"Companies that received bailout money giving generously to candidates
By T.W. Farnam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2010; 10:02 PM
"Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) was a fierce critic of the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler last year, saying he could not "ask the American taxpayer to subsidize failure."
"Companies that received bailout money giving generously to candidates
"But GM doesn't seem to hold a grudge.
"The political action committee formed by the company, which is now largely owned by taxpayers, cut McConnell a $5,000 campaign check in September, a small piece of the $190,000 it donated to campaigns in the past month.
"Although GM suspended its contributions while it solicited the government for financial help, it is now back in the game of political giving, increasing donations from its federal PAC steadily over the past few months.
"It is not alone: Companies that received federal bailout money, including some that still owe money to the government, are giving to political candidates with vigor. Among companies with PACs, the 23 that received $1 billion or more in federal money through the Troubled Assets Relief Program gave a total of $1.4 million to candidates in September, up from $466,000 the month before.
"Most of those donations are going to Republican candidates, although the TARP program was approved primarily with Democratic support. President Obama expanded it to cover GM and other automakers.
"Greg Martin, a GM spokesman, said that the company's PAC donations come from voluntary contributions from its employees. "We contribute to candidates who thoughtfully approach issues that are important to the auto industry and manufacturing," he said. "If you look at our giving, we have given equally to both parties' leadership."
"Some of the generosity to Republicans can be explained by the expectation that the party will make huge gains in Congress. But another factor is the Democratic Party's push for financial-regulation legislation this year. The new law, which passed the Senate with the votes of three Republicans and all but one Democrat, placed new curbs on banks and introduced a regulator to vet financial products for consumers. Most Republicans, and banks, say the law creates too many new restrictions.
"Scott Talbott, a lobbyist with the Financial Services Roundtable, said another factor could be the tone some Democrats used against financial firms. At one point, Obama called Wall Street executives "fat cats."
"The entire industry was painted with a broad brush, and there was dissatisfaction with that," Talbott said.
"Democrats have been abandoned by individual Wall Street donors as well as corporate PACs, leaving the party without an important source of funding as it fends off aggressive Republican challengers.
"The bailouts have become campaign fodder for Republicans to use against their Democratic rivals. In a television commercial, former Republican senator Dan Coats pillories his opponent in the Indiana Senate race, Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D), for supporting "the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda," including "the disastrous bank bailout."
"Coats has received more than $30,000 for his Senate campaign from companies, including J.P. Morgan Chase and GM, that took government money. No companies on the bailout list have donated to Ellsworth. Neither campaign responded to a request for comment.
"One company that used TARP funds to invest in toxic assets from other banks is getting into the political giving mode for the first time. The investment fund BlackRock created a federal PAC in March, only a few months after the company used $2 billion in government money to invest in those assets. Its newly formed PAC has cut campaign checks to federal lawmakers including Rep. Barney Frank (D.-Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
"The two top recipients of money from companies receiving TARP funds are the top two House Republicans, Minority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) with $200,000 and Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) with $187,000. They are followed by the ranking members of two key House committees, Spencer Bachus (Ala.) on Financial Services and Dave Camp (Mich.) on the tax-writing committee.
"The Republican Party itself is getting some of the bank contributions. Seven financial firms have given the maximum $15,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee in each of the past two years, including American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs - a total of $210,000.
"A new ad by the NRSC running in Alaska shows a black-and-white photo of Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "They're out of control - government takeovers, Wall Street bailouts," the ad says as photos stamped with red ink pile up.
"The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has taken $93,500 from companies that received TARP funds. The committee did not accept money from companies while they owed the government, except for one $15,000 donation from Capital One.
"Citigroup, one of the few top recipients that has not paid back all that it owes the government, in September gave $30,000 to Republicans including Camp and Bachus. It also cut $12,000 in checks to Democrats, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.).
"The DCCC also has found a way to use the issue leading up to the midterm elections. A DCCC ad attacks Republican Scott Rigell, a car dealer opposing Democratic Rep. Glenn Nye in Virginia, for campaigning against the bailout while accepting money from the government's "Cash for Clunkers" program.
""Hypocrisy. That's politics these days," the ad says. "Rigell rails against the bailout, but his business raked in the cash, almost a half million of our tax dollars filling Scott Rigell's pocket. Mr. Rigell, that's hypocrisy. It's wrong."
"Rigell said that it was his customers that chose to participate in the "Cash for Clunkers" program, and that he felt an obligation to participate so that he would not need to lay off any of his employees.
""Glenn Nye and his Democratic allies are attacking me for a program that Glenn Nye voted for," Rigell said in a statement. "That's real hypocrisy!"
Out with incumbent Rogers. Elect Jim Holbert to Congress KY-05!
Monday, October 25, 2010
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
VOTE!
"Beth Broderick.Actress, founding member of MOMENTUM
"Posted: October 20, 2010 06:51 PM
"A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Plutocracy
"There is money flowing and flowing and flowing into our national dialogue. Our airwaves are crammed with negative ads financed by the big guys. Wealthy corporations and fat cats are swelling the coffers of the Rovian right. So it's all over for democracy right? The Democrats don't stand a chance against this outpouring of treasure. The midterms are going to be a smackdown of the people's party... those poor, dear Democrats silly enough to believe in governance. It's curtains for the environmentalists and woe unto the education reformers. A woman's right to choose? Sorry, yanked. Green jobs? Um no, not this year. The separation of church and state -- merely a quaint historical notion.
"No, say the pundits, this one is for the grand old parties, tea and otherwise, that would-be plutocrats are feting.
"Or maybe not. A funny thing is happening at early polling sites all over the country -- folks are voting. America has apparently not gotten the memo that our democracy is for sale. The saps are just proceeding right on with it as though the millions spent to dismay them have somehow failed to do so. It seems they plan to have their vote counted, and last I looked it is votes that we count here... not coins.
"I hope at least for Meg Whitman's sake that money can buy you love, because an election? Turns out, not so much. Bless her heart, she spent $120 million of her personal fortune on her race for governor of California and could not even win the endorsement of her hometown paper.
"This is very good news for our country as a whole. We are exercising our right to self-determination. Bully for us. I voted today at 1:30 p.m., Central Standard Time, so there, Koch brothers -- you can take your gold and shove it, or what the hell, give some more to Christine O'Donnell... the girl's got rent to pay.
"If you have time to read this, you have time to vote. If you are angry about all the anger out there, good, go ahead and be angry -- there is a lot of anger to be angry about. But you must vote. If you need a ride, ask for one, but get to the polls. If you lost your cat, put up posters of her on your way to the booth and vote. If your cause has not yet been taken up by the country, remember that it never will be if you do not vote. If you think that the outcome of this election is a foregone conclusion, then you need to think again, because every election is ours to win or lose, which is why we vote.
"They have endless streams of cash, but they do not have you. You are a resource that cannot be monopolized. If they win you lose. It is that simple. You are all you've got, and that is all you need.
"Vote."
As long as you're voting anyway, would you please pull the lever for Jim Holbert? Thanks. Kenneth Stepp.
"Posted: October 20, 2010 06:51 PM
"A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Plutocracy
"There is money flowing and flowing and flowing into our national dialogue. Our airwaves are crammed with negative ads financed by the big guys. Wealthy corporations and fat cats are swelling the coffers of the Rovian right. So it's all over for democracy right? The Democrats don't stand a chance against this outpouring of treasure. The midterms are going to be a smackdown of the people's party... those poor, dear Democrats silly enough to believe in governance. It's curtains for the environmentalists and woe unto the education reformers. A woman's right to choose? Sorry, yanked. Green jobs? Um no, not this year. The separation of church and state -- merely a quaint historical notion.
"No, say the pundits, this one is for the grand old parties, tea and otherwise, that would-be plutocrats are feting.
"Or maybe not. A funny thing is happening at early polling sites all over the country -- folks are voting. America has apparently not gotten the memo that our democracy is for sale. The saps are just proceeding right on with it as though the millions spent to dismay them have somehow failed to do so. It seems they plan to have their vote counted, and last I looked it is votes that we count here... not coins.
"I hope at least for Meg Whitman's sake that money can buy you love, because an election? Turns out, not so much. Bless her heart, she spent $120 million of her personal fortune on her race for governor of California and could not even win the endorsement of her hometown paper.
"This is very good news for our country as a whole. We are exercising our right to self-determination. Bully for us. I voted today at 1:30 p.m., Central Standard Time, so there, Koch brothers -- you can take your gold and shove it, or what the hell, give some more to Christine O'Donnell... the girl's got rent to pay.
"If you have time to read this, you have time to vote. If you are angry about all the anger out there, good, go ahead and be angry -- there is a lot of anger to be angry about. But you must vote. If you need a ride, ask for one, but get to the polls. If you lost your cat, put up posters of her on your way to the booth and vote. If your cause has not yet been taken up by the country, remember that it never will be if you do not vote. If you think that the outcome of this election is a foregone conclusion, then you need to think again, because every election is ours to win or lose, which is why we vote.
"They have endless streams of cash, but they do not have you. You are a resource that cannot be monopolized. If they win you lose. It is that simple. You are all you've got, and that is all you need.
"Vote."
As long as you're voting anyway, would you please pull the lever for Jim Holbert? Thanks. Kenneth Stepp.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
The "Kick Them All Out" Strategy!
"Why It Doesn't Matter Who Replaces The Incumbents
"If we actually buck up and do what needs to be done, if most of us muster the courage to set political emotional attachments aside and cast all our votes to the strongest challengers and actually remove the bulk of incumbents we will accomplish something that the world has never seen. We will have demonstrated that we can unite with purpose, despite all our emotional attachments and differences, to make our voice heard, as a nation, not as a fractured, pathetic mass of yammering minions as we usually do.
"Just imagine the day after the election when the statistics are reversed, from 90% getting to keep their jobs to 90% losing their jobs! If we do this, even if everyone that takes their place is just as bad (which isn't likely) the new freshmen members of Congress will have to deal with something no Congress has ever had to deal with. They will KNOW we just fired everyone that came before them. They will KNOW we mean business, that we do not fall for their crap any more. We will have demonstrated we've grown up. We KNOW the whole thing was a big con job and a farce and we're not falling for it anymore. The new Congress will know it's time to play OUR GAME. Our game demands that members of Congress do one main thing, to protect and defend the Constitution, to enforce the Constitution in order to protect our unalienable rights. They will see that serving in public office is no longer a path to wealth an power. We're changing the rules. Representatives serve one term and we send them packing. We begin to dry up the gravy train. We set a new precedent that ends the notion that once you get elected and you play ball with the power brokers, you stay in.
"We can do this. It's not hard. What's hard is giving up the strong emotional attachments to political identity. Once you do that, it's easy as pie. You just do what needs to be done. We do this enough times and the whole ball game changes in ways we can't even imagine right now. If we adopt a "NEVER RE-ELECT ANYONE POLICY" for the foreseeable future how can it not radically alter the political landscape.
"Several of our founding fathers warned us about allowing political parties to take over. If we refused to play their game anymore, if we removed everyone in every election, it wouldn't be long before the two main parties would begin to wither away because their hollow ideologies would become irrelevant. As is said in the last newsletter, they should be irrelevant anyway because if all parties were forced to adhere to the Constitution they would all being doing the same thing, following the same rule of law. Ninety-nine percent of what Congress is doing would end.
"There is nothing conservative or liberal about our unalienable rights. These rights flow from the Creator and belong to all equally no matter what hair-brained things anyone thinks.
"The bottom line is we have to start somewhere with something and fast. We don't have a lot of options. We can't get our hands on the bankers. We can't get our hands on the banker's minions that staff all the regulatory agencies and bureaucracies. The only people we can get our hands on are elected representatives. Our only "direct" Constitutional power is the power to hire and fire these people. Putting the KTAO voting strategy into action will give us the biggest bang for the buck of anything we could do.
"So, the big question is do you have the coconuts to become a political atheist and do what needs to be done or not?
"Quick Bank Battle Update
"Right now I'm waiting for OneWest Bank and Freddie Mac to respond to the complaints that I filed. OneWest has asked for two extensions of time from us of 10 days each to respond to the Federal complaint. They're not getting any more. There's been no response yet from OneWest or Freddie Mac on the State complaint yet.
"The news in the mainstream media has been amazing over the last week. Every single day more and more is coming out about just how deep the rat-hole goes. One of the most outrageous things that came out is the fact that the banks did not follow the rules governing the trusts that were set up in order to sell bonds to investors. They never transferred the assets, the notes into the trusts. They basically sold investors an empty box. The bankers set up trusts that had very rigid rules in order to qualify as being tax exempt. One of the rules was they had to transfer the asset into the trust, with full and accurate transfer to title to the investors by "closing" of the loan. In some cases there was a 90 day grace period. After that time, they could not be transferred into the trust. So all these "investment vehicles" the bankers created to avoid paying taxes are totally fraudulent and worthless.
"Another amazing admission came from the FDIC of all places. They confessed that the servicing banks have been advancing funds to the investors on loans that homeowners stopped paying so they could continue to list the loans as "performing." What this means is every loan they did this with was never in default. The people who were supposedly owed the money received their money. If the loan was not in default, for whatever reason, a bank cannot waltz into court and claim that it is. Like everything these bankers do, nothing is disclosed to anyone about what is really going on. They just lie about everything and do whatever they want regardless of whether it's legal or not.
"I have posted quite a few stories below about what's been reported in the last week. The tide is most definitely turning against the criminal bankers.
"Bruce McDonald
"If you'd like to blog this article, you can find it posted here.
"
"We all know the bankers are devaluing the dollar at breakneck speed since the Federal Reserve came into being in 1913. Since 1913 our dollar has been devalued by 95%.
"A dollar today has the buying power of a nickel back in 1913. Our paper money will soon be absolutely worthless the way things are going. In the 1923, Germany experienced the crash of their currency. It was cheaper to burn Marks than to buy firewood! If, as a growing number of economists are predicting, we will experience a global financial collapse and your food will be many times more precious than gold or anything else.
"In such a scenario, police and emergency services will be unable to cope with the social unrest. Grocery stores will be picked clean in no time and it could take months to see social order restored.
"You may think that with a supply of gold and silver, you'll be able to buy whatever you need, but food is our greatest dependency and in an economic meltdown it may not be available at any price.
"It just makes sense in the current uncertain economic environment, to invest in precious metals only after you have set aside enough food for yourself and your family. A little extra for friends and relatives would be even better.
"If those predicting financial meltdown are wrong, we can all breathe a sigh of relief, thank the Creator for our good fortune and you can still eat your food. If they're right and you have no food, all the gold in the world won't save you but the food will.
"For a very limited time eFoods Global is offering you an opportunity to receive FREE FOOD for simply joining their new opportunity before their official launch on October 20th. Not only is this an opportunity to receive a bargain, it also provides a very simple way for the average person to acquire great tasting storable food they will need to weather the upcoming economic storm.
""God helps those that help themselves," is one of my favorite sayings. We all know that no one on earth is going to help us out of the mess we're in. I truly believe God has put this opportunity before us so we may help ourselves to at least be able to protect our families as we continue to fight.
"Please join us and begin helping yourself and all your friends and family do what needs to be done to prepare for the inevitable collapse of our currency."
Oust an Incumbent! Elect Jim Holbert to the U.S. House KY-05!
"If we actually buck up and do what needs to be done, if most of us muster the courage to set political emotional attachments aside and cast all our votes to the strongest challengers and actually remove the bulk of incumbents we will accomplish something that the world has never seen. We will have demonstrated that we can unite with purpose, despite all our emotional attachments and differences, to make our voice heard, as a nation, not as a fractured, pathetic mass of yammering minions as we usually do.
"Just imagine the day after the election when the statistics are reversed, from 90% getting to keep their jobs to 90% losing their jobs! If we do this, even if everyone that takes their place is just as bad (which isn't likely) the new freshmen members of Congress will have to deal with something no Congress has ever had to deal with. They will KNOW we just fired everyone that came before them. They will KNOW we mean business, that we do not fall for their crap any more. We will have demonstrated we've grown up. We KNOW the whole thing was a big con job and a farce and we're not falling for it anymore. The new Congress will know it's time to play OUR GAME. Our game demands that members of Congress do one main thing, to protect and defend the Constitution, to enforce the Constitution in order to protect our unalienable rights. They will see that serving in public office is no longer a path to wealth an power. We're changing the rules. Representatives serve one term and we send them packing. We begin to dry up the gravy train. We set a new precedent that ends the notion that once you get elected and you play ball with the power brokers, you stay in.
"We can do this. It's not hard. What's hard is giving up the strong emotional attachments to political identity. Once you do that, it's easy as pie. You just do what needs to be done. We do this enough times and the whole ball game changes in ways we can't even imagine right now. If we adopt a "NEVER RE-ELECT ANYONE POLICY" for the foreseeable future how can it not radically alter the political landscape.
"Several of our founding fathers warned us about allowing political parties to take over. If we refused to play their game anymore, if we removed everyone in every election, it wouldn't be long before the two main parties would begin to wither away because their hollow ideologies would become irrelevant. As is said in the last newsletter, they should be irrelevant anyway because if all parties were forced to adhere to the Constitution they would all being doing the same thing, following the same rule of law. Ninety-nine percent of what Congress is doing would end.
"There is nothing conservative or liberal about our unalienable rights. These rights flow from the Creator and belong to all equally no matter what hair-brained things anyone thinks.
"The bottom line is we have to start somewhere with something and fast. We don't have a lot of options. We can't get our hands on the bankers. We can't get our hands on the banker's minions that staff all the regulatory agencies and bureaucracies. The only people we can get our hands on are elected representatives. Our only "direct" Constitutional power is the power to hire and fire these people. Putting the KTAO voting strategy into action will give us the biggest bang for the buck of anything we could do.
"So, the big question is do you have the coconuts to become a political atheist and do what needs to be done or not?
"Quick Bank Battle Update
"Right now I'm waiting for OneWest Bank and Freddie Mac to respond to the complaints that I filed. OneWest has asked for two extensions of time from us of 10 days each to respond to the Federal complaint. They're not getting any more. There's been no response yet from OneWest or Freddie Mac on the State complaint yet.
"The news in the mainstream media has been amazing over the last week. Every single day more and more is coming out about just how deep the rat-hole goes. One of the most outrageous things that came out is the fact that the banks did not follow the rules governing the trusts that were set up in order to sell bonds to investors. They never transferred the assets, the notes into the trusts. They basically sold investors an empty box. The bankers set up trusts that had very rigid rules in order to qualify as being tax exempt. One of the rules was they had to transfer the asset into the trust, with full and accurate transfer to title to the investors by "closing" of the loan. In some cases there was a 90 day grace period. After that time, they could not be transferred into the trust. So all these "investment vehicles" the bankers created to avoid paying taxes are totally fraudulent and worthless.
"Another amazing admission came from the FDIC of all places. They confessed that the servicing banks have been advancing funds to the investors on loans that homeowners stopped paying so they could continue to list the loans as "performing." What this means is every loan they did this with was never in default. The people who were supposedly owed the money received their money. If the loan was not in default, for whatever reason, a bank cannot waltz into court and claim that it is. Like everything these bankers do, nothing is disclosed to anyone about what is really going on. They just lie about everything and do whatever they want regardless of whether it's legal or not.
"I have posted quite a few stories below about what's been reported in the last week. The tide is most definitely turning against the criminal bankers.
"Bruce McDonald
"If you'd like to blog this article, you can find it posted here.
"
"We all know the bankers are devaluing the dollar at breakneck speed since the Federal Reserve came into being in 1913. Since 1913 our dollar has been devalued by 95%.
"A dollar today has the buying power of a nickel back in 1913. Our paper money will soon be absolutely worthless the way things are going. In the 1923, Germany experienced the crash of their currency. It was cheaper to burn Marks than to buy firewood! If, as a growing number of economists are predicting, we will experience a global financial collapse and your food will be many times more precious than gold or anything else.
"In such a scenario, police and emergency services will be unable to cope with the social unrest. Grocery stores will be picked clean in no time and it could take months to see social order restored.
"You may think that with a supply of gold and silver, you'll be able to buy whatever you need, but food is our greatest dependency and in an economic meltdown it may not be available at any price.
"It just makes sense in the current uncertain economic environment, to invest in precious metals only after you have set aside enough food for yourself and your family. A little extra for friends and relatives would be even better.
"If those predicting financial meltdown are wrong, we can all breathe a sigh of relief, thank the Creator for our good fortune and you can still eat your food. If they're right and you have no food, all the gold in the world won't save you but the food will.
"For a very limited time eFoods Global is offering you an opportunity to receive FREE FOOD for simply joining their new opportunity before their official launch on October 20th. Not only is this an opportunity to receive a bargain, it also provides a very simple way for the average person to acquire great tasting storable food they will need to weather the upcoming economic storm.
""God helps those that help themselves," is one of my favorite sayings. We all know that no one on earth is going to help us out of the mess we're in. I truly believe God has put this opportunity before us so we may help ourselves to at least be able to protect our families as we continue to fight.
"Please join us and begin helping yourself and all your friends and family do what needs to be done to prepare for the inevitable collapse of our currency."
Oust an Incumbent! Elect Jim Holbert to the U.S. House KY-05!
Monday, October 18, 2010
A World Made by War:
"Tom Engelhardt.Editor of TomDispatch.com
Posted: October 18, 2010 05:27 PM
A World Made by War:
When you look at me, you can’t mistake the fact that I’m of a certain age. But just for a moment, think of me as nine years old. You could even say that I celebrated my ninth birthday last week, without cake, candles, presents, or certainly joy.
I’ve had two mobilized moments in my life. The first was in the Vietnam War years; the second, the one that leaves me as a nine-year-old, began on the morning of September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV while doing my morning exercises, saw a smoking hole in a World Trade Center tower, and thought that, as in 1945 when a B-25 slammed into the Empire State Building, a terrible accident had happened.
Later, after the drums of war had begun to beat, after the first headlines had screamed their World-War-II-style messages (“the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century”), I had another thought. And for a reasonably politically sophisticated guy, my second response was not only as off-base as the first, but also remarkably dumb. I thought that this horrific event taking place in my hometown might open Americans up to the pain of the world. No such luck, of course.
If you had told me then that we would henceforth be in a state of eternal war as well as living in a permanent war state, that, to face a ragtag enemy of a few thousand stateless terrorists, the national security establishment in Washington would pump itself up to levels not faintly reached when facing the Soviet Union, a major power with thousands of nuclear weapons and an enormous military, that “homeland” -- a distinctly un-American word -- would land in our vocabulary never to leave, and that a second Defense Department dubbed the Department of Homeland Security would be set up not to be dismantled in my lifetime, that torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) would become as American as apple pie and that some of those “techniques” would actually be demonstrated to leading Bush administration officials inside the White House, that we would pour money into the Pentagon at ever escalating levels even after the economy crashed in 2008, that we would be fighting two potentially trillion-dollar-plus wars without end in two distant lands, that we would spend untold billions constructing hundreds of military bases in those same lands, that the CIA would be conducting the first drone air war in history over a country we were officially not at war with, that most of us would live in a remarkable state of detachment from all of this, and finally -- only, by the way, because I’m cutting this list arbitrarily short -- that I would spend my time writing incessantly about “the American way of war” and produce a book with that title, I would have thought you were nuts.
But every bit of that happened, even if unpredicted by me because, like human beings everywhere, I have no special knack for peering into the future. If it were otherwise, I would undoubtedly now be zipping through fabulous spired cities with a jetpack on my back (as I was assured would happen in my distant youth). But if prediction isn’t our forte, then adaptability to changing circumstances may be -- and it certainly helps account for my being here today.
I’m here because, in response to the bizarre spectacle of this nation going to war while living at peace, even if in a spasmodic state of collective national fear, I did something I hardly understood at the time. I launched a nameless listserv of collected articles and my own expanding commentary that ran against the common wisdom of that October moment when the bombing runs for our second Afghan war began. A little more than a year later, thanks to the Nation Institute, it became a website with the name TomDispatch.com, and because our leaders swore we were “a nation at war,” because we were indeed killing people in quantity in distant lands, because the power of the state at home was being strengthened in startling ways, while everything still open about our society seemed to be getting screwed shut, and the military was being pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian dimensions, I started writing about war.
At some level, I can’t tell you how ridiculous that was. After all, I’m the most civilian and peaceable of guys. I’ve never even been in the military. I was, however, upset with the Bush administration, the connect-no-dots media coverage of that moment, and the repeated 9/11 rites which proclaimed us the planet’s greatest victim, survivor, and dominator, leaving only one role, greatest Evil Doer, open for the rest of the planet (and you know who auditioned for that part, and won, hands down)!
Things That Go Boom in the Night
I won’t say, however, that I had no expertise whatsoever with a permanent state of war and a permanent war state -- only that the expertise I had was available to anyone who had lived through the post-World War II era. I was reminded of this on a recent glorious Sunday when, from the foot of Manhattan, I set out, for the first time in more than half a century, on a brief ferry ride that proved, for me, as effective a time machine as anything H.G. Wells had ever imagined. That ferry was not, of course, taking me to a future civilization at the edge of time, but to Governor’s Island, now a park and National Monument in the eddying waters of New York harbor and to the rubble of a gas station my father, a World War II vet, ran there in the early 1950s when that island was still a major U.S. Army base.
On many mornings in those years, I accompanied him on that short ride across the East River and found myself amid buzzing jeeps and drilling soldiers in a world of Army kids with, among other wonders, access to giant swimming pools and kiddy-matinee Westerns. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, it was my only real exposure to the 'burbs and it proved an edenic one that also caught something of the exotically militarized mood of that Korean War moment.
As on that island, so for most Americans then, the worlds of the warrior and of abundance were no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers who were using a rising military budget and the fear of communism to create a new national security economy. An alliance between big industry, big science, and the military had been forged during World War II that blurred the boundaries between the military and the civilian by fusing together a double set of desires: for technological breakthroughs leading to ever more efficient weapons of destruction and to ever easier living. The arms race -- the race, that is, for future good wars -- and the race for the good life were then, as on that island, being put on the same “war” footing.
In the 1950s, a military Keynesianism was already driving the U.S. economy toward a consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The companies -- General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others -- producing the large objects for the American home were also major contractors developing the big ticket weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance.
More than half a century later, the Pentagon is still living a life of abundance -- despite one less-than-victorious, less-then-good war after another -- while we, increasingly, are not. In the years in-between, the developing national security state of my childhood just kept growing, and in the process the country militarized in the strangest of ways.
Only once in that period did a sense of actual war seem to hover over the nation. That was, of course, in the Vietnam years of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the draft brought a dirty war up close and personal, driving it into American homes and out into the streets, when a kind of intermittent warfare seemed to break out in this country’s cities and ghettos, and when impending defeat drove the military itself to the edge of revolt and collapse.
From the 1970s until 2001, as that military rebuilt itself as an all-volunteer force and finally went back to war in distant lands, the military itself seemed to disappear from everyday life. There were no soldiers in sight, nothing we would consider commonplace today -- from uniforms and guns in train stations to military flyovers at football games, or the repeated rites of praise for American troops that are now everyday fare in our world where, otherwise, we largely ignore American wars.
In 1989, for instance, I wrote in the Progressive magazine about a country that seemed to me to be undergoing further militarization, even if in a particularly strange way. Ours was, I said:
[An] America that conforms to no notions we hold of militarism… Militarization is, of course, commonly associated with uniformed, usually exalted troops in evidence and a dictatorship, possibly military, in power. The United States, by such standards, still has the look of a civilian society. Our military is, if anything, less visible in our lives than it was a decade ago: no uniforms in the streets, seldom even for our traditional parades; a civilian-elected government; weaponry out of sight… the draft and the idea of a civilian army a thing of the past.
“In the Reagan-Bush era, the military has gone undercover in the world that we see, though not in the world that sees us. For if it is absent from our everyday culture, its influence is omnipresent in corporate America, that world beyond our politics and out of our control -- the world which, nonetheless, plans our high-tech future of work and consumption. There, the militarization of the economy and the corporatization of the military is a process so far gone that it seems reasonable to ask whether the United States can even be said to have a civilian economy.
Of course, that was then, this is now. Little did I know. Today, it seems, our country is triumphant in producing only things that go boom in the night: We have a near monopoly on the global weapons market and on the global movie market, where in the dark we’re experts in explosions of every sort. When I wrote in 1989 that the process was “so far gone,” I had no idea how far we still had to go. I had no idea, for instance, how far a single administration could push us when it came to war. Still, one thing that does remain reasonably constant about America’s now perpetual state of war is how little we -- the 99% of us who don’t belong to the military or fight -- actually see of it, even though it is, in a sense, all around us.
Warscapes
From a remarkable array of possibilities, here are just a few warscapes -- think of them as like landscapes, only deadlier -- that might help make more visible an American world of, and way of, war that we normally spend little time discussing, questioning, debating, or doing anything about.
As a start, let me try to conjure up a map of what “defense,” as imagined by the Pentagon and the U.S. military, actually looks like. You can find such a map at Wikipedia, but for a second just imagine a world map laid flat before you. Now divide it, the whole globe, like so many ill-shaped pieces of cobbler, into six servings -- you can be as messy as you want, it’s not an exact science -- and label them the U.S. European Command or EUCOM (for Europe and Russia), the U.S. Pacific Command or PACOM (Asia), CENTCOM (the Greater Middle East and a touch of North Africa), NORTHCOM (North America), SOUTHCOM (South America and most of the Caribbean), and AFRICOM (almost all of Africa). Those are the “areas of responsibility” of six U.S. military commands.
In case you hadn’t noticed, on our map that takes care of just about every inch of the planet, but -- I hasten to add -- not every bit of imaginable space. For that, if you were a clever cartographer, you would somehow need to include STRATCOM, the U.S. Strategic Command charged with, among other things, ensuring that we dominate the heavens, and the newest of all the “geographic” commands, CYBERCOM, expected to be fully operational later this fall with “1,000 elite military hackers and spies under one four-star general” prepared to engage in preemptive war in cyberspace.
Some of these commands have crept up on us over the years. CENTCOM, which now oversees our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was formed in 1983, a result of the Carter Doctrine -- that is, of President Jimmy Carter’s decision to make the protection of Persian Gulf oil a military necessity, while both NORTHCOM (2002) and AFRICOM (2007) were creations of the Global War on Terror.
From a mapping perspective, however, the salient point is simple enough: At the moment, there is no imaginable space on or off the planet that is not an “area of responsibility” for the U.S. military. That, not the protection of our shores and borders, is what is now meant by that word “defense” in the Department of Defense. And if you were to stare at that map for a while, I can’t help but think it would come to strike you as abidingly strange. No place at all of no military interest to us? What does that say about our country -- and ourselves?
In case you’re imagining that the map I’ve just described is simply a case of cartographic hyperbole, consider this: We now have what is, in essence, a secret military inside the U.S. military. I’m talking about our Special Operations forces. These elite and largely covert forces were rapidly expanded in the Bush years as part of the Global War on Terror, but also thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s urge to bring covert activities that were once the province of the CIA under the Pentagon’s wing. By the end of George W. Bush’s second term in office -- think of that map again -- Special Operations forces were fighting in, training in, or stationed in approximately 60 countries under the aegis of the Global War on Terror. Less than two years later, according to the Washington Post, 13,000 Special Operations troops are deployed abroad in approximately 75 countries as part of an expanding Global War on Terror (even if the Obama administration has ditched that name); in other words, Special Ops troops alone are now operating in close to 40% of the 192 countries that make up the United Nations!
And talking about what the Pentagon has taken under its wing, I’m reminded of a low-budget, sci-fi film of my childhood, The Blob. In it, a gelatinous alien grows ever more humongous by eating every living thing in its path, with the exception of Steve McQueen, in his debut screen role. By analogy, take what’s officially called the “IC” or U.S. Intelligence Community, that Rumsfeld was so eager to militarize. It’s made up of 17 major agencies and outfits, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Created in 2004 in response to the intelligence dysfunction of 9/11, ODNI is already its own small bureaucracy with 1,500 employees and next to no power to do the only thing it was really ever meant to do, coordinate the generally dysfunctional labyrinth of the IC itself.
You might wonder what kind of “intelligence” a country could possibly get from 17 competing, bickering outfits -- and that’s not even the half of it. According to a Washington Post series, Top Secret America, by Dana Priest and William Arkin:
“In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11… Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States… In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space.&rdquo
Oh, and keep in mind that more than two-thirds of the IC’s intelligence programs are controlled by the Pentagon, which also means control over a major chunk of the combined intelligence budget, announced at $75 billion (“2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001,” according to Priest and Arkin), but undoubtedly far larger.
And when it comes to the Pentagon, that’s just a start. Massive expansion in all directions has been its m.o. since 9/11. Its soaring budget hit about $700 billion for fiscal year 2010 (when you include a war-fighting supplemental bill of $33 billion) -- an increase of only 4.7% in otherwise budget-slashing times -- and is now projected to hit $726 billion in fiscal year 2011. Some experts claim, however, that the real figure may come closer to the trillion-dollar mark when all aspects of national security are factored in. Not surprisingly, it has taken over a spectrum of State Department-controlled civilian activities, ranging from humanitarian relief and development (aka “nation-building”) to actual diplomacy. And don’t forget its growing roles as a domestic-disaster manager and a global arms dealer, or even as a Green Revolution energy innovator. You could certainly think of the Pentagon as the Blob on the American horizon, and yet, looking around, you might hardly be aware of the ways your country continues to be militarized.
With that in mind, let’s consider another warscape, one particularly appropriate to a moment when numerous commentators are pointing out that the U.S. seems to be morphing from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, when the headlines are filled with exploding gas lines and grim reports on the country’s aging infrastructure, when a major commuter tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan, the sort of project that once would have been tattoo-ably American, has just been canceled by New Jersey’s governor.
Still, don’t imagine that the old can-do American spirit I remember from my childhood is dead. Quite the contrary, we still have our great building projects, our pyramid- and ziggurat-equivalents. It’s just that these days they tend to get built nearer to the ruins of actual ziggurats and pyramids. I’m talking about our military bases, especially those being constructed in our war zones.
I mean, no sooner had U.S. troops taken Baghdad in April 2003 than the Pentagon and the crony corporations it now can’t go to war without began to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into the construction of well-fortified American towns in Iraq that included multiple bus routes, PXes, fast-food joints, massage parlors, Internet cafés, power plants, water-treatment plants, sewage plants, fire stations, you name it. Hundreds of military bases, micro to mega, were built in Iraq alone, including the ill-named but ginormous Victory Base Complex at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, with at least nine significant sub-bases nestled inside it, and Balad Air Base, which -- sooner than you could say “Saddam Hussein’s in captivity” -- was handling air traffic on the scale of O'Hare International in Chicago, and bedding down 40,000 inhabitants including hire-a-gun African cops, civilian defense employees, Special Ops forces, the employees of private contractors, and of course tons of troops.
And all of this was nothing compared to the feat the Pentagon accomplished in Afghanistan where the U.S. military now claims to have built something like 400 bases of every sort from the smallest combat outposts to monster installations like Bagram Air Base in a country without normal resources, fuel, building materials, or much of anything else. Just about all construction materials for those bases and the fuel to go with them had to be delivered over treacherous supply lines thousands of miles long, so treacherous and difficult in fact that, by the time a gallon of fuel reaches Afghanistan to keep those Humvees and MRAPs rolling along, it’s estimated to cost $400.
At some level, of course, all of this represents a remarkable can-do achievement and tells you a great deal about American priorities today, about where our national treasure and can-do efforts are focused.
Ziggurats or Tunnels?
And I could go on. The Pentagon and the military make going on easy. After all, the list is unending, the militarization of our American world ongoing, and it’s all happening in your time, on your watch. This is the world you are going to walk out into. I may be nine years old in TomDispatch terms, but I’ve been around for 66 years and this won’t be my world for so long.
So let me ask you: Are you sure that you want the U.S. military to be concerned with every inch of the planet? Are you sure that you want your tax dollars to go, above all, into building pyramid-equivalents in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of tunnels at home, or into fighting a multigenerational war on terror planet-wide, instead of into putting the unemployed to work here? If you can’t imagine reducing the American military mission and “footprint” on this planet significantly, then, of course, it’s probably best to ignore this talk. But rest assured: You won’t save our country that way, you’ll destroy it.
A decade ago, when I was born as TomDispatch.com, many of you were only ten or eleven years old, as were many of our soldiers now in Afghanistan and Iraq. A decade from now, if the war in Afghanistan (and increasingly Pakistan) is still being fought, most of you will be entering your fourth decade on this planet and you may even have a 10 year old of your own. A decade from then, if -- as some top Washington officials insist -- the global war on terror is “multigenerational,” that child may be fighting in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia or some other military “area of responsibility” somewhere on the planet. A decade from then…
Of course, whatever skills we may lack when it comes to predicting the future, all things must end, including the American war state and our strange state of war. The question is: Can our over-armed global mission be radically downsized before it downsizes us? It will happen anyway, and it won’t take forever either, not the way things are going, but it will happen in an easier and less harmful way, if you’re involved, in whatever fashion you choose, in making it so. Had I had a birthday cake with candles on it for that ninth birthday of mine and blown them out, that, I think, would have been my wish.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has recently been published. You can catch him discussing war American-style and his book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here. This was originally a talk given to students attending Hofstra University's lecture series, The International Scene.
[Note: If Marty and Margaret Melkonian hadn’t offered me a double invitation to speak at Hofstra College and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, this talk would never have seen the light of day. A bow of appreciation to both of them! If it weren’t for Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website, Antiwar.com, and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, which jostle fiercely in my mind each morning as I try to decide where to stop first in my online travels, I would be so much poorer in good information and analysis. So let me add a bow to them as well! In a world made by war, Noah Shachtman’s Danger Zone blog also shouldn't be missed. It contains all things warlike. And Katherine Tiedemann’s AfPak Daily Brief is the best ongoing summary of mainstream coverage of our Afghan (and increasingly Pakistan) War. For any of you interested in learning more about my childhood in Cold War America -- from G.I. Joe to Star Wars and beyond -- check out the updated edition of my book, The End of Victory Culture.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt
Vote for Peace. Elect Holbert!
Posted: October 18, 2010 05:27 PM
A World Made by War:
When you look at me, you can’t mistake the fact that I’m of a certain age. But just for a moment, think of me as nine years old. You could even say that I celebrated my ninth birthday last week, without cake, candles, presents, or certainly joy.
I’ve had two mobilized moments in my life. The first was in the Vietnam War years; the second, the one that leaves me as a nine-year-old, began on the morning of September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV while doing my morning exercises, saw a smoking hole in a World Trade Center tower, and thought that, as in 1945 when a B-25 slammed into the Empire State Building, a terrible accident had happened.
Later, after the drums of war had begun to beat, after the first headlines had screamed their World-War-II-style messages (“the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century”), I had another thought. And for a reasonably politically sophisticated guy, my second response was not only as off-base as the first, but also remarkably dumb. I thought that this horrific event taking place in my hometown might open Americans up to the pain of the world. No such luck, of course.
If you had told me then that we would henceforth be in a state of eternal war as well as living in a permanent war state, that, to face a ragtag enemy of a few thousand stateless terrorists, the national security establishment in Washington would pump itself up to levels not faintly reached when facing the Soviet Union, a major power with thousands of nuclear weapons and an enormous military, that “homeland” -- a distinctly un-American word -- would land in our vocabulary never to leave, and that a second Defense Department dubbed the Department of Homeland Security would be set up not to be dismantled in my lifetime, that torture (excuse me, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) would become as American as apple pie and that some of those “techniques” would actually be demonstrated to leading Bush administration officials inside the White House, that we would pour money into the Pentagon at ever escalating levels even after the economy crashed in 2008, that we would be fighting two potentially trillion-dollar-plus wars without end in two distant lands, that we would spend untold billions constructing hundreds of military bases in those same lands, that the CIA would be conducting the first drone air war in history over a country we were officially not at war with, that most of us would live in a remarkable state of detachment from all of this, and finally -- only, by the way, because I’m cutting this list arbitrarily short -- that I would spend my time writing incessantly about “the American way of war” and produce a book with that title, I would have thought you were nuts.
But every bit of that happened, even if unpredicted by me because, like human beings everywhere, I have no special knack for peering into the future. If it were otherwise, I would undoubtedly now be zipping through fabulous spired cities with a jetpack on my back (as I was assured would happen in my distant youth). But if prediction isn’t our forte, then adaptability to changing circumstances may be -- and it certainly helps account for my being here today.
I’m here because, in response to the bizarre spectacle of this nation going to war while living at peace, even if in a spasmodic state of collective national fear, I did something I hardly understood at the time. I launched a nameless listserv of collected articles and my own expanding commentary that ran against the common wisdom of that October moment when the bombing runs for our second Afghan war began. A little more than a year later, thanks to the Nation Institute, it became a website with the name TomDispatch.com, and because our leaders swore we were “a nation at war,” because we were indeed killing people in quantity in distant lands, because the power of the state at home was being strengthened in startling ways, while everything still open about our society seemed to be getting screwed shut, and the military was being pumped up to Schwarzeneggerian dimensions, I started writing about war.
At some level, I can’t tell you how ridiculous that was. After all, I’m the most civilian and peaceable of guys. I’ve never even been in the military. I was, however, upset with the Bush administration, the connect-no-dots media coverage of that moment, and the repeated 9/11 rites which proclaimed us the planet’s greatest victim, survivor, and dominator, leaving only one role, greatest Evil Doer, open for the rest of the planet (and you know who auditioned for that part, and won, hands down)!
Things That Go Boom in the Night
I won’t say, however, that I had no expertise whatsoever with a permanent state of war and a permanent war state -- only that the expertise I had was available to anyone who had lived through the post-World War II era. I was reminded of this on a recent glorious Sunday when, from the foot of Manhattan, I set out, for the first time in more than half a century, on a brief ferry ride that proved, for me, as effective a time machine as anything H.G. Wells had ever imagined. That ferry was not, of course, taking me to a future civilization at the edge of time, but to Governor’s Island, now a park and National Monument in the eddying waters of New York harbor and to the rubble of a gas station my father, a World War II vet, ran there in the early 1950s when that island was still a major U.S. Army base.
On many mornings in those years, I accompanied him on that short ride across the East River and found myself amid buzzing jeeps and drilling soldiers in a world of Army kids with, among other wonders, access to giant swimming pools and kiddy-matinee Westerns. As a dyed-in-the-wool city boy, it was my only real exposure to the 'burbs and it proved an edenic one that also caught something of the exotically militarized mood of that Korean War moment.
As on that island, so for most Americans then, the worlds of the warrior and of abundance were no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers who were using a rising military budget and the fear of communism to create a new national security economy. An alliance between big industry, big science, and the military had been forged during World War II that blurred the boundaries between the military and the civilian by fusing together a double set of desires: for technological breakthroughs leading to ever more efficient weapons of destruction and to ever easier living. The arms race -- the race, that is, for future good wars -- and the race for the good life were then, as on that island, being put on the same “war” footing.
In the 1950s, a military Keynesianism was already driving the U.S. economy toward a consumerism in which desire for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television console and submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The companies -- General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others -- producing the large objects for the American home were also major contractors developing the big ticket weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance.
More than half a century later, the Pentagon is still living a life of abundance -- despite one less-than-victorious, less-then-good war after another -- while we, increasingly, are not. In the years in-between, the developing national security state of my childhood just kept growing, and in the process the country militarized in the strangest of ways.
Only once in that period did a sense of actual war seem to hover over the nation. That was, of course, in the Vietnam years of the 1960s and early 1970s, when the draft brought a dirty war up close and personal, driving it into American homes and out into the streets, when a kind of intermittent warfare seemed to break out in this country’s cities and ghettos, and when impending defeat drove the military itself to the edge of revolt and collapse.
From the 1970s until 2001, as that military rebuilt itself as an all-volunteer force and finally went back to war in distant lands, the military itself seemed to disappear from everyday life. There were no soldiers in sight, nothing we would consider commonplace today -- from uniforms and guns in train stations to military flyovers at football games, or the repeated rites of praise for American troops that are now everyday fare in our world where, otherwise, we largely ignore American wars.
In 1989, for instance, I wrote in the Progressive magazine about a country that seemed to me to be undergoing further militarization, even if in a particularly strange way. Ours was, I said:
[An] America that conforms to no notions we hold of militarism… Militarization is, of course, commonly associated with uniformed, usually exalted troops in evidence and a dictatorship, possibly military, in power. The United States, by such standards, still has the look of a civilian society. Our military is, if anything, less visible in our lives than it was a decade ago: no uniforms in the streets, seldom even for our traditional parades; a civilian-elected government; weaponry out of sight… the draft and the idea of a civilian army a thing of the past.
“In the Reagan-Bush era, the military has gone undercover in the world that we see, though not in the world that sees us. For if it is absent from our everyday culture, its influence is omnipresent in corporate America, that world beyond our politics and out of our control -- the world which, nonetheless, plans our high-tech future of work and consumption. There, the militarization of the economy and the corporatization of the military is a process so far gone that it seems reasonable to ask whether the United States can even be said to have a civilian economy.
Of course, that was then, this is now. Little did I know. Today, it seems, our country is triumphant in producing only things that go boom in the night: We have a near monopoly on the global weapons market and on the global movie market, where in the dark we’re experts in explosions of every sort. When I wrote in 1989 that the process was “so far gone,” I had no idea how far we still had to go. I had no idea, for instance, how far a single administration could push us when it came to war. Still, one thing that does remain reasonably constant about America’s now perpetual state of war is how little we -- the 99% of us who don’t belong to the military or fight -- actually see of it, even though it is, in a sense, all around us.
Warscapes
From a remarkable array of possibilities, here are just a few warscapes -- think of them as like landscapes, only deadlier -- that might help make more visible an American world of, and way of, war that we normally spend little time discussing, questioning, debating, or doing anything about.
As a start, let me try to conjure up a map of what “defense,” as imagined by the Pentagon and the U.S. military, actually looks like. You can find such a map at Wikipedia, but for a second just imagine a world map laid flat before you. Now divide it, the whole globe, like so many ill-shaped pieces of cobbler, into six servings -- you can be as messy as you want, it’s not an exact science -- and label them the U.S. European Command or EUCOM (for Europe and Russia), the U.S. Pacific Command or PACOM (Asia), CENTCOM (the Greater Middle East and a touch of North Africa), NORTHCOM (North America), SOUTHCOM (South America and most of the Caribbean), and AFRICOM (almost all of Africa). Those are the “areas of responsibility” of six U.S. military commands.
In case you hadn’t noticed, on our map that takes care of just about every inch of the planet, but -- I hasten to add -- not every bit of imaginable space. For that, if you were a clever cartographer, you would somehow need to include STRATCOM, the U.S. Strategic Command charged with, among other things, ensuring that we dominate the heavens, and the newest of all the “geographic” commands, CYBERCOM, expected to be fully operational later this fall with “1,000 elite military hackers and spies under one four-star general” prepared to engage in preemptive war in cyberspace.
Some of these commands have crept up on us over the years. CENTCOM, which now oversees our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was formed in 1983, a result of the Carter Doctrine -- that is, of President Jimmy Carter’s decision to make the protection of Persian Gulf oil a military necessity, while both NORTHCOM (2002) and AFRICOM (2007) were creations of the Global War on Terror.
From a mapping perspective, however, the salient point is simple enough: At the moment, there is no imaginable space on or off the planet that is not an “area of responsibility” for the U.S. military. That, not the protection of our shores and borders, is what is now meant by that word “defense” in the Department of Defense. And if you were to stare at that map for a while, I can’t help but think it would come to strike you as abidingly strange. No place at all of no military interest to us? What does that say about our country -- and ourselves?
In case you’re imagining that the map I’ve just described is simply a case of cartographic hyperbole, consider this: We now have what is, in essence, a secret military inside the U.S. military. I’m talking about our Special Operations forces. These elite and largely covert forces were rapidly expanded in the Bush years as part of the Global War on Terror, but also thanks to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s urge to bring covert activities that were once the province of the CIA under the Pentagon’s wing. By the end of George W. Bush’s second term in office -- think of that map again -- Special Operations forces were fighting in, training in, or stationed in approximately 60 countries under the aegis of the Global War on Terror. Less than two years later, according to the Washington Post, 13,000 Special Operations troops are deployed abroad in approximately 75 countries as part of an expanding Global War on Terror (even if the Obama administration has ditched that name); in other words, Special Ops troops alone are now operating in close to 40% of the 192 countries that make up the United Nations!
And talking about what the Pentagon has taken under its wing, I’m reminded of a low-budget, sci-fi film of my childhood, The Blob. In it, a gelatinous alien grows ever more humongous by eating every living thing in its path, with the exception of Steve McQueen, in his debut screen role. By analogy, take what’s officially called the “IC” or U.S. Intelligence Community, that Rumsfeld was so eager to militarize. It’s made up of 17 major agencies and outfits, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). Created in 2004 in response to the intelligence dysfunction of 9/11, ODNI is already its own small bureaucracy with 1,500 employees and next to no power to do the only thing it was really ever meant to do, coordinate the generally dysfunctional labyrinth of the IC itself.
You might wonder what kind of “intelligence” a country could possibly get from 17 competing, bickering outfits -- and that’s not even the half of it. According to a Washington Post series, Top Secret America, by Dana Priest and William Arkin:
“In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11… Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States… In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space.&rdquo
Oh, and keep in mind that more than two-thirds of the IC’s intelligence programs are controlled by the Pentagon, which also means control over a major chunk of the combined intelligence budget, announced at $75 billion (“2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001,” according to Priest and Arkin), but undoubtedly far larger.
And when it comes to the Pentagon, that’s just a start. Massive expansion in all directions has been its m.o. since 9/11. Its soaring budget hit about $700 billion for fiscal year 2010 (when you include a war-fighting supplemental bill of $33 billion) -- an increase of only 4.7% in otherwise budget-slashing times -- and is now projected to hit $726 billion in fiscal year 2011. Some experts claim, however, that the real figure may come closer to the trillion-dollar mark when all aspects of national security are factored in. Not surprisingly, it has taken over a spectrum of State Department-controlled civilian activities, ranging from humanitarian relief and development (aka “nation-building”) to actual diplomacy. And don’t forget its growing roles as a domestic-disaster manager and a global arms dealer, or even as a Green Revolution energy innovator. You could certainly think of the Pentagon as the Blob on the American horizon, and yet, looking around, you might hardly be aware of the ways your country continues to be militarized.
With that in mind, let’s consider another warscape, one particularly appropriate to a moment when numerous commentators are pointing out that the U.S. seems to be morphing from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, when the headlines are filled with exploding gas lines and grim reports on the country’s aging infrastructure, when a major commuter tunnel from New Jersey to Manhattan, the sort of project that once would have been tattoo-ably American, has just been canceled by New Jersey’s governor.
Still, don’t imagine that the old can-do American spirit I remember from my childhood is dead. Quite the contrary, we still have our great building projects, our pyramid- and ziggurat-equivalents. It’s just that these days they tend to get built nearer to the ruins of actual ziggurats and pyramids. I’m talking about our military bases, especially those being constructed in our war zones.
I mean, no sooner had U.S. troops taken Baghdad in April 2003 than the Pentagon and the crony corporations it now can’t go to war without began to pour billions of taxpayer dollars into the construction of well-fortified American towns in Iraq that included multiple bus routes, PXes, fast-food joints, massage parlors, Internet cafés, power plants, water-treatment plants, sewage plants, fire stations, you name it. Hundreds of military bases, micro to mega, were built in Iraq alone, including the ill-named but ginormous Victory Base Complex at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, with at least nine significant sub-bases nestled inside it, and Balad Air Base, which -- sooner than you could say “Saddam Hussein’s in captivity” -- was handling air traffic on the scale of O'Hare International in Chicago, and bedding down 40,000 inhabitants including hire-a-gun African cops, civilian defense employees, Special Ops forces, the employees of private contractors, and of course tons of troops.
And all of this was nothing compared to the feat the Pentagon accomplished in Afghanistan where the U.S. military now claims to have built something like 400 bases of every sort from the smallest combat outposts to monster installations like Bagram Air Base in a country without normal resources, fuel, building materials, or much of anything else. Just about all construction materials for those bases and the fuel to go with them had to be delivered over treacherous supply lines thousands of miles long, so treacherous and difficult in fact that, by the time a gallon of fuel reaches Afghanistan to keep those Humvees and MRAPs rolling along, it’s estimated to cost $400.
At some level, of course, all of this represents a remarkable can-do achievement and tells you a great deal about American priorities today, about where our national treasure and can-do efforts are focused.
Ziggurats or Tunnels?
And I could go on. The Pentagon and the military make going on easy. After all, the list is unending, the militarization of our American world ongoing, and it’s all happening in your time, on your watch. This is the world you are going to walk out into. I may be nine years old in TomDispatch terms, but I’ve been around for 66 years and this won’t be my world for so long.
So let me ask you: Are you sure that you want the U.S. military to be concerned with every inch of the planet? Are you sure that you want your tax dollars to go, above all, into building pyramid-equivalents in Iraq or Afghanistan instead of tunnels at home, or into fighting a multigenerational war on terror planet-wide, instead of into putting the unemployed to work here? If you can’t imagine reducing the American military mission and “footprint” on this planet significantly, then, of course, it’s probably best to ignore this talk. But rest assured: You won’t save our country that way, you’ll destroy it.
A decade ago, when I was born as TomDispatch.com, many of you were only ten or eleven years old, as were many of our soldiers now in Afghanistan and Iraq. A decade from now, if the war in Afghanistan (and increasingly Pakistan) is still being fought, most of you will be entering your fourth decade on this planet and you may even have a 10 year old of your own. A decade from then, if -- as some top Washington officials insist -- the global war on terror is “multigenerational,” that child may be fighting in Pakistan or Yemen or Somalia or some other military “area of responsibility” somewhere on the planet. A decade from then…
Of course, whatever skills we may lack when it comes to predicting the future, all things must end, including the American war state and our strange state of war. The question is: Can our over-armed global mission be radically downsized before it downsizes us? It will happen anyway, and it won’t take forever either, not the way things are going, but it will happen in an easier and less harmful way, if you’re involved, in whatever fashion you choose, in making it so. Had I had a birthday cake with candles on it for that ninth birthday of mine and blown them out, that, I think, would have been my wish.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has recently been published. You can catch him discussing war American-style and his book in a Timothy MacBain TomCast video by clicking here. This was originally a talk given to students attending Hofstra University's lecture series, The International Scene.
[Note: If Marty and Margaret Melkonian hadn’t offered me a double invitation to speak at Hofstra College and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock, this talk would never have seen the light of day. A bow of appreciation to both of them! If it weren’t for Juan Cole’s Informed Comment website, Antiwar.com, and Paul Woodward’s The War in Context, which jostle fiercely in my mind each morning as I try to decide where to stop first in my online travels, I would be so much poorer in good information and analysis. So let me add a bow to them as well! In a world made by war, Noah Shachtman’s Danger Zone blog also shouldn't be missed. It contains all things warlike. And Katherine Tiedemann’s AfPak Daily Brief is the best ongoing summary of mainstream coverage of our Afghan (and increasingly Pakistan) War. For any of you interested in learning more about my childhood in Cold War America -- from G.I. Joe to Star Wars and beyond -- check out the updated edition of my book, The End of Victory Culture.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt
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