The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (10 page)

Over 2,000 for-profit firms and over 850,000 people with top-secret clearance are engaged in military and intelligence activities, ostensibly for the U.S. government, with seemingly little or no oversight.

Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., has submitted a bill, H.R. 5353, called “The War Is Making You Poor Act.” Grayson, with a few Republicans and a number of progressive Democratic co-sponsors, wants to force Commander in Chief Obama to run his two wars with “only” the $548.9 billion base budget. The $159.3 billion saved would be turned into a tax break, making the first $35,000 of income tax-free, and anything left over would be directed to paying down the national debt. The bill is in committee now and may generate genuine bipartisan support. Grayson, when introducing the bill, highlighted a fact worth repeating: The U.S. war budget is greater than the military spending of every other nation on Earth, combined.

Meanwhile, at the National Peace Conference to be held in Albany, New York, this weekend, people are targeting the military budget. Students are organizing around the connection between war expenditures and education budgets that are being slashed, sparking protests at campuses nationwide. Another effort, called “Bring Our War Dollars Home,” promotes action at the city council and statehouse level, along with grassroots campaigns to pressure members of Congress to stop funding war.

The cost of the Iraq War was estimated by Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, with his colleague Linda Bilmes, at $3 trillion, calculating not only hard, current costs, but also the cost to society of caring for wounded veterans, and the long-term costs of having so many families disrupted by caring for their injured loved ones, or having a breadwinner killed in action. And that’s just Iraq. As of May, the monthly cost of the war in Afghanistan surpassed, for the first time, the cost of war in Iraq.

Stiglitz was one of the many economists who said the economic stimulus package (at $787 billion) was too small. He argues that deficit spending, when done wisely, creates long-term returns for an economy.

Conversely, he wrote recently, “Deficits to finance wars or give-aways to the financial sector . . . impos[e] a burden on future generations.”

Economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research says President Obama’s Deficit Commission, formally the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, is a major cause for concern. The co-chairs are former Republican Sen. Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles, who is on the board of Morgan Stanley, one of the bailed-out Wall Street firms. Baker told me: “Both are on record saying they want to cut Social Security. This should have people very, very worried. That isn’t a balanced commission.”

March 2, 2011

The Battle of the Budgets: New Fronts in the Afghan and Iraq Wars

Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio, Idaho . . . these are the latest fronts in the battle of budgets, with the larger fight over a potential shutdown of the U.S. government looming. These fights, radiating out from the occupation of the Wisconsin capitol building, are occurring against the backdrop of the two wars waged by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan. No discussion or debate over budgets, over wages and pensions, over deficits, should happen without a clear presentation of the costs of these wars—and the incalculable benefits that ending them would bring.

First, the cost of war. The U.S. is spending about $2 billion a week in Afghanistan alone. That’s about $104 billion a year—and that is not including Iraq. Compare that with the state budget shortfalls. According to a recent report by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “some 45 states and the District of Columbia are projecting budget shortfalls totalling $125bn for fiscal year 2012.”

The math is simple: the money should be poured back into the states, rather than into a state of war.

President Barack Obama shows no signs that he is going to end either the occupation of Iraq or the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Quite the opposite: he campaigned with the promise to expand the war in Afghanistan, and that is one campaign promise he has kept. So how is Obama’s war going? Not well.

This has been the deadliest period for civilians in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion began in October 2001. Sixty-five civilians were reportedly killed recently in Kunar, near Pakistan, where mounting civilian casualties lead to increasing popular support for the Taliban. 2010 was the deadliest year for U.S. soldiers as well, with 711 U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan. Soldier deaths remain high in 2011, with the fighting expected to intensify as the weather warms.

The
Washington Post
recently reported that Obama’s controversial CIA-run drone program, in which unmanned aerial drones are sent over rural Pakistan to launch Hellfire missiles at “suspected militants,” has killed at least 581 people, of whom only two were on a U.S. list of people suspected of being “high-level militants.” Ample evidence exists that the drone strikes, which have increased in number dramatically under Obama’s leadership, kill civilians, not to mention Pakistani civilian support for the United States.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, the democracy that the neocons in Washington expected to deliver through the barrel of a gun with their “shock and awe” may be coming finally—not with the help of the U.S., but, rather, inspired by the peaceful, popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. However, Human Rights Watch has just reported that as people protest and dissidents organize, “the rights of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are routinely violated with impunity.”

Protests have erupted in another Tahrir Square, in Baghdad (yes, it means “liberation” in Iraq and Egypt), against corruption, and demanding jobs and better public services. Iraqi government forces killed twenty-nine people over the weekend; and 300 people, including human-rights workers and journalists, have been rounded up.

Yet, the U.S. continues to pour money and troops into these endless wars.
Rolling Stone
’s Michael Hastings, whose reporting exposed the crass behavior of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has just exposed what he calls an illegal operation run by Lt. Gen. William Caldwell in Afghanistan, in which a U.S. Army “psy-ops” operation was mounted against U.S. senators and other visiting dignitaries in order to win support and more funding. One of Hastings’ military sources quoted Caldwell as saying: “How do we get these guys to give us more people? . . . What do I have to plant inside their heads?”

The recently retired special inspector general (SIGAR) for Afghanistan reconstruction, Arnold Fields, just reported that $11.4 billion is at risk due to inadequate planning. Another group, the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting, “concludes that the United States has wasted tens of billions of the nearly $200 billion that has been spent on contracts and grants since 2002 to support military, reconstruction and other U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Which brings us back to those teachers, nurses, police officers, and firefighters in Wisconsin. Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, told me in the capitol rotunda in Madison why the unionized firefighters were there, even though their union was one not targeted by Gov. Scott Walker’s bill: “This is about an attack on the middle class.”

By shutting down the attacks on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, we can prevent these attacks on the poor and middle class here at home.

July 27, 2011

War Is a Racket

“War is a racket,” wrote retired U.S. Marine Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, in 1935. That statement, which is also the title of his short book on war profiteering, rings true today. One courageous civil servant just won a battle to hold war profiteers accountable. Her name is Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse. She blew the whistle when her employer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, gave a no-bid $7 billion contract to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) as the invasion of Iraq was about to commence. She was doing her job, trying to ensure a competitive bidding process would save the U.S. government money. For that, she was forced out of her senior position, demoted, and harassed.

Just this week, after waging a legal battle for more than half a decade, Bunny Greenhouse won. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers settled with Greenhouse for $970,000, representing full restitution for lost wages, compensatory damages, and attorneys’ fees.

Her “offense” was to challenge a no-bid, $7 billion-plus contract to KBR. It was weeks before the expected invasion of Iraq, in 2003, and Bush military planners predicted Saddam Hussein would blow up Iraqi oilfields, as happened with the U.S. invasion in 1991. The project, dubbed “Restore Iraqi Oil,” or RIO, was created so that oilfield fires would be extinguished. KBR was owned then by Halliburton, whose CEO until 2000 was none other than then Vice President Dick Cheney. KBR was the only company invited to bid.

Bunny Greenhouse told her superiors that the process was illegal. She was overridden. She said the decision to grant the contract to KBR came from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, run by VP Cheney’s close friend, Donald Rumsfeld.

As Bunny Greenhouse told a congressional committee, “I can unequivocally state that the abuse related to contracts awarded to KBR represents the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career.”

The oilfields were not set ablaze. Nevertheless, KBR was allowed to retool its $7 billion no-bid contract, to provide gasoline and other logistical support to the occupation forces. The contract was so-called cost-plus, which means KBR was not on the hook to provide services at a set price. Rather, it could charge its cost, plus a fixed percentage as profit. The more KBR charged, the more profit it made.

As the chief procurement officer, Greenhouse’s signature was required on all contracts valued at more than $10 million. Soon after testifying about the egregious RIO contract, she was demoted and stripped of her top-secret clearance and began receiving the lowest performance ratings. Before blowing the whistle, she had received the highest ratings. Ultimately, she left work, facing an unbearably hostile workplace.

After years of litigation, attorney Michael Kohn, president of the National Whistleblowers Center, brought the case to a settlement. He said: “Bunny Greenhouse risked her job and career when she objected to the gross waste of federal taxpayer dollars and illegal contracting practices at the Army Corps of Engineers. She had the courage to stand alone and challenge powerful special interests. She exposed a corrupt contracting environment where casual and clubby contracting practices were the norm. Her courage led to sweeping legal reforms that will forever halt the gross abuse she had the courage to expose.”

The National Whistleblowers Center’s executive director, Stephen Kohn (brother of Michael Kohn), told me: “Federal employees have a very, very hard time blowing the whistle. So whenever the government is forced to pay full damages for all back pay, all compensatory damages, all attorneys’ fees, that’s a major victory. I hope it’s a turning point. The case was hard-fought. It should never have had to been filed. Bunny did the right thing.”

According to Nobel Prize–winning economist Joe Stiglitz, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone will exceed $5 trillion. With a cost like this, why isn’t war central to the debate over the national debt?

Two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler had it right seventy-five years ago when he said of war: “It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious [racket]. . . . It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. . . . It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.”

As President Barack Obama and Congress claim it is Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security that are breaking the budget, people should demand that they stop paying for war.

August 2, 2011

War, Debt, and the President

President Barack Obama touted his debt ceiling deal Tuesday, saying, “We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession.” Yet that is what he and his coterie of Wall Street advisers have done.

In the affairs of nations, Alexander Hamilton wrote in January 1790, “loans in times of public danger, especially from foreign war, are found an indispensable resource.” It was his first report as secretary of the treasury to the new Congress of the United States. The country had borrowed to fight the Revolutionary War, and Hamilton proposed a system of public debt to pay those loans.

The history of the U.S. national debt is inexorably tied to its many wars. The resolution this week of the so-called debt ceiling crisis is no different. Not only did a compliant Congress agree to fund President George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with emergency appropriations, it did so with borrowed money, raising the debt ceiling ten times since 2001 without quibbling.

So how did the Pentagon fare in the current budget battle? It looks like it did fine. Not to be confused with the soldiers and veterans who have fought these wars.

“This year is the 50th anniversary of [Dwight] Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex speech,” William Hartung of the Center for International Policy told me while the Senate assembled to vote on the debt ceiling bill. Speaking of the late general turned Republican U.S. president, Hartung said: “He talked about the need for a balanced economy, for a healthy population. Essentially, he’s to the left of Barack Obama on these issues.”