03/13/09 – Frida Berrigan – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome back to the show Frida Berrigan.
She's a Senior Program Associate at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative.
She's a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus and a contributing editor at In These Times.
And she's got an article with Tom Englehardt at Tom Dispatch, which is also at Antiwar.com, called Why the Pentagon Can't Put America Back to Work.
Welcome back to the show, Frida.
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm good.
It's good to be with you, Scott.
Well, I'm glad to have you here.
And this will be a great experiment, I think, in libertarian and progressive convergence on economics and opposition to imperialism.
We'll see how far we can get C&I to I before we have to differ here.
I can feel the love.
Yeah, well, of course, first thing is first.
And opposition to imperialism and aggressive war is first.
And other disagreements will have to wait.
So why don't you give us the lowdown here.
I guess really what you're taking on is the idea of military spending as a stimulus for the American economy.
That's exactly right.
You know, I was paying attention to the stimulus package just like everybody else and hoping that one of the biggest line items in the stimulus package would be the nonprofit industrial complex and specifically the arms and security initiative.
And then when it turned out that President Obama was not going to give me hundreds of millions of dollars and set me up for life, I started paying attention to some of the advertisements, different companies and industries making their case, really the people in Washington, but to the American people about how they were the ones that were going to put America back to work.
And there was Lockheed Martin and Boeing and Northrop Grumman, companies that have gotten hundreds of billions of dollars over the last eight years in the course of the global war on terror.
And all of them saying, hey, we've spent all this money so far.
Give us more money and we will put America back to work.
So we started looking at the claims coming specifically from Lockheed Martin, 95,000 jobs protected, 3 million Americans protected with the F-22 fighter plane.
And we did a brief analysis saying no way does the F-22 fighter plane support 95,000 jobs.
And even if it did, those jobs come with a pretty high price tag.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a question of the seen and unseen.
They created however many thousand jobs.
How many jobs did they destroy to take that wealth to make a fighter plane out of it?
Well, yeah, exactly.
There's a great study from the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass that basically says for every billion dollars invested in the defense industry or in the military industry, fewer than 9,000 jobs are created, 8,555 jobs.
And you put that money in education and you fund more than 17,000 teachers and administrators and lunch ladies and crossing guards.
And you put that money into health care, you get 12,000-something jobs.
And just right across the line, basically the only thing that creates fewer jobs that you can do with a billion dollars is just handed out in the form of tax cuts or stimulus checks to individuals.
So I just found all this really galling and all these advertisements that kind of touch this myth in the United States that military spending, that going to war is what lifted the United States out of the Great Depression and that otherwise if we hadn't gone to war, we'd still be sort of out there on the soup line basically.
And I thought that there was a revisionist history going on here, but also this failure to acknowledge that, hey, it was this war that got us into this economic freefall in the first place.
Of course, it wasn't the only thing.
There was sort of a perfect storm of elements, but the fact that we've spent essentially a trillion dollars on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere certainly contributed to the economic situation we're in today, and not just the fact that that money was spent, but where that money came from, right, where that money was generated through borrowing.
President Bush cut taxes twice in the middle of the global war on terror and borrowed from the Chinese, borrowed from other countries, borrowed from the Treasury, printed money essentially to go to war, and then all of a sudden we're in this bleak financial outlook.
And, you know, many of us progressives were like, well, Obama's going to change everything.
He's going to come in and he's just going to ride his white horse and fix all of the problems.
And one of the problems being that we spend way too much on the military.
And then I was very disappointed to see a military budget come out at the beginning of February.
Now it's only the first draft.
We'll get a lot more detail at the beginning of April.
In the first draft we have basically a Bush-style military budget.
It's $20 billion more than Bush's last military budget.
It projects $140 or so billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, $130 billion.
And it doesn't shake things up in any sort of substantial way.
So I got out my little pen and I just started writing.
Well, there's a few things there, and let me stop you there because there's so much to talk about just there so far.
First of all, I want to go back all the way to the F-22.
How much do these things cost and what's so good about them and why do we need a bunch of F-22s when we already had a bunch of F-15s and F-16s and F-18 Hornets and the rest of those?
You listen to some of the military guys, and this plane sounds pretty phenomenal, right?
It goes really fast.
It's very stealthy.
It would be fun to fly.
It would be awesome to fly.
And if you go to the F-22Araptor.com or something like that, they have all these computer video games you can play and you can put yourself in a cockpit.
And how fast it goes is a state secret, right?
It's protected by national security.
It's classified.
So this thing is cool, but that doesn't make it necessary.
Well, we need it to fight the Afghan Air Force, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I think they fly kites, the Afghan Air Force.
I mean, this plane was built to fight dogfights over the Soviet Union.
It was designed as a foil for a Soviet plane that was never built.
It's very difficult to build.
We've only built a couple of them.
What I talk about in the essay is that it's essentially a handcrafted artisanal product, like fine cheese in France or something.
Or a Lamborghini.
Or a Lamborghini, exactly.
And so far the United States has spent $65 billion on the F-22 Raptor.
Oh, well, that's peanuts.
It's just pretty soon it starts adding up to real money, right?
I mean, it really just doesn't have any role.
And, in fact, Secretary of Defense Gates has essentially said that.
He said, you know, here we are, we're fighting these two wars.
The F-22 hasn't and won't play any role in either one of these theaters.
And he basically said, you know, we've got plenty of F-16 fighter planes.
We've got plenty of F-18 fighter planes.
We also have the F-14 and the F-15.
That this plane essentially isn't necessary at all.
And at the price tag, moving forward, it's certainly not necessary.
The Air Force is looking for another $9 billion to build fewer than 100 of these planes.
And so why is it still there?
Why are we still building it?
Well, in part because Lockheed Martin is really smart.
They've spread out the contracts and the subcontractors to 44 states.
There are people with some relationship to this plane in just about every state in the union.
And certainly in the states that have the members of Congress who sit on the key committees that move this thing through.
And then whenever the system is in danger, as it has been a number of times over the past decade or so, they just bring out the union.
And then you have blue-collar machinist union workers saying we need the F-22 because we need our jobs.
And these are well-paid machinist jobs, and there aren't that many of those anymore.
And that works.
And the millions of dollars that Lockheed Martin hands out in campaign contributions and the millions that they spend lobbying Congress.
Is it just me, or is this whole system becoming so incredibly transparent where the military, industrial firms, and the congressmen, and the revolving door, and campaign money, and spreading out the subcontractors all over the country in all different congressmen's districts, things like that.
It seems like this ought to be scandalous or something.
You know, this ought to be scandalous.
And I was just reading a couple days ago about a guy named Michael Cantrell, who essentially gamed the system.
He worked for the Missile Defense Agency, which oversees the building of the great missile defense shield that will render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
And this one guy gaming the system was able to create $230 million worth of dead-end projects.
And Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, and these other companies went right along with it.
Members of Congress went right along with it.
And this guy is going to go to jail because he spent a lot of the taxpayers' money on things that we didn't need.
Well, and he just made it too obvious.
He pushed it to its absurd conclusion, and so he had to be made an example out of.
But this is what these corporations are doing every single day.
And their executives went right along with it, and members of Congress went right along with it.
And the only crime was that that one guy pocketed the money for himself, and he was doing it for his own gain instead of for gain within a corporate structure where your shareholders and your board of directors are the ones who benefit.
So yeah, it's transparent, it's tired, it's an art form.
And just a couple of days ago, President Obama gave a speech where he said, under my administration, there will be no blank checks for defense contractors.
And the ripples of this statement, the ripples of fear that this caused throughout the industry, you could see it.
Did you get all the memos?
You got your hands on the memos where they said, oh no, oh no, no more blank checks.
And I was just thinking, blank check?
I mean, these guys, as I say in the essay, you know, it's like they've had the PIN number to the ATM of the U.S. Treasury for decades.
And so they don't need a blank check from the president when they basically have their own mint that's printing the money.
It's amazing that they have so little confidence in him when I am, in fact, quite confident that he will continue to serve their interests.
As you said, he's expanding the budget even more than Bush last year.
He campaigned on expanding the size of the Army and the Marine Corps, expanding the war in Afghanistan.
There's no surprise here.
What are they worried about?
I don't think they're worried.
I think they're doing the poor little me defense contractor bit for members of Congress.
And they do it so much more effectively than teachers or nurses or, you know, guys who build roads.
Oh, poor little us.
We haven't gotten our measly, you know, $100 million.
They never make the kind of hue and cry that the defense industry, that Lockheed Martin is able to make.
And they certainly don't have the relationships to just kind of, you know, turn the cash spigot back on.
So, you know, right before the inauguration, when the Defense Department put out its new wish budget, you know, what they really want from the new administration, it was $50 billion more than what Obama ended up offering as the 2010 budget.
And then the press releases were fast and furious about how Obama was going to cut $50 billion from the military budget.
And it worked on Capitol Hill.
Everybody was up in arms before they realized, oh, no, this isn't a cut.
This is actually a $20 billion increase from last year.
Well, if we spent $10 less than the entire rest of the world combined, that would obviously leave us helpless before their will.
Yeah, that's right.
Right?
Yeah, lost in all of this is that we spend more than the rest of the world combined.
And that it doesn't, you know, just spending more doesn't make us more secure.
Well, and let's get back to the question of whether any of this is good or bad for the economy.
Because I think you correctly identify this major myth.
And I would even go so far as to say that you could throw away George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and say that the real founding myth of America now is the Great Depression and World War II and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and how the war, the New Deal tried to help and almost helped, but really it was the war that saved us from the Depression.
And I know this still matters because I remember people telling me in 2002 and 2003 that, well, war is good for the economy and it will help stimulate the economy and that kind of thing.
And the thing is about that myth is it's either true or it's not.
And either taking wealth from productive people and turning that wealth into high explosives and destroying property with it is a net gain or it isn't.
And it seems to me like on the very basic logic it's not.
In fact, in 1984 in George Orwell, in O'Brien's secret book about how we do it, they say in there, the only reason we make all these rockets and the floating fortress is so we can take all the proles' excess wealth and dump it into the ocean or blast it off into the stratosphere where they can't get to it.
This is obviously a net loss.
And it was really the end of World War II, of course, that brought about prosperity when all the rationing and price controls and manipulations of the economy were finally let go.
I mean, that's exactly right.
And I wanted to get much more in this piece into that history right before World War II and right after World War II.
And it is this enduring myth.
And it's so deeply entrenched they almost can't even talk about it because people will counter immediately with the Great Depression and the tin cup and then the prosperity of the 1950s.
And there's so much missing from that apocryphal story, that big lie, that it's almost like, well, where do you even start?
You know, just the very idea of rationing, right, and the kind of scarcity that the American people dealt with throughout World War II, the fact that military spending was 40 or 50 percent of GDP, that taxes were made much higher during the war, the number of people paying taxes was higher during the war, and then when all of that was relaxed at the end of the war, as you say, and people came back, the GI Bill and there was all sorts of...
All of a sudden there was all this money available and a new kind of prosperity, and then this industrial base that had really come into its own during World War II then began to turn itself to consumer products and all of that.
So, I mean, you don't bust that wide open with just one essay or one conversation, but I think this is something we're going to continue to have to hammer home on, and really just start with the basics, the basics of American history, the basics of Economics 101.
Well, that really is the thing, is it gets down to basic questions of money.
And, for example, if war stimulus doesn't work, then why should regular stimulus work?
Why should deficit spending by government on anything work if for war it doesn't?
I guess if there's a genuinely needed bridge, you could argue that government spending on that is kind of revenue neutral to the rest of the economy, but it's really prices is what determines where resources are to be used best.
And so it really comes down to challenging people's belief systems, not just the myth of World War II that they were brought up with, but even what they believe now about what got us into this mess and what's the best way to get us out of it kind of as a side issue to the war, you know?
Definitely.
And I think you're right what you said at the very beginning, too, about the role of the war in causing this problem, because after the dot-com collapse, but then especially after September 11th, the political pressure from the Republicans was very strong on the Federal Reserve to keep a very easy money policy in order to prevent a recession, which after the dot-com bust, and especially after September 11th, we were due for one.
But they prevented a recession from taking hold then so that the Republicans could have their war and, as you said, cut taxes during it, borrow and print the money and tell us we were getting a war for free and put off the cost until now, and now we're paying through the nose.
And we're going to be paying for a very, very long time.
And that's where I think this promise coming from Washington that we're going to not only get out of this fast, but we're going to go back to we're not going to have deficits anymore, that all of this can happen overnight.
And all of this can happen without systemic sacrifice or changing the way we live and changing, as you said, changing our belief system and changing what's important to us.
None of this is going to be solved quickly.
Well, it might.
I mean, the Chinese might just stop buying our debt, and that'll be the end of that.
You know, that would be interesting, wouldn't it?
Well, it would be horrible is what it would be.
It would mean that our dollars become, you know, our $100 bills become worth pennies or dimes if we're lucky.
Yeah.
But it wouldn't mean the end of the empire, I think.
It wouldn't mean the end of the empire.
And, you know, in the Midwest, interesting can basically mean anything from cool to terrifying.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
But, yes, I mean, you're right, that the rest of the world and China, chief among the nations of the world, has been carrying the United States, and we have to bank on them continuing to carry us, which is kind of confusing given how, you know, we're always, you know, shaking our saber at other countries at the same time that they're, you know, dragging us along and keeping us upright.
How much of this defense spending, do you know, is spent on the militarization of space, putting rods from God and other terrible weapons up there in orbit?
Well, right now, it's a fairly small percentage.
I mean, we're talking about $3 billion a year, $2 billion a year, and most of it is still very much in the research and development phase.
But the long term, the projection forward about what it would cost to put the rods from God all up there and weaponize space fully, as some would like to see us do, you know, are very hard to calculate.
We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.
And the rationale for that being, well, we have all these satellites there that keep our economy going, and the Chinese and other countries could take down our satellites, and so we need to protect them, and then we also, you know, from space, we can operate with a great deal more impunity than we can operate from, you know, the Cheyenne Mountain, for example, or some air base in Missouri.
Right.
Kill anyone in the world within the hour.
That's right.
We'll have freedom of operations.
But that would come at quite a high cost.
So it was certainly something that President Bush wanted to move forward, and it didn't move as quickly as he wanted it to.
And so we'll see what Obama does with it over the next couple of years.
But the plans are there.
The prototypes are there.
The research and development stream has been steady for a number of years.
And so unless, you know, barring some opposition to it, or barring, you know, the Chinese taking over our economy, we could see that move forward.
Well, and by the way, they're shooting one of their own satellites down, to make an example, was after they had been begging America to not weaponize space, because we don't want to go down that road.
And so it's not like they're the aggressor as far as this.
We started it, not them.
That's true.
I just want to make sure that gets out there, because I think it was sort of just left hanging, the right-wing accusation that's often leveled, that all this is about protecting us from the yellow peril.
That's right.
We need to always make sure to challenge that.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Frida.
It's been great.
Hey, it was good to speak with you, Scott.
Thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Frida Berrigan.
She's a senior program associate at the New America Foundation's Arms and Security Initiative.
She's a columnist for Foreign Policy and Focus and a contributing editor at In These Times.
And that's it for Anti-War Radio.
See you all tomorrow.