All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest on the show today is Dina Razor.
She is chief investigator of the Follow the Money Project and a partner in the Bauman and Razor Group.
She has over 25 years of experience investigating and exposing defense procurement fraud.
She trained as an investigative journalist and has worked for several media outlets such as ABC News and the San Francisco Examiner.
For 10 years, she directed the Washington DC-based Project on Military Procurement, a nonprofit organization that she founded with its work with whistleblowers and sources inside the Pentagon and the defense industry, exposing fraud and waste.
And then check out the books, More Bucks, Less Bang, How the Pentagon Buys Ineffective Weapons back in 1983, The Pentagon Underground in 1985, and in 2007, Betraying Our Troops, The Destructive Results of Privatizing War.
And she co-authored the Whistleblowers Manual, Courage Without Martyrdom, a survival guide for whistleblowers.
Wow.
Welcome to the show, Ms.
Razor.
How are you?
Okay, fine.
I should say that Follow the Money Project is not really very active right now.
Right now, most of my time is being a full-time columnist and writer for Truthout.org now.
Okay, right on.
Well, that's the part I was just going to get to, was this great piece at Truthout.org, Lockheed, the ultimate pay-to-play contractor, and also at issue in this interview, your last piece, F-35 Fighter is latest in a long line of wasteful weapons failures.
Both of these sort of read like they were written by Joseph Heller.
That's a compliment, but it's just like Catch-22, the way this system works, the way generals buy weapons, huh?
Yeah, probably the height of cronyism in the government gets down to the military weapons.
Members of Congress are occasionally willing, when you have Health and Human Services chair or somebody come up, the undersecretary or something, they see them as bureaucrats and they beat them up if they don't like what they see.
But with the military stuff, it's just considered unseemly to beat up on a general.
So they have an inoculation of between that and being able to hitch themselves up to the troops.
Well, we're just doing this for the best of the troops.
Meanwhile, they are probably some of the biggest self-dealing people who make sure they set up their post-retirement with a contractor.
It doesn't have to necessarily be like, say you were overseeing the F-35 Lockheed.
It wouldn't necessarily mean you'd go work for Lockheed, although a lot of them do.
But other contractors then see that you're part of the game and you play part of the game.
So they kind of swap who hires what general.
That's interesting.
It really is that clear, which comes first, the lack of accountability and then the unlimited budget and the unlimited corruption.
The lack of accountability breeds this kind of thing.
Well, it's gotten really, really bad in the last 10 years.
I've noticed that having gone after military stuff for 30 years, it used to be that cronyism, self-dealing, revolving door, was the kind of stuff you did sort of in a hush-hush way.
You did it, but you didn't advertise it, and everybody knew you were doing it.
And, you know, the liberals would scream, but go along with it as long as some members of Congress had defense stuff in their district.
But now it's considered completely cool.
It's considered, oh, you know, no big deal.
Everybody does it, you know, the cronyism part, especially in the military.
What people don't realize is that, you know, some of the generals that retired in World War II, after World War II, many of them saw that it was considered, it wasn't illegal, but it was considered distasteful or dishonorable, if you would even think of going to work for a defense contractor after the war.
It was a creepy thing to do.
And so a lot of the famous generals went to, you know, had a Red Cross, Marshall with the Marshall Plan, things like that.
And I forget which general it was, but one of them, it may have been Bradley, went to work as the head of Rolex watches.
You know, they would go to different places that were non-military, but that's completely gone now.
It's very hard to find.
Yeah, you know, I don't even ever hear, sometimes in private economic circles, but never in government circles do I even hear the phrase conflict of interest anymore.
That's sort of a, it has this echo in my brain, like the last time I heard it was in 1986 or something.
Yeah, well, it's a situation of cronyism.
You know, it's a, it happened, you know, the Clintons did it, but they were, at least they were a little embarrassed that they did it.
But the Bush people saw it as part of the capitalist system.
They had no respect for the government.
So they, what they could not kill, they would loot or have their friends being in charge of.
And that's how you ended up with, you know, people who didn't know how to run FEMA or other places.
And then they say, see, government doesn't work because we put our cronies in there.
They contracted out to their cronies and then things would fall apart.
And then they'd say, see, government doesn't work.
So it's made it outrageous.
I'm writing column on this every week now, and I'm finding from a lot of the readers is they just expect it, which is a really sad state of affairs.
They just expect that's what people are going to do.
And well, it has certainly been a long time now.
Well, now here's the thing, Dina, when I read that lengthy bio, I realized by the end of it that I really fell short because the best part of your bio is the paragraph where you explain in this Lockheed article, the ultimate pay-to-play contractor at truthout.org.
You say, I've been doing hand-to-hand combat with these guys on a sort of first-person basis since way back.
And you give sort of the litany of all the different times that you've come into direct conflict with these people.
And that to me is very interesting.
I think will help set up the rest of the conversation, too, you know?
Yeah, well, yeah, it is true.
And I kind of sit there when I was doing that.
I didn't enlist all of them, but when I was doing that, I thought, yeah, you know, I've really had most of my head butts has been with Lockheed and I've been doing this for 30 years.
And now they're the largest, most powerful company.
So yeah, I've really been doing my job.
Well, you know, you do what you can.
It doesn't mean it's your fault when it doesn't work out the way you wanted it to.
Yeah.
Well, I could do nothing less.
They really, really, really hated me back when I exposed their lobby plan.
And that's badge of honor enough right there, I think.
Yeah.
But no, tell us, though.
I'm sorry.
I didn't mean to.
Oh, tell us about that.
Well, what would happen is, you know, we have to understand when I was doing that, I was really young and when I started the project on military procurement, which is now Pogo, which is a really well-known watchdog group, I was almost 25 and, you know, I took on a lot of different constants, C5B and a lot of other things with Lockheed and did a lot of head-butting with them.
And at first they kind of ignored me, but then when they started to bite, they really started finding ways to try to harass me and whatever.
I was never afraid of them because I'm a public figure.
I was always afraid for my whistleblowers who weren't public figures at the time, but probably the worst thing they did to me, which quite frankly, I've never talked about publicly, but still burns me.
I had a woman who came to me who told me, I had a whole network of people in Lockheed Missile and Space on time card fraud, and they wanted to know who these people were.
But I had a woman who came to me who worked from there and she had filed a lawsuit and she had talked to me and she knew that I'd warned her that by talking to me, I would have to, that I could be deposed on what she told me because she'd already gone public.
And they then decided to have a, they wanted to depose me, but not instead of just asking about what she knew, they said, we're going to depose you and we're going to get all your sources and you'll have to name your sources.
And I said, no, I don't because I'm a nonprofit organization, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I had to get a lawyer pro bono and I was pregnant at the time and I told him, you know, I'm not in a position to sit through a deposition.
I'm at the end of my pregnancy and I don't have a lawyer.
So we kept going around and around.
I had my son and after four weeks, my son suddenly found out that my son had a heart defect and he had to have open heart surgery.
And so I just told my office, I'm gone.
Just pretend I don't exist for a month because I, you know, I can't do anything.
And I was in the recovery room, literally, for my son's surgery and I got this call.
I got an emergency call and I got called out thinking something had happened to my parents or something.
And it was the hired lawyer for Lockheed.
And he said, you're going to do this deposition.
And I said, I can't.
My son's had heart surgery.
I can't do anything right now.
And he said, okay, we're going to court.
We're going to put a lien on it.
We're going to take your car.
We're going to take your house.
We're going to completely destroy you.
And I said, I don't care right now.
I can't talk to you.
My son's just had heart surgery.
He says, I don't care.
We're going to get you.
We're going to get you.
We're going to get you.
And you know, at that point for the first time in my life, it became personal and I began to realize what whistleblowers must feel.
I was so mad.
So eventually I did have to be deposed by this guy and sit seven hours across from him and I went to smack him in the face and they threatened to put me in jail.
And I, my lawyer had to run up to the, potentially run up to the appeals court to try to keep me out of jail while we were there.
And I was all ready to go to jail.
We had taken the house out of my name and so that the judge couldn't put a lien on the house because it was only in my husband's name.
I mean, this is serious stuff and it was all bluff.
Lockheed made me spend a lot of time, money and effort.
Luckily, I did get a pro bono lawyer, but you know, maybe six months of heartbreak of them going after me.
And then at the end in the parking lot, they said, well, we're not going to go up there.
We're not going to do anything.
And it was just completely and totally tried to destroy me and didn't do anything to me.
I didn't have to name my sources, but boy, after that, it became a little more personal.
Yeah, I was going to say, it seems like they could now give a seminar, one of those nifty little PowerPoints that they like to the generals about blowback and what happens when you mess with somebody like this.
Might just come back to haunt you here.
Now, you've been writing about them for 20 years since then, huh?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and also I worked on big whistleblower suits and we haven't ever, I've never gotten the amount of money out of them.
I'd like to get out of them, but they are, and the ironic thing about all this is that as they are the most celebrated, the most protected and everything else, they're also the number one on the POGO's contractor misconduct.
You know what?
I had misunderstood that in your article because I was surprised to see that anyone in the government was ranking them on their misconduct.
Oh, I get it.
It was an outside group.
Yeah, project and government oversight.
There is no accountability whatsoever inside the government for Lockheed.
No.
Still stands then.
Well, the government does put out, you know, yeah, the government.
The GAO sometimes, right?
Well, no, but the government does put out things that say you're barred or disbanded or, you know, you are, you get these, you get these reprimands, but they don't put it all in one place and the project and government oversight POGO is the organization I founded that morphed into POGO.
They have a contractor database and Obama is trying to put together a contractor database, but the bureaucracy is fighting him like crazy.
So POGO has it and out of all the contractors, it's not just defense contractors.
They're number one for misconduct, you know, a formal misconduct things like, you know, getting in trouble with different contracts and whatever in the whole government, not just in the DoD.
Well, no surprise too, since they're just the biggest overall anyway, right?
They're how many times bigger than SIAC or the next biggest?
Yeah.
Well, they're big and they're big and influential and in the article I talk about that.
I went back to the Sunlight Foundation databases and you know, they've been over the over since 89.
They spent 23 million dollars on campaign.
You know, I was I was really astounded by that that it only cost 23 million dollars to buy 23 billion dollars worth of influence, huh?
Yeah, maybe 230 billion.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it doesn't that's why they're willing to invest that they they used to be able to to write off higher lawyers to protect to defend them against the government against their being investigated for wrongdoing and then charge that on to the government and one of the things we did get through is to stop defense companies from being able to charge their lawyer fees on trying to escape government oversight.
So it's a little bit of a country that like I said, they're like a privileged class and that's one of the problems.
It's very it's much harder to get to them than any other government agency because they come in with their their, you know, the generals try to say we're the same as the troops and they come in and they've got all their ribbons and honor and you know, all this kind of stuff and people are really impressed by those ribbons, aren't they?
They just love ribbons.
And I have found too though a lot of a lot of it is they kind of lose their the kind of people kind of lose their on the military lose their eye and really what I've come down to is that if you get make it past Colonel, you've pretty much had to sort of sell out.
There's a couple of good guys and generals and stuff, but there's an awful lot that's not and that's been that's been a big problem that a lot of the good true warriors the good guys and guys that you want to have.
Who care about the troops and buy what and and hold the contractors feed the fire.
They usually get out at Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel.
They can't make it past so the decision makers are the ones that are the suck-ups.
Mm-hmm.
All right now in this article again, everybody.
It's a Dina razor from truth out truth out org Lockheed the ultimate pay-to-play contractor you talk about this recent article for defense dot aol.com and I didn't even know there was aol.com anymore, but apparently they have this defense website where this guy wrote this article.
I guess I'll ask you to tell us who he is and and describes article in detail.
But basically his point is the future is looking really good for those who receive their dividend checks from Lockheed.
Yeah.
Well, he kind of he kind of stepped in it and that's what made it so easy for me to write his name is Lauren Thompson and he has you know, they have this Lexington Institute in which was started by a former congressman and it you know, Lexington freedom, you know, it's the whole part of that and he he's they get money from defense contractors for this.
It's kind of like a heritage and everything else only but for defense and they he writes positively about the defense industry, but he also consults for the defense industry and he's saying some people who have conspiracy theories think this might be because you know, they are doing pay-to-play but it's really because you know, they're number one because of their great management skills and stuff.
Well, they're number one on the misconduct contractor thing.
The f-35 is an unmitigated disaster and will continue to be and it's going to be one of the most expensive weapons in history and yet it's having more problems than even their other problem plague things.
And so as a result, I just couldn't let his challenge go on that he's funny.
He even acts like well, this is what people think and he keeps saying it over and over.
So I think he probably knows true but he's always like but they have superior management and they did they didn't they were cutting costs and all that cutting cost really?
Well, we did boy the government sure like to know about that because they're overrunning everything.
In a massive way and the life cycle cost for the f-35 are going to be over a trillion dollars and I remember the day that they told the Armed Services Committee that and even John McCain and Lindsey Graham who never saw you know, who never saw weapons and they didn't like they cut it.
Although McCain even though he wants to go to war.
He can be tough on contractors, but they did there was sort of a collective Senator suck up, you know, the wind going couldn't believe a million a trillion dollars.
Yeah, boy, those guys can suck too.
But wait, you know what?
I actually thought this must be a typo.
I'm going to at first I was going to quote this in the article and ask you about it.
And then I thought no that just must not be right.
So we'll not get bogged down there.
But no you're saying 672 billion dollars.
Isn't that as much as all the planes at the Air Force ever flew or something?
Well, it's not not that much that way.
But yeah, it's they are they it's the classic more bucks less bang.
It's doing the f-35 is become the epitome of what's been growing on this every exponentially on every plane and that is each plane gets priced on the cost of the older plane and the older plane has all this fat fraud and waste in it.
But what they end up doing is the you know, it just multiplies up and so they they are now pricing themselves out of this plane and on the meantime, they they're doing what they call concurrency and that's the developing the plane and putting it on the production line before the all the bugs are worked out and as a result, then we're having to spend a whole lot of money going back and fixing it and the government's doing most of that.
So there there's it's problem plagued which is the less bang, you know, you got a plane and work is work like it's supposed to and then of course on top of it, it's costing more and more and more.
So you're buying less and less and less, right?
Well, that was what reminded me of Joseph Heller so much was when it comes to the problems with these things.
It's always I think you say there are no nanoseconds at all or something between it's too early to tell and it's too late to do anything about it.
Yeah, that's engineered that way, you know, they they don't ever want to have this opening which is what happened with the f-22 too much, you know to ever surprise the gate actually found a moment where he could do it, but it's the classic thing is they keep saying well, we don't know we don't know we don't know and ups.
Well, we've already put in so much money.
We can't change it to too big to fail kind of thing, you know, well not bad of a lemon is the f-35 really because like for example, do you know have they ever flown it in their little Top Gun games versus the F-15 barely flown it.
It just keeps perpetually having things go wrong, you know fuel problems and weight and engine and it just it's just a myriad every time they come out with a you know, the testing comes out.
It's just a big bunch of problems which then they go back and say they're going to have to fix and part of that problem is that you can't imagine that Ford Motor Company would take a prototype and say, okay, let's put this prototype on the production line to start making it.
Meanwhile, we'll finish, you know doing the tweet and tweaks on it that actually makes it work and are really on the road and then we can have them sooner.
Well, the problem is that when you don't work out the bugs before you go into expensive production, then you have to go back and fix it and it costs a lot more to fix.
So this is what they're doing with this day.
This is what they do with weapon systems because it takes them so long to get them through the system.
There's you know, all this fighting back and forth and it's just it's just incredibly dysfunctional and so in other words though, there's no reason to believe at this point.
They haven't demonstrated that these are even could be superior to the F-15s and F-16s and F-14s that we already have.
Yeah, I mean they those planes already had their problems, but they're it's so bad that they're starting to pour money back into the F-16s, which by the way, Lockheed made because they bought General Dynamics.
The back into the F-16.
Wait, when did they buy General Dynamics?
I thought at least those two were separate.
No, no.
No, what the hell?
I don't think so.
No, no, maybe I'm wrong, but I need to read more.
No, I defer to you.
I think I think they ended up getting now.
There's very few defense companies left.
Yeah, but the thing is that I may be wrong on that.
I'm going to be a little brain freeze on that.
I'll have to have to do a check.
It's happened so many of them and I just I'll instruct the audience to bet on your interpretation.
Well, I don't know.
I don't know because I I tend to be looking at it again.
But anyway, the bottom line is that the DOD is starting to pour more money into the F-16.
And possibly coming up with a new version of it because they see how badly this is all failing.
Yeah, so it's just you know, it's probably the it's going to probably end up being the most expensive weapon ever bought.
Assuming they ever can finally deploy the things and now the way I understood the big fight over the F-22 versus the F-35 was that 22 is for this fantasy war with China that we can't ever have because they have hydrogen bombs and so not that so what we need is a F-35 so that we can bomb Afghans in their villages where they live.
Well, I mean that's even unrealistic to.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, apparently they can't get the things off the ground.
I don't know how they're going to get to Afghanistan.
I guess they could ship them across, you know, in a truck over the Khyber Pass.
They can bribe the Pakistanis to let it pass, you know.
Yeah.
No, you know, it's it's they actually.
It was interesting that Lockheed didn't fight very hard on well, they fought for a while on the F-22, but then they gave up.
Yeah, so they make both of these planes and then they do a whole Coke Pepsi thing with them, huh?
It just ends up being a big mess because they know though that they could fight it and that the military really wanted to, what the military probably did behind closed doors was say, look, let us kill off the F-22, but we'll make it up with the, you know, what they call contract nourishment in the F-35.
A lot of times these companies will still get the same amount of money for what they, you know, their share.
The military guys always have the best euphemisms for things.
Contract nourishment.
Yeah, I have to write myself.
General Dynamics hasn't been bought by Lockheed.
I don't know why I thought that.
It was another company that I was thinking of.
Well, anyway, so yeah, well, they call it, you know, they just know really what it comes down to is it's really that one of the largest, what we call the largest socialistic entities in the universe is the Pentagon because it's each according to its needs.
They won't let defense contractors go under.
Right.
And so, you know, they always make sure they get enough money to survive.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry.
We're all out of time.
We got to leave it here, but great interview, great work at truthout.org.
That's Dina Razor, everybody.
Thanks for your time.
Okay.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
It's called Lockheed, the ultimate pay-to-play contractor at truthout.org right now.
