07/19/12 – John Amick – The Scott Horton Show

WarCosts.com Hmm, I think I'm going to have to add that RSS feed to my RSS feeds.
Alright, well, so our guest is John Amick.
And I have his bio here.
He's the campaign director for Brave New Foundation's WarCosts.
That's WarCosts.com.
Like I was just saying, Brave New Films, Brave New Foundation.
Here he has a piece co-authored with Robert Greenwald at CommonDreams.org with needed defense cuts on the horizon.
Industry forces rev up the propaganda machine.
Welcome to the show, John.
How are you doing?
Good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So, I guess first of all, I'm going to need you to provide some evidence for your assertion that there are defense cuts on the horizon.
Whenever I hear things like that, it just reminds me of the generals announcing troop withdrawals back in 2005, you know?
Right.
Your mistrust is probably, certainly warranted.
But of course we know that after last year, the deficit reduction plan, there was no, there was definitely an impasse.
So this sequester was planned for the beginning of January where around $1 trillion in cuts to the Defense Department budget is planned to occur.
But now, of course, Congress, they're trying to come up with a plan to avoid those cuts.
A lot of people on the Hill, not just Republicans, but a lot of Democrats also want to protect that money that goes to the defense budget.
So right now, this week actually, as we speak on Capitol Hill, they're debating the 2013 Defense Appropriations Bill, which sort of sets the stage for the coming battle, if you will, for these cuts in January.
Okay, now let me stop you there just because I'm ignorant and I need a little bit of clarification here.
I remember they had this whole scam where a year ago they decided they would stop talking about the Libya war and instead they would talk about the, what do you call it, the debt ceiling deal that they made that said that they had, they created this super committee and it was going to come up with all the necessary cuts and if it didn't, then that was going to trigger these automatic cuts to defense spending and other discretionary spending or whatever as they call it up there.
But then didn't they have a thing where they said, yeah, never mind that.
We're not cutting anything from defense.
What are you crazy?
And I thought that was where they left it.
So what happened that I missed?
Well, I mean, the cuts are still in place, at least on paper.
Oh, really?
So I have it all wrong that they had actually passed something saying never mind the part about defense cuts?
No, I mean, it's still in the works.
It goes without saying that almost everyone on Capitol Hill will try to do whatever they can to avoid this happening because it was a last-second plan that they whipped together last year.
And not only Capitol Hill, but the Defense Department, the executive branch, they don't necessarily want to see this happen either.
I think it was just a bargaining chip basically to alleviate some of those cuts to entitlement programs, other spending that Republicans especially were leaning on.
We know the Bush tax cuts, our Bush-Obama tax cuts really are set to expire soon.
So that's another major bargaining chip here.
So, no, those cuts are still in the works.
I'm sure they'll be scrambling to avoid them, but they're still in the works.
And now those cuts really are just cuts in the rate of projected growth from before, right?
It's all still increases.
Right, it's a pretty small amount of money.
I mean, a lot of people on Capitol Hill are crying foul that this is too much, that they're using rhetoric like this will gut the military, this will not gut the military.
This is $1 trillion over the next decade.
This is a pretty small cut when it comes down to it.
A lot of Republicans are saying that it's going to hollow out the budget.
Really, it's amazing that they protect this government spending while any other government spending is certainly a demon to them.
Other sectors, if the government spends a dollar on health care, they can get many more jobs out of that, or education for that matter, as opposed to defense spending.
So this is just a minor cut when it comes down to it.
This isn't just cutting weapons programs.
This is also cutting other wasteful programs in the Defense Department.
So there are a lot of smoke and mirrors going on, as usual.
That's not a surprise.
This week, with this appropriations bill on the table, that, like I said, sets the stage for January, industry forces have been on Capitol Hill testifying, saying the sky is going to fall for the economy if these cuts are allowed to go in effect, which is really nonsense.
The defense industry has made record profits, of course, in the last decade with at least two wars going on.
For instance, Lockheed Martin's CEO was on Capitol Hill.
He was invited by the House Armed Services Committee chairman, Buck McKeon, from California, who takes in vast amounts of money from the defense industry.
His top five campaign contributors are defense contractors.
So he invited Lockheed Martin's CEO, who makes about $25 million a year, to have free reign to say whatever he wanted about jobs.
So it's really nonsense when any defense contractor says that they don't have enough money to sustain jobs if these cuts go into place.
They're spending millions upon millions on lobbying.
The number goes up every year.
In 2011, defense contractors got $373 billion from the government.
That's the second highest yearly total ever.
That's in our story.
And like you mentioned, the story is at commondreams.com, but also our site, warcost.com.
So I guess my point is this is, again, smoke and mirrors.
They're making a lot of money.
They have a lot of money.
They're getting a lot of money from the government to call these cuts devastating for the jobs outlook in the defense industry is really absurd.
Well, and I wondered to what degree if they believe any of their own hype at all.
I mean, why do they go rushing to Congress?
I don't know if it was on C-SPAN or not, but they bring Dick Cheney with them to say, please don't do this.
I mean, do we even really need to be propagandized like this?
Why don't they just leave it well enough alone?
They're paid.
They're not taking any chances.
It's like a drug, and they're addicted here, and they know that this flow of money will continue to some extent.
Of course they know that, but they want to keep growing.
They want more.
They want more and more and more.
So any kind of cuts like this, they'll take the opportunity to cry foul and point the finger.
This time it's jobs.
It used to be national security, and it still is to some extent.
They'll demagogue about a secure America, or you're hurting the troops or something like that.
I was watching the floor debate yesterday for a while, and it's just amazing.
It's not surprising, but it's still amazing to see both Republicans and Democrats, but mostly Republicans, using national security and keeping troops safe as a reason to avoid these cuts, which, again, aren't that sizable.
Now you say in your article here that in 2011, $373 billion went to defense contractors.
And then I wonder if you had numbers about what percentage of that, how much of that went to Lockheed, because they are far and away the biggest of them all, right?
Definitely.
They may not be far and away, but they are the biggest.
I don't have totals in front of me right now for how much Lockheed gets in particular, but like I said, the CEO is making $25.4 million.
It was the second consecutive year that they had record revenues and profits.
This is the entire industry.
Lockheed spent $15 million on lobbying in 2011.
That was an increase from 2010, a 19% increase.
Well, see, that's the part that I want to focus on, the chump change in question.
I mean, I'm sorry, $15 million is a hell of a lot to me, but to Lockheed, I can't do the math that well, but that's how many zeros between the decimal point and the 1% of how much money they make off of the U.S. government is that investment.
It's just probably the best kind of deal in world history going on right there, what it takes to invest in lobbying.
I'm sorry.
I always make a great point and then go to break before you can respond because I suck.
But anyway, we'll be right back after this.
Scott Horton Show.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, ScottHortonShow.com for all the interview archives.
All right, we're talking with John Amick from WarCosts.com, which I guess is a project of Brave New Films, Brave New Foundation, Robert Greenwald thing.
Is that basically right, John?
That's correct.
Tell us all about the website.
Go ahead.
Sure, sure.
This is a campaign that's a predecessor of Rethink Afghanistan.
I don't know if you remember that campaign.
Yeah, there's a movie called that, too, which everybody ought to look at if you've got the stomach for it.
Correct, and I think it really changed a lot.
I mean, it didn't end anything, but it changed the conversation around that war.
I think that's – there's no doubt about that.
So this is a successor campaign, and we're trying to highlight, again, the financial and really moral costs around endless warfare at the hands of the United States of America.
We have several investigative films planned on the various facets of the military-industrial-congressional complex.
We do have a website, like you mentioned, WarCosts.com, Facebook.
We're there.
Find us there and like us.
We're on Twitter.
So, again, we're trying to hammer away at the different financial and moral deficiencies in America's endless warfare.
Yeah, there you go.
Well, I don't know how.
I was trying to add you on Facebook there, but I don't see it.
It forwarded me on to the actual site, not to your Facebook page because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.
But anyway, yeah, WarCosts.com.
That's the actual site anyway, the one for looking at with all the information.
Oh, let's see.
I still didn't find the RSS feed on here, but I will.
Okay, anyway, so we're talking about this piece at CommonDreams.org, Robert Greenwald and John Amick, and it's called When Needed Defense Cuts on the Horizon Industry Forces Rev Up the Propaganda Machine.
So we're talking about that propaganda, but we're also, when we were going out to break, I was trying to make the case how little, what a small percentage of the total income and profits a company like Lockheed has to invest in bribing the Congress to give them the tens and maybe hundreds of billions of dollars that they get from the taxpayer every year.
It's absolutely incredible.
I mean, you can spend $15 million.
That sounds to me like the cost of some limousines and some steak dinners and some throwing around money for taking some congressional aides out to the girly bar at night and whatever, right?
What is that?
That's nothing.
You're right, and I think, I mean, there's an army.
The defense industry has an army of lobbyists that trolls Capitol Hill, and they make sure that every member of Congress knows that they're there, reminds them about political contributions, campaign contributions, I mean, and members of Congress know that if they go to bat for the industry, that campaign contributions will flow, like I was talking about earlier, and we have another piece on warcost.com about Buck McKeon.
I mentioned him earlier.
He's a very powerful member of Congress, a Republican from California.
He's the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
His top five campaign contributors are members of the defense industry, with Lockheed Martin being number one.
So it's not curious when he invites Lockheed Martin's CEO to testify and really have an open forum to cry about jobs.
It's pretty rampant, and, of course, the revolving door between not only the Pentagon and industry but Congress and industry is really out of control.
I mean, I think the statistic is around 80% or 90% of Pentagon officials in the last handful of years have retired from the Pentagon and gone to industry.
It's hard to see that as not a direct conflict of interest.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that's the funny part about all this.
That's my favorite part of all this is how transparent it all is.
I really don't feel well.
Maybe it's the giant knife sticking out of your back.
You know what I mean?
Maybe it's that poison you drank.
It's pretty obvious what's wrong with America.
It's that Lockheed pays our Congress to pay them our money by the truck full.
Yeah, I mean, it's all right there.
It's very cyclical.
I mean, Lockheed gets so much of their money from the government.
They use that money to not only pad their own pockets, but to keep that money flowing, they use the taxpayer money to lobby and to get more and more and more.
It's really legal corruption.
I mean, a lot of it is legal.
It's fine when it comes down to the law, but we see it.
We see it happening, and it persists, like I said, not only between the Pentagon and industry, but Congress and industry.
People that work on Capitol Hill, they want to get a job, a well-paying lobbying job or a well-paying job in industry.
When they leave, how tough are they going to be on industry when they're working for a member of Congress if they want to get a job with that industry?
I mean, I think it's pretty transparent that they're going to go light on the industry if that's their aim.
People on Capitol Hill don't make a lot of money.
So I think a lot of it is everyone looking out for themselves and knowing that money will flow and keeping it flowing and keeping good jobs for themselves.
And who loses in all this?
Taxpayers, of course.
We are asked to fork over more and more money to the Pentagon and really troops in the field.
Their equipment is substandard.
We can go into a side argument about whether that's a valid argument, but I think that troops lose out in the long run too.
We're talking about programs that are supposed to find IEDs in the field that don't work.
So rather than using this incredibly expensive piece of weaponry given to them by Boeing or Lockheed Martin, they've got to use a stick and a water bottle to find an IED.
This is the kind of thing that happens.
They're getting so much money and still their weapons don't work or their technologies don't work in the field.
So it's really a tragedy all the way around, and that's what we're trying to do at WarCost is highlight these things.
So many people out there, especially people listening to you, understand that.
But we're trying to reach a broader audience.
We want people to talk about this with others that may not understand this, that may hear the security argument or the jobs argument and say, well, that might make sense, and I don't want to think about this anymore.
Try to talk to your fellow citizens about what is really going on.
It's like we were talking about earlier, a very transparent farce.
Right.
Well, the thing is too, underlying all this, well, first of all, Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute, and I forgot their names.
There's a few writers who worked together on it at Mother Jones, and then, of course, Chris Hellman at the National Priorities Project.
They all calculate approximately a trillion dollars per year spent on the Pentagon, the national security state, and the wars.
Correct.
And that includes upkeep of the hydrogen bombs and all the subs and everything else.
FBI counterterrorism, things like that.
Right.
So then the bottom line is that's a trillion dollars destroyed.
When they come talking about cuts will cost jobs, I mean, that's just the exact opposite of the truth.
Every dollar that they spend making a bomb is a dollar that's simply wasted.
That's not productive whatsoever.
Just think, all those people on all those assembly lines that have been making these piece of crap F-22 and F-35s that aren't even really deployable at all and won't be, they could have been making goods and services to help people this whole time.
Making things that people wanted to pay them for.
It's a trillion dollars a year blasted off into space.
Only it kills a lot of innocent people on the way there, too.
That's what's funny about, like we were talking earlier, what's funny about this whole thing is that suddenly people that, members of Congress that denigrate government spending 364 days of the year when it comes to the defense appropriations bill, here they are saying government spending is spurring jobs.
These are needed jobs for the economy.
If we cut any amount of money, the economy is going to suffer greatly.
When studies have shown that other sectors, if you want to spend government money, other sectors are much more worthwhile when it comes to creating jobs.
An aerospace industry study is one recent study that many defenders of the system use in saying that this is going to be a debilitating round of cuts.
When really the study ignores that this will be phased over 10 years, again, that other sectors can spur more job growth.
Really, it's farce upon farce upon farce that, again, like we said, is incredibly transparent.
We want people to talk about this with one another and try to get the word out because I think we still have the power over Congress.
I know it seems tough sometimes to say that, but we still control things.
Money is a pervasive influence, but if people demand more accountability, we've seen polls.
A recent poll showed that both self-identified Republicans and Democrats want these cuts, even in places where defense manufacturing exists.
So people have an appetite for this.
That's good.
I didn't realize that.
That's a very important point and a good one to end with.
The American people are finally getting through their big skull here.
All right.
Thank you very much.
This is John Amick, everybody, from warcosts.com.
Thank you.
Thank you, Scott.