That's it.
Just make weapons.
And then they had another meeting that said, well, geez, you know, it's hard to guess what kind of weapons the Pentagon is going to want.
And we could still lose out to our competitors if we're researching and developing for fighting in Eastern Europe, and yet the next war is going to be in the Middle East.
So maybe we need to just create the foreign policy and control exactly what the foreign policy of America will be, and that way we'll know which kind of weapons to make.
And it was simply just a business decision.
You can picture all these bald, old, fat Republicans sitting around a table at the board meeting at this big old table, just deciding, kind of shrugging, OK, so let's create the committee to expand NATO up to Russia's border all throughout Central Asia, and we'll call it a policy.
And it's really just about selling F-16s and F-22s.
That's right, and you can see that same dynamic in the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was formed in the lead-up to Bush's invasion in early 2003, which also was peopled by many Lockheed Martin alumni and former CEOs and all of that.
Yeah, Bruce Jackson.
That's right, exactly, Bruce Jackson.
So, yeah, this creation of foreign policy to line the pockets of stockholders and to make big payouts for CEOs is pretty endemic and essentially doesn't really get all that much attention.
I mean, I'm sure thousands of people read that article in Playboy, but it's not something that rose to the level of water cooler talk or is the kind of thing that we're all talking about all the time.
And yet it is a major push as the United States goes out into the world.
This is what we lead with.
We lead with the weapons manufactured by Boeing and Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and a handful of other companies.
Yeah, I think he shows in that article, Cummings does, that the Iraq war was basically, at least the very beginning, the shock and awe campaign such as it was and all that, was basically just like a Lockheed promotional video come true with all the different planes and all the different ground-based missiles and air-based missiles and all the radars and all the thing.
It was basically just like Lockheed had set it up.
Lockheed's war has a nicer ring than Operation New Dawn, huh?
Well, you know, that ring's really nice.
I guess it's not trespassing anymore if you call it New Dawn.
Well, now here's something, though.
How do you have an arms race with nobody forever?
I mean, this is getting ridiculous.
John Mueller points out in Overblown that peace is breaking out all over.
The U.N., as much as I'm against having a U.N. and collective security and all that nonsense anyway, but such as it is, they have these peacekeeping forces that come in in order to enforce ceasefires or preserve them or whatever.
They're short on peacekeepers.
There's too many peacefires all over the world.
Virtually the only wars going on are ones fought by America.
Everywhere else, certainly there's no near-peer competitor.
Look at who we're fighting, a bunch of people in their own country, citizens basically, civilians in their own lands.
So I'm watching TV the other day, and they have all about laser weapons on the Discovery Channel, one of those, and the Science Channel maybe, and they have all these computer animations of America fighting wars in space with laser beams against, I guess, some other major power with space military like ours or something, and yet who do they imagine they're going to be fighting?
Again, the Russians and the Chinese and the Europeans combined couldn't take us on in space.
I mean, this is, I don't know.
It seems like they'll just keep cashing checks no matter what, and they'll just shoot at rocks up there or old space junk.
Right.
Well, you know, Nigeria has a space program, so they might emerge as our new space rival.
They're an oil-rich country, and they're putting satellites in space, so we better watch out.
I mean, I think for so long, or for half a century, the United States oriented itself against the Soviet Union and against a nation that was more or less on the level with the United States, and we were locked in this sort of long kind of embrace, militarized embrace.
And I think the last 20 years without that have been rocky and uncomfortable for the military-industrial complex, even as military budgets have essentially continued to rise with only a slight dip early in the Clinton years as we sort of stabbed around for a new mission for this enormous military might that we had.
And so you can remember a whole series of rationales for our military power.
We were going to be the world's policemen.
We were going to sort of help out, extend a helping hand in any sort of small conflict.
We were going to be the world's democracy promoter.
We were going to fight the war on drugs.
And then September 11th was sort of like a gift in a way, in the sense that now all of a sudden we have a new rival, but instead of being a nation-state that we can kind of understand and kind of set ourselves up against in some sort of parity, we have no idea, we have no concept of how big it is.
It's everywhere.
It's nowhere.
And so it requires a whole new military, a whole new sort of way of countering it.
And it's not quite the same as that sort of old polarity and parity, but it certainly is paying dividends in the sense of rising military budgets and new technologies that the United States is developing to fight this enemy that will never be defeated and will never be obliterated and can just move from country to country.
And so it's almost as though any nation could now be our rival because whether we have a beef with their government or not, if they're harboring terrorist cells or there's small groups of people in that country, well then all bets are off.
So Yemen was kind of the latest on the list, but the list is kind of endless.
But Boeing and Lockheed Martin and other corporations are kind of worried about this.
They're not sure that this is going to last forever.
And so every once in a while we kind of poke a stick at China and make sure that there's still a military power and that they still sort of have animosity towards the United States.
And even though we're financially and economically very intertwined, and in fact the United States is very dependent on China economically, we're going to sell $6 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan in a move that does very little except serve to antagonize China.
And I think China's military budget has increased significantly over the last five or ten years.
They're modernizing.
They're developing new technologies.
They're establishing new military relationships throughout Africa, for example.
And we could get a near-pure rival, probably not for another ten years or so.
But we could also not if we went in the other direction.
But the military-industrial complex doesn't gain from that kind of thinking at all.
Wow.
It really is funny, like if you look at it just in historical terms, where Nixon went and shook hands with Mao Zedong and finished splitting them off successfully from the Soviet Union and made friends with them.
They're our biggest trading partner besides Canada, I guess.
And here, as Pat Buchanan pointed out in his article on antiwar.com yesterday, we're borrowing billions of dollars from China to secure and occupy Central Asia to keep it out of the hands of China, to protect it from China.
And this whole thing is, you know, it makes sense if you're a Lockheed stockholder or a Lockheed vice president or something like Bruce Jackson, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to the rest of us.
It's just, you know, it was like when they did those missile strikes in Somalia from a submarine.
Like, wait a minute, we've got a $10 billion submarine to shoot missiles at and miss, of course, and simply murder women and children in Somalia trying to get suspects in the embassy attacks or something?
This is what they call the self-licking ice cream cone at this point?
The self-licking ice cream cone and the, you know, the hammer to kill the fly or something like that.
I mean, the metaphors are pretty endless.
But, yeah, it doesn't make any sense to anybody except for this select few that you named.
And it makes less and less sense as we look at our economy and as we look at, you know, the dissolution of so much of the United States that there's really no sector of our economy that is standing on its own two legs these days.
And neither is the weapons industry.
It just continues to be subsidized by American taxpayers to an extent that is almost unconscionable.
And the military budget keeps going up and the dividend for stockholders keeps going up and the weapons keep going out.
And it seems like a nice, neat, closed circle that makes no sense and yet makes a lot of money.
Well, and so much of the population, as you point out, the military-industrial complex has got its tentacles in everything.
And so many people are dependent on it.
In fact, that guy, that suicide bomb, the IRS building in Austin last week, that was one of his complaints was that the crass, uncaring national government had closed down some military bases in Southern California and they just didn't care about the consequences for the poor people there.
Never mind that those military bases are a huge net loss to everyone.
If that money's coming in, I don't know, from the taxpayers of New York and New Jersey and it's landing in California, they see it as a benefit.
And when the base closes, they lose.
But here, they've been losing to pay for those bases.
The people of California pay for the ones in Arkansas or whatever.
The whole thing is a net loss.
But it's the kind of thing that will drive a guy to murder, to close down the military base that he relies on.
Yeah.
I mean, it's like Nick Terce says, it's the military-industrial everything complex where, like, even Colgate toothpaste, right?
If we didn't have a giant war all the time, then Colgate's, you know, that would be some giant percentage of their sales every year to the Pentagon that they would lose out on.
And so they would just assume, I'm, you know, putting these words in their mouth, but them and the average, you know, tube sock company and boots and buttons for shirts and all the scientists at the universities and everybody who's in on it for their own little reason, well, their own little personal reason, would just as soon have the war forever.
It's really almost all of us when you come down to it.
Hell, if I didn't have an empire to fight, what would I do for a living?
Well, but, you know, if we were at peace, we'd still need tube socks and toothpaste.
Well, of course.
But that's the thing is nobody wants to make the transition, right?
It's like that movie Falling Down with Michael Douglas where he goes crazy because he lost his job making nuclear weapons.
Like we should have just kept making hydrogen bombs so that he could stay employed.
But then he went on a murder spree over it.
Same thing happened in Austin last week.
Right, yeah, yeah.
You know, it's a shock to people's system to have to go from, you know, one situation to another like that.
And that's, I think that's, it's sort of just like the wars themselves.
That's what the war party never really understands is that it really is human lives, individuals that are important to themselves and to others that they're messing with here.
It's not just an academic exercise.
These trillions of dollars could have gone to productive uses.
These lives could still be alive and not in shallow graves.
Right, yeah.
I mean, I think thinking about these transitions is really important.
And certainly, you know, Boeing and Lockheed are thinking, well, at some point, you know, the military budget has to come down.
And so, and they're preparing for new kinds of wars and new kinds of threats and creating new threats as a way of staving that off.
But we also need to be thinking about that and how do we start to prepare now so that, you know, when the Lockheed Martin plant closes because peace on Earth has been declared, you know, how are we already ready to help transition those workers from making F-16 fighter planes to making fishing rods or solar panels or windmills or, you know, whatever.
There's this sense that, like, because this is how it is today, we have to keep it this way.
And certainly there are forces that are keeping it that way.
But I think this also is an opportunity for us to think really creatively and systemically so that we can say, you know, you do deserve to have a job.
And wouldn't it be better if you weren't making F-16 fighter planes?
Wouldn't you like your job a little bit better if you were doing something else?
And you can get paid just as well.
And here, like, let's do this together.
Yeah, sounds right to me.
Again, it's funny.
When everybody talks plain common sense about how things could be, it sounds so wild and far off from the way things are now, you know?
There's nothing utopian or grandiose about what you just said.
All you said was, hey, let's just be normal people in a normal place and live normal lives instead of this craziness.
And yet it almost makes you sound like the fringe person.
This money could be spent on something other than bombs all the time, huh?
You know, we could actually make advancements in things other than tracking systems for explosives, you know?
Yeah.
And, you know, we get better returns on our money.
I mean, it does sound like pie in the sky.
And yet economically it makes so much sense.
You know, there's this new report from the Political Economic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, and they look at, you know, what's the return on investment on $1 billion?
And you put that money into the military, and you create, like, 11,000 jobs.
You put that same money into education, you create 17,000, 18,000 jobs.
So it's not just about, hey, the military is bad, and we shouldn't put money in it.
It's like we can make almost twice as many jobs and meet the needs of the next generation if we take that money out of the military and invest it in young people, invest it in literacy, invest it in schools.
But, yeah, you start talking about this stuff in some circles, and you sound like a crazy person.
And yet the thing that's crazy is to build a whole economy on perpetual war and the killing of people.
Like, that's insane.
And yet that's what our country's been doing for way too long.
Yeah.
You know, I remember, I think maybe the first time that I interviewed you, it was about the rods from God and laser weapons and all this stuff in outer space.
And back to that TV show I saw on the Discovery Channel the other day.
This is all just perfectly normal, right?
Like, we must weaponize space, we must have all these neat lasers.
And never mind the fact that we have no interplanetary enemies at all.
What are they doing?
That we know about.
But it seems so normal on the Discovery Channel.
Like, look at this neat laser that you bought.
Yep.
It's just perfectly, yeah, that Frida Bergen, she's got a real chip on her shoulder.
She's against weaponizing space.
But meanwhile, who do we have to shoot at?
Nobody.
Rods from God, too.
I like that, that the military calls themselves God when they drop inanimate carbon rods on people.
And, by the way, does that weapon system work?
Have they completed that?
No, no, that's on somebody's computer somewhere.
It's some polymer model in some lobby of some weapons manufacturer.
I mean, it's not.
We're working on it.
I saw where they have the laser reflector is now on these little pistons, and it can change the focus, you know, in milliseconds to adjust for fluctuations in the atmosphere.
So they will be able to cook you from space here in no time, just like that movie The Real Genius kind of thing, only from a satellite.
So we should all be looking forward to that, too.
They can cook you from space, but people are getting their gas and electric turned off around this country and unable to cook meals for themselves and unable to afford groceries and all of that.
So, yeah, there's some real crazy stuff going on here, Scott.
All right, well, at least we'll be safe when Mars attacks.
That's right.
All right, everybody, that's Frida Bergen.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Take care, Scott.
And, by the way, you can find Frida's most recent article that's on Antiwar.com under Tom Englehart's name.
You know how he does with the introductions at the top.
So, anyway, it's Pimping Weapons to the World or America's Global Weapons Monopoly.
And Frida Bergen, you can find her at the New America Foundation, where she is the senior program associate of their Arms and Security Initiative.