04/26/16 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing our good friend Kelly B. Vallejos.
She is a regular writer at the American Conservative magazine, and I hate slash love this new article.
Welcome back to the show, Kelly.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Thank you, Scott.
Thanks for having me back.
Very happy to talk to you again.
And the article is called How Wartime Washington Lives in Luxury.
Meet the New Class Profiting from the Growth of the National Security State.
And if I could just ruin the article for everyone, basically what it says is their worst imagination about how it is and just how much, just how many, just how corrupt our imperial court is, how many people are involved in it and all of that is their worst imagination is correct.
At least.
That's basically the bottom line of the article.
Yeah.
Well, you know, part of me wants to think that maybe this article is old news for some people, because when we talk about wartime Washington, we're really talking about post 9-11, which is almost 15 years now.
And this is true.
After 9-11, the flood of billions of dollars into the federal government for counterterrorism, homeland security, national security, defense war had created such a boon for defense contractors, but not only the defense contractors, but the lobbyists who went on the Hill to get more money, the consultants, the people doing the war games, the planning, all of the what you would call the imperial court had ballooned to enormous proportions after 9-11.
And so the Washington DC area has benefited enormously from this in terms of real estate values and construction booms and population and all of the luxuries that go with having all this money.
It's not new news.
But what I think is fresh about this story is that it's still continuing, despite the fact that there was a major recession in 2008, a financial collapse, a real estate bubble burst.
The Washington DC area has fared very well through this.
And it is because despite what the chicken littles in the defense community and the federal government and Congress have called the sequestration and the pulling back and the tightening of budgets, the money is still flowing.
And so you have not only Washington DC, but you have Virginia and Maryland getting billions of dollars in federal contracting money every year, which is flowing into those communities.
And so they have been able to fare this real estate bust, not only survive it, but thrive through it.
So people who have bought homes maybe in the 1990s, you know, for a what you would call a, you know, maybe a nominal price, you know, within this, you know, ring of the Beltway are now facing, you know, now have are sitting on $1 million properties or more, depending on upgrades and blowouts and buildouts and, and what have you, but the property itself, even without all the upgrades has, has, has doubled, maybe even tripled in some cases.
So I think what was refreshing about this article is to show that, like you said, people's worst, worst characterizations or beliefs about the Beltway are indeed true, but, but they are worse.
And there, there are reasons behind that.
It's not just the fact that there's money flowing, but there is a, a ecology here of, of, of people and, and, and, and true believers and establishment who, who fight every day to keep up that pace and to keep up that lifestyle.
And it is, it is, it is an organism and to itself.
Yeah.
Now, and see, I think this is the part that I like so much about it.
The, the portrait painted in this article is I really liked the way that you talk about the different neighborhoods and, you know, they spread out here into Maryland and here into Virginia.
And I just kind of have this, you know, airplane windows, I view of this massive beast parasite, you know, sucking the blood of the American people.
That's our money, right?
It's not like, Oh, they they're rich while we're poor.
We're poor because they're rich.
This is our money that they are taking from us by force.
And I can just see, you know, you know, in my mind's eye, the way you, you paint the picture in the book of these neighborhoods, just getting richer and richer and richer as all the old houses are torn down and all the mansions are built on top of them.
And how these suburbs, these, these quaint, nice little suburbs end up getting torn down and turned into these whole, a whole new generation of, of, of construction and all this all for the bubble, the government, the federal government employee bubble that in that, as you say, is absolutely recession proof.
Not just do they cause the recession, but they're always completely unaffected by it.
In fact, they always get the stimulus spending.
This is how we fix the economy when we ruin it.
See, is we spend even more money on government employees doing things to people.
And then, of course, as you say, all the contractors, all the planners, all the, everyone else involved gets their take too.
And it's just, yeah, you know, as, as there are real people in America going really hungry.
I mean, I disagree with Bernie Sanders solutions to these problems, but when he talks about child mortality rates and poverty rates in parts of the United States of America right now, as you look at these goons who've never really worked a day in their life, cashing six-figure paychecks, you know, of tax dollars at everyone else's expense, it's pretty maddening, you know, it's really something else.
It really is.
And, and I think, and, and also, you know, the point that I make in, in, in the article, and which I have to say, you know, the article is based on some interviews that I had done with Mike Lofgren, who works, who had retired from service, working on, on the Hill, on the budget committee for 30 years, but also lived in Alexandria, right in the, in the center of this hot mess.
He had written a book and one of the chapters was Beltway land, where he had connected what he calls the deep state, you know, all these forces working together to uphold the status quo with, you know, the, the lifestyle and culture of the Beltway.
But, you know, what he points out and what I tried to convey was that, you know, while the, the, the counties in this Beltway region, which extends beyond the, the sort of like the physical Beltway of Washington, are the wealthiest in the country right now, but there's also the greatest income equality gap in the Washington area.
So you have this, you have this dichotomy, this really sad dichotomy, where you have the richest people in the country, but then you also have the poorest.
You have the people who were born here.
You're, you're, you're people, mostly minorities in, in Washington, DC, which are, their wages have gone down over time because there are the, you know, high school or non-college educated, you know, workers and all their wages have gone, their jobs have shrunk.
And then, and then you have like, you know, people who are in professions that did not survive the recession.
So they might've been white collar workers, people like in media, for example, information technology, other, other contractors who didn't survive the sort of Darwinism that went on in the recession, who are still struggling to make ends meet.
So you, you have what, you know, Bernie Sanders has been talking about on the campaign trail.
You have this, you know, the haves and have nots are so in this, in this, this sort of magnified in this beltway and in this beltway region.
And, you know, and just to get back to the, the government workers, you know, one of the points I tried to make also was, yes, all this money is flowing into the federal government, but it's really the private sector that feeds off this federal government dole that has really gone, taken the DC culture and lifestyle luxury to the next level, because they don't have the, the, the sort of the salary caps that, you know, as far as much as we want to, you know, knock the government workers, they do have, they do have caps on their salaries, whereas the private sector, I mean, we're talking, you know, we're limitless and, you know, after citizens United and which, you know, unlimited amounts of money have been able to go, you know, from the corporate banks and to, into campaigns, you know, super PACs, you know, you have a lot of money flowing here.
That's not necessarily government money, but it's all money.
That's, I guess we'd say that is, is, is working to, to feed the government, to get something out of the government.
So you have this really, you have this out of control, private sector class here.
That's just been making money hand over fist.
And, but you're correct.
It is all connected in some way to the, the, the, the trough, so to speak.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're getting it out of the treasure.
It's government money, but it's going right into, you know, corporate profits.
Exactly.
I think there's gotta be a way we need to, I think I even figured out a solution to this at one point, but now I can't remember anymore.
We need to find a different way to spell the two different kinds of privatization.
There's government getting out of the business of doing something and allowing the market to take care of it.
And then there's government contracts to private companies to carry out state functions, which is an entirely different thing.
And, uh, you know, the, they're both called the same thing though, unfortunately, but yeah.
And, you know, like you said at the beginning, this all really started with the Bush years, except that we already know that we already had a military industrial complex since world war two and all the bankers and all the, you know, most powerful and wealthiest interests in America.
They were already on the dole before nine 11 ever happened.
And ever since then, now there's this whole new Homeland security state and a whole new level of national security state beyond what was ever even imagined back when we already had the biggest government in the history of the world.
And so now it's, you know, there've been a few books, um, uh, uh, Arkin, uh, William Arkin, formerly with the Washington post, uh, has written a couple of books about this one.
I'm with Dana Priest about top secret America and all this, where it's just a whole other level of spending and a whole other, a whole new generation of businesses grown up on the, you know, on government connections like this.
Um, I'm reminded of that article by Andrew Coburn about when the, a couple of years ago when the coup d'etat and Ukraine blew up in their face and it led to the war in the East and all that.
Um, Andrew Coburn said they threw a big party in crystal city where all the contractors got together and they were so excited that we're going to have a new cold war with Russia.
They're not even ashamed at all.
They don't think they should be.
This is what they're for, you know, let's all celebrate and get drunk and, and have fun.
Cause we're going to sell more big ticket planes to American taxpayers who can possibly afford them for wars.
We couldn't possibly want or need.
Yeah.
I'm glad you brought up that top secret, uh, series that, that Dana Priest and Arkin had done because, um, I go back to that many times in my writing because they had done an unbelievable amount of research on the, um, what you had, you know, correctly called this sort of like, I don't want to say underground, but just sort of like this shadow, uh, the shadow, uh, security state that we're living in on which, you know, tens of thousands, we're not talking a few thousands, tens of thousands of people were hired and given security clearances to do, uh, security intelligence work in this country, in the Washington area.
So you have entire, like basically villages and hamlets that had, had, uh, sprung up in like, you know, formerly wooded area, uh, outside of DC that are now these thriving little communities because they had to build the office buildings, you know, to accommodate these, these thousands of employees plus housing and schools.
So, I mean, you were absolutely correct.
There was, I mean, the military industrial complex, we know where the origins of that were, you know, 60, 70 years ago, uh, when Eisenhower first made that speech, fine.
But after 9-11, you had literally a new, uh, security state had, has, has grown up in this Washington DC area and all of the money and all of the jobs that that has, has entailed.
And that was, that had, uh, steeled the, the, um, this, this part of the country against, uh, the, this financial, um, you know, uh, collapse that was happening in 2008.
It's still here.
We might not talk about it as much because we're not actively, I mean, we're still at war that's, you know, granted, but I mean, we're, we're not in the, the, you know, we don't have hundreds of thousands of troops overseas.
So, you know, I think we get dulled to it as, you know, um, as a nation that there, that this is all going on.
Uh, but, uh, I, I believe, and I think I kind of hinted that in my article in my, in the article that, you know, things are going to start ramping up.
I mean, if Donald Trump, you know, even if it's Donald Trump who wins or Hillary, either one, uh, in the fall, I guarantee there will be a ramp up of, uh, defense spending once again, uh, to accommodate, you know, these flare ups and what's going on in Syria right now and Iraq with these more special forces and troops going out there.
So I would imagine that, that, that defense contracts, contractors will be cheering on either side, no matter who wins.
Um, because they, they do feel like that they have been, uh, they haven't gotten their, uh, the level of, of, uh, funding that they were, you know, uh, enjoying up until, you know, the sequestration and the budget tightening, you know, all in quotes there.
Yep.
Well, and, you know, it's easy to imagine too, how, like when you're talking about an entire little, you know, small town where they all have all this security clearance that the rest of us don't have, it's pretty easy to see how that breeds contempt by them for us that they really do know things that we just don't know.
And so then that becomes the, uh, you know, their excuse for more or less just freezing us out and treating, you know, regular private citizens, uh, the non-billionaires of us anyway, um, like, uh, you know, we're all just basically livestock.
We might as well all be, uh, might as well all be illegal immigrants to them or something.
We don't have a say because, you know, what could we possibly say that, uh, you know, could override what they know that they know we don't know.
And something that Ellsberg talks about in his book secrets, um, about that, that attitude among government employees.
But now you're talking about millions of new contractors and new government employees, millions and millions of them who all are in that loop that the rest of us are not in.
And so then, uh, you know, they, they end up of course, making things worse and making us feel that much more alienated from them.
And it's a, it's a vicious cycle and all of that, but you can see their mindset when, uh, there really is, there really can be an entire consensus based on entire sets of facts that the rest of us are excluded from.
Yeah.
Right.
And, and, and, and Mike Laughrin talks about this in his book that, you know, it, it's easy to talk about the elite and the establishment in Washington that, that are behind this sort of, um, crazy lifestyle and this culture that we disdain so much.
But let's talk about the ideology about behind it.
And when you're talking about, uh, tens of thousands of people who are either directly connected or indirectly through contractors, uh, to the federal dole, the federal government, you know, it becomes this self sustaining ecosystem in which you have to, I mean, every, every day you wake up, uh, your job is not only just to, to, to complete whatever mission that you have on duty, but it's also to, to, to sustain the reason for being on, on that mission.
And so you're, your whole life here in the beltway is to ensure that you stay in the beltway at the level of comfort at the, in the status quo.
And it, and it might not be conscious, but everything you believe every, you know, is, is, is, is, is part of sustaining the government power and authority and mission and, uh, and, and, and budgets.
So, you know, everybody's working together to make sure that it continues on the same glide path, which, which of course rewards the people who, you know, are taking back home, these big fat salaries and have these wonderful pensions and retirements and can send their kids to the best schools in the area, you know, um, and live, live in homes that, you know, most of us, you know, 90% of the, of, of, of Americans couldn't afford.
So it, it, it is a vicious cycle because it is about ideology.
You won't find people in these ranks, you know, talking out, questioning, questioning the role, questioning the, the mission, you know, and you see this, you know, on a, a smaller level or, uh, you know, a more granular level in the military.
But I think it goes for this whole, you know, sort of Washington culture, you know, uh, you're not, you're not going to question, you know, um, the, the, the, the Imperial mission, so to speak.
Right.
Yeah.
No, if there's one thing they all agree on, it's that we all need them real bad for something.
And of course, you know, I forget who was somebody once talked about, or, you know, I don't know what he said, but something along the lines about all the award shows for the entertainment industry in LA all year long or whatever.
And that, you know, the entertainment industry's point is simple.
They are very important and we better pay attention to what it is that they're doing or whatever.
Yeah.
It's the very same thing with any industry, especially like you say, where people are making a lot of money at it.
Uh, nobody wants that gravy train to stop.
So first order of business is rationalizing it and making it seem like, uh, you know, it, it's all for the right.
Cause, uh, then, I mean, otherwise, I guess it's pretty easy to solve a conscience with a lot of money, especially for, for a bureaucrat, but still, you know, it's easier when, Hey, don't you know, there's terrorists out there we got to protect from, et cetera, like that.
And no matter how small the town they're protecting from, uh, no matter how small a number of terrorists, but, uh, anyway, um, the other thing, you know, about this too, is just, as you said, nevermind that world war two, but even just nine 11, that's 15 years ago now.
And we've had two administrations and again, the whole stimulus and all of this.
And, um, this has gone on at least when I'm, when I read your article, my overriding kind of lesson here was this is just never going away until, you know, the dollar breaks and the whole society falls completely apart and race war and God knows what or whatever.
But otherwise there are so many people, individuals who have their interests entrenched in this system, especially the national security state part of it, uh, that we're talking about here, um, that it's just virtually impossible to imagine the American people ever being able to figure out a way to make them all go and get real jobs other than the entire system completely falling apart.
It's just, it's unreal.
It's like, um, you know, the, all the rich suburbs of Moscow while everybody else is going hungry back in the days of the Soviet union.
Yeah.
I mean, we, I mean the, the only, the only, uh, alternative is to get out of the business of war.
And like you said, it doesn't seem to be, uh, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Um, so when you have a, a, a defense contracting establishment with the number of the millions of dollars of lobbying money that they put into Capitol Hill every year, and you know, the, the, the, you know, 300 lobbyists that they, you know, uh, will field, you know, 65% of them who have rotated in and out of, you know, budget committees and appropriations committees, you know, they have people all over banning over the Hill, making sure that they get their weapons system, uh, funded for that particular year, even if it might take, you know, 20 years to get it finished.
If they get their, their money every year, they're happy.
That's, that's their goal.
So anything that's going to, um, is, is, is, is going to put a cast doubt on whether, you know, those weapons will ever be used in an actual war.
They, they have, it's in their best interest, um, to oppose that.
So what we have here is an industry that's sort of leading policy, you know, I hate to say this, cause you know, I, I, I almost leading it by the nose.
So you have, you know, you have a foreign policy that has been pretty muddied by the, the Obama administration.
You have a national security, uh, you know, plan in place that, that doesn't seem very clear.
And then you have, uh, when it comes to Syria and Iraq and these other hotspots, and then you have a defense contracting community that's, that's held back on getting their, their systems built and up there and funded.
So it seems to me that there, there's no opposing force to put the brakes on any of this and add the whole, you know, nuclear industry and, and the ramping up of, of nuclear weapons that Obama has initiated in his latest budget.
And you, and you realize that, you know, none of this is going to stop.
So the money is still going to be flowing, um, into this, into this area and it, you know, into the coffers of certain people for, um, you know, regardless of whether there's a major war overseas or a major threat, you know, a major national security threat.
So I don't know, it doesn't, it seems a little dim.
Yeah.
That's the one that is really the most amazing.
And I guess, you know, maybe the most obvious way to get this point across is in a world where we just don't have any powerful enough enemies to justify even having a nuclear deterrent at all, where even the Pentagon says that, you know, we don't need more than a couple of hundred tops.
Right.
And yet we still have thousands and we have Mr, you know, peace prize, democratic president, the most peaceful one since Carter and probably for the rest of our lifetimes, as bloody as he is, um, embarking on a new, yeah, right.
$1 trillion program, probably more like two or three by the time they're done to completely revamp and redo the entire nuclear weapons arsenal.
And it's all simply at the behest of the nuclear weapons industry and the Congressman that represent them.
And there's no national interest whatsoever.
I don't think there's a single egghead, uh, you know, uh, bespectacled pseudo genius at the university of Chicago saying, Oh yeah, we got to have 7,000 nukes.
There is no strategy that says we need 7,000 nukes.
There's simply lobbyists and, and hydrogen bomb manufacturers on welfare who insist and their say goes.
Yeah.
It sounds unbelievable.
It sounds like, yeah, but this is a limited constitutional democratic Republic and all that.
That's not how it works.
Right.
You'll always have, you'll always have the, the pundocracy, um, that will, you know, justify the nuclear arsenal by pointing to, to Russia and some of, and some of the statements that Putin's made and they're building up their arsenal now.
So we're, we're headed into what, I guess another arms race because you know, there is, there is a, you know, not only the lobbyists that are on the Hill and the industry people, but then you, you have national security experts out there and think tanks and otherwise who are also out there saying that it's, it's, it's critical for us to keep our nuclear arsenal, um, uh, updated.
And, uh, you know, because it's, it's, you know, I guess, you know, we've got antiquated, there's decades old, you know, weapons and, and cores and, and pits and, you know, the whole deal we can get really in the weeds there.
But yeah, I mean, you, this goes back to the, the, the, the ecosystem, you know, it's not just lobbyists.
It's not just the, the, the CEOs of these companies.
It's, it's the whole, you know, it, it's the whole think tank world that is, you know, feeding off of this.
So you do have, and they're setting the message too.
And they're in there, they're right in there, scaring people, you know, and if it's not nuclear war, it's, it's, it's other war, you know, it's cybersecurity, you know, the, the billions we've been putting into cybersecurity.
Yes, it's a threat when you have, um, you know, rogues and, and governments who are hacking into systems and stealing people's personal data, you know.
Um, but it is also become yet another front of the, the sort of global war on terror, which has created yet another boondoggle for, uh, the Washington contracting scene.
So, you know what, this would make a great documentary, Kelly.
I think you should hook up with, uh, maybe this guy Lofgren, uh, that you talk about here and a cameraman and show the people of the country, the mansions, these so-called public servants live in and their contractors.
And cause that's the whole thing about it.
You know, when we, we mentioned, uh, we talked about Bernie before when he talks about income inequality, he doesn't focus on government, uh, money like this, uh, the military industrial security complex, or not so much anyway, he mostly just, you know, criticizes anybody who made money, no matter how they made it, that kind of thing.
But this kind of thing, I think, you know, is, I think this is a very powerful article.
And I think even just the visual of the yachts, uh, you know, at the, at the top of the article and everything, that's a powerful thing.
If somebody worked and actually earned a yacht, I don't care how nice it is a good for them, but anybody getting paid with money that came from the treasury who can afford a yacht is being paid too much.
And I mean, unless they already made their money somewhere else, but anyway, you know what I mean?
And anyway, you show people this and you'll make them all as mad as me.
And then that'll be good for something.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Seriously.
I think you should consider that.
No, I think, I think it's, it's sort of like it, it is, you know, the Washington DC area falls behind San Francisco, you know, the big Silicon Valley, you know, that how, like he, you know, Mike points out, you know, that tech is fueled.
He's sort of a elitist boom there and wall streets fueled New York, Manhattan, and you know, Connecticut, Long Island, those, you know, the, the, the wealthy elites there, but people don't realize that you have this whole other culture that's been fueled by the federal government war.
And to a certain extent, you know, the, the, the out of control campaign financing, you know, that's going on, you know, here in Washington, you have a, it's, it's, it's sort of maybe not as glamorous as the two others, but it's just as, as, as potent in terms of like these visuals that you're mentioning, the yachts, the mansions, the, the luxury homes, the real estate prices, you know I mean, DC is, is, you know, in some ways it's been gentrified.
There's entire neighborhoods that when I moved here 17 years ago were badlands.
You couldn't go in them.
And now they've all been paved over with, with, with, with boutique restaurants and just, you know, yuppie shops and people walking and that's great.
But all the people that were poor that lived there no longer can afford to live there.
So they've been pushed out.
So there's, there's definitely a story here.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
There is.
And well, I'm about to tweet this article out and can't wait till I post the interview.
I know everybody's going to really like it.
I really appreciate you doing it.
Oh, thank you.
All right.
So that is the great Kelly B Vallejos.
She writes at the American conservative magazine.
That's the American conservative.com.
This one is called how wartime Washington lives in luxury.
Thanks again.
Thank you.
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