Defense Budget Greed

Transcript

go hello this is glenn mower and i'm here today uh with bud booth and we're going to do another episode of the next step uh the subject matter of today is uh euphemistically called defense department greed or defense budget greed and we're speaking of the appetite of a military and for a huge increasingly share of american uh production right now uh in the united states uh 57 percent of federal discretionary spending at least 57 percent uh is spent on the military and defend what they call a defense department uh that means that there is not money available for other things that are much more humane much more productive much more basic to our nature i think i'd start i want to start with a quote from dwight david eisenhower hardly a man that is known to be a too touchy feely liberal or but here's what he said every gun that is made every warship launched every rocket fired is a theft from those who hunger you know if a man like dwight david eisenhower who was allied commander in world war ii and observed war at close range and certainly was in charge of a military can appreciate that then i think we should be listening to those words and not have forgotten them over the last few decades as we seem to have done so um right now the united states of america accounts for over 40 percent of the world's military expenditures 40 percent one nation alone china is about uh 9.6 uh of that russia is about 5.2 percent united states spent at least 682 billion dollars a year on what we call defense probably higher because of the black budgets china spends 166 billion russia about 91 million nato the combined nato forces which of which were the primary unifying military member um over one trillion almost one trillion dollars a year on defense as compared to uh so there's a huge amount of money being spent most of it by the united states so bud you were in the in the military in world war ii and uh have been an observer of the military since is this something new in american politics or something that we have been seeing well i was thinking the other day about the uh the planes that we flew and thousands of them in world war ii and just one f-35 fighter would probably cost more than uh than all the eight air force planes that bombed germany and this is just uh beyond belief now granted that the planes that uh that bomb germany were uh very insufficient and sophisticated but the f-35 is uh is as sophisticated as is possible to make and it um is not really used as a fighter plane although they call it a fighter plane because the the the true fighter planes were two planes uh of fighting against each other or the one fighter plane trying to shoot down the bombers of another fighter plane so it's uh beyond belief what our military is costing to start out i might say that uh the military-industrial complex is the cost is as glenn just pointed out is is beyond belief compared to what the military and the rest of the world spends and i should add that it's not to defend our country it's i affectionately call it the department of offense because the chance it had to defend our country was in 911 and it fell flat on its face there so it's it's used as an offensive weapon and another thing i might add that uh what the what the military asks for from congress is x amount of money but what the congress appropriates is x plus amount of money in other words the the congress each congressional district wants to get little uh pieces of the action and they they add money to the budget that the department of defense uh put presents to the uh congress so uh later on i'll i'll just show you some information from the defense communications agency which is an organization that tracks what the military does and the money they spend well i think you know their perspective i mean individual abuses are are obvious the f-35 will discuss more i hope other other examples of that but but but i think we need to hold on to the context here that as you say we spend so much money in the united states as part of our economy we are among the industrialized nations we are by far we spend the largest percentage of our gross domestic product on the on the military of any other nation on earth other than ironically well we spend about 4.5 percent of our gross domestic product china is about 2.1 percent russia is about the same as us 4.4 percent except the only exception to those all the other numbers were one or half a percent or one percent or you know some token amount except saudi arabia uh spends about nine percent uh and and we have this huge army uh the united states standing military is about 7.3 military uh personal personnel per thousand population uh china is 5.2 per thousand russia is 5.3 per thousand so in almost every measure every metric we spend more we spend more of our as our gross domestic product we spend 40 of the world's spending may be higher than that alone and as part of our alliance with nato and others uh maybe two-thirds of the world's money is spent on on western defense militarism um and so and and they get this out uh out of the american public by frightening us by making us believe that uh if we don't do this uh we will be subject to attack by all these other nations which have woefully less resource than we do there's no way that any country can attack united states except with a nuclear bomb hidden in an old rusty freighter or in some other means of uh of hitting us with a bomb but you're talking about the end of the world when you talk about nuclear exchange well extending right standing armies are not going to stop against these kind of terroristic possibilities or more subtle attacks i mean not settle in the sense of the effect but certainly you don't need to have an invasion force of ships and airplanes and and missiles in order to do immense damage united states if they were to take advantage of the type of thing you're describing some unsophisticated uh nuclear weapon and the united states is the only country in the world that has their military force and bases spread all over the world russia doesn't they they they did one time they tried to go into afghanistan at the uh invitation of the so-called ruler of afghanistan and they got beaten back by the united states who with its ally yes osama bin laden was our ally in defeating russia in their uh in the television and the taliban also you know yeah the whole well osama bin laden and because he was access to what they call the now as being called the taliban and uh yeah that's the irony of it all but uh you mentioned the us extension of the u.s military presence now we have as best i can gather and this is probably pretty inadequate because there's so much of this that is reported to the public 781 bases abroad um around the world and they estimate the cost of maintaining those bases around the world from azerbaijan or in the islands in the indian ocean or anywhere else in germany wherever they are the the cost of maintaining those bases uh since about 2001 when the war on terror began somewhere between 1.8 trillion and 2.1 trillion dollars of money that is being sent out of this country by and large or certainly into other uh economies for the purpose of maintaining an imperial presence around the world and at the cost of domestic programs and needs that could be met yes it all it all started back at the end of world war ii when the allies namely the soviet union and the united states defeated a country that needed to be defeated and but we have different uh social uh means of of in our countries and they they are socialist and we are capitalists but we are we are socialists in many aspects we've got social security we've got medicare medicaid we've got k-12 education all social socialistic things and russia is as much capitalistic as we are now they weren't then but they are now so we we we split up the world into their sphere and our sphere and and that is kind of rearing its ugly head again today the the the cold war is creeping back in to what we had hoped was got to get rid of well i think we need to look behind the militarism alone there is an economic incentive for free enterprise corporations involved in this the cost of these we continue to sell the american public that we should uh produce new weapons of war and new weapon systems and and maintain these bases all which benefits a lot of private corporations that we know about i mean the military-industrial complex says you referred to a moment ago was another eisenhower quote uh he observed that we were we were becoming corrupted by this mixture of politicians and business communities uh and uh and and that has got no better since he warned about it back in the late 60s 1959 or 60 when he left office um and others have warned about it too but we but it continues because it pays politicians get paid off uh by lobbyists and others and individual states often have war industries based in those states and they're loath to see them disappear but this is not something new uh again uh it was observed uh another another douglas macarthur quote that i came across uh the powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear keep us in a continuous stamped stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we are not blindly rallying but about the by furnishing exorbitant sums demanded to these militarists yet in retrospect these disasters never seem to have happened never seemed to be quite real i'm amazed to hear douglas macarthur having these insights because i don't think of him as being a man of that subtlety but it's true anybody who's in in the system and steps back for just a moment and observes it realizes uh the manipulative nature of fear and of the militarists yes absolutely there really is no end in sight because our congress uh is so beholden to the military-industrial complex for their existence and with that they uh the they get to congress to uh to vote and elect representatives that uh will back what they're doing so it's kind of a never-ending spiral well it is and you know what's uh one of the more interesting events of the last couple of years was the sequester uh this uh uh quote-unquote unholy alliance between the liberals and the conservatives between the democrats and the republicans um and all of that in which um everybody thought every the other side was going to be too chicken to actually go through with it and what do you know it happened and for a year the department of defense was under the same reductions as result of sequester as any other government agency allegedly a 10 reduction which of course didn't happen the they they were allowed to escape the tampa set reduction by uh using unexpected monies from previous budgets which means they had hid money from previous years they had stuffed this aside in in unexpected accounts so they were they had enough money there for almost seven percent of the reduction to be covered so they didn't have any impact significant impact uh and then they just used black money and other hidden monies to carry them through with almost no reductions in that first year the sequester then they came back and got a new budget pass which not only undid the sequester but gave them a three percent increase and even though at present obama and hegel are talking about reducing the military what they mean by reducing is reducing growth they're not talking about actually reducing except a couple and they realize they don't need 440 000 soldiers uh in in the modern times so they're talking about reducing the size of the standing army which is uh bigger than any time since world war ii yeah hardly necessary yeah so anyway yes you're right the the the you know there's there's truth and there's there's there's hidden truth the truth is that the military uh but the budget on in the pentagon budget continues to grow and even when uh for exam the obama administration's plan right now that they're talking about reducing the budget in the current defense but department hidden in that is they have acknowledged that they will grow defense to spending by 115 billion dollars over the four years beginning in 2016. so there's a little temporary hitch as they make some adjustments but the promise to the pentagon and to the defense industries is that just go along with us on this little momentary blip and we will give you more money in the future 116 billion dollar growth in the next uh four years plus there's 85 billion contingency monies for these secret programs the black programs war programs so they caught that outside of the pentagon budget the war in afghanistan the war in iraq those were all budgets that didn't get included in the pentagon budget so when you talk about the pentagon budget being 40 or 57 or 60 of the american domestic discretionary money it's not it's even worse than that because that doesn't include the war budgets yeah so what are we going to do about the mexican public is not aware of this and that's uh the question is how do you make the public aware of these exorbitant budgets that uh are taking away from from needed well yeah i mean there are people who understand even john mccain you know an apologist from the military by and large he called one of the programs the f-35 when he i know it's one of your least favorite uh uh uh military expenditures and an example of maybe the worst blue dog in the history that's what he called it john mccain called the program the f-35 fighter suddenly bomber what they call that thing one of the great national scandals yeah so people see this and that's what uh is uh pointed out in the uh uh this these publications that i got here of center for defense information it's a it's a an excellent publication that monitors and tracks what the department of offense is doing the first one says and i'll just read the headlines i won't read the whole thing it says how the f-35 nearly doubled in price and why you didn't know world spending on nuclear weapons surpasses one trillion dollars per year some issues with the f-35 aircraft and the f-35 out of altitude airspeed and ideas but never money now we had an f-15 f-16 and f-18 fighter planes that uh were better than the russians who were the only ones that had uh top draw draw fighter planes they were better than but that wasn't enough we had to we had to build a f-22 fighter and you know we don't hear anything about the f-22 anymore it was it was built and it is uh i don't know what what percentage of the of the total number that was authorized what number have been built but now we're going to the f-35 fighter which is truly not a fighter plane we think of fighter planes as i mentioned before um planes that uh uh that fight with dogfights with each other like snoopy and the red baron did but we we don't realize that that that's not the case anymore and they all fighters also used to shoot down bombers which we know so many of our bombers get shot down by the german fighters well military i mean the the military the army the navy the marine corps whatever they are they love having toys war toys they love having the idea of developing some new technology some new faster plane it's like you know i mean when i was younger i wanted to have a car that went faster you know we we wanted to have this mechanical thing it was sort of a macho thing but so so they end up i guess you can sort of understand in a way because it's not their money in fact the more of these absurd programs they built the more the the uh the staff officers and the pentagon officers be the more demand there is for them one of the one of the costs of a increasing cost in the military i just want a little bit of a side here is a incredible increase in the number of what are they called flags officers flag officers i have a chart here uh showing that since uh in in in world war ii at the end of world war ii there were approximately one flag officer for every um 15 000 or 20 000 troops for uniform personnel well i'm sorry yeah one point seven for every hundred for every ten thousand uniformed personnel uh and in by korea that went up to about three uh by vietnam it was about little under four uh during the cold war period in ireland period uh it was up to about five and the afcorn war began it was about six and in 2010 it was over seven so they've since world war ii they've quadrupled the number of these flag officers who are not cheap you know there's a huge number of hundreds of them it's not just a few dollars money that it costs when they retire and they retire fairly young and by today's the average retirement retire when they're they can retire when they're 50 55 years old and the average retirement for the flag officers according to the information now is like 247 thousand dollars uh not average i'm sorry up to 247 000 from 190 to 240 000 a year retirement costs and their average salary cost is about the same amount 990 000 plus 30 overhead so you know i don't want to be picking on this but but but there's there's this they continue to expand their uh their nest and and by having more programs to administer more money to administer the more staff officers and well you know they they were building a new golf course outside the pentagon for several millions of dollars and one of the officers was interviewed as well why was this necessary and uh that was proposing the golf course and uh expansion and he says well you have to understand it on saturday morning we have officers standing on each other trying to play golf that's his idea of necessity is that they want to be able to play golf more conveniently and the rest of us can pay for it um so anyway let's go back to this uh f-35 bomber uh plane that you mentioned just to make sure the people are called a bomber which is more true than a fighter because it's a fighter bomber the planes do not come together anymore like they used to and and shoot their machine guns at the other plane well each they're they're off they're off of 50 60 miles away and uh launching their missiles that would hit uh something the public needs to understand they give a plane it's just well it's a plane that's you know we build a few planes and we have to fly them around and but these are not just planes these are what they call weapon systems i guess these are they want to buy 2443 according numbers i saw of these at a price tag of 382 billion dollars repeat that 382 billion dollars and we can't afford you know food stamps or preschool or our medicare for all 382 billion dollars and the government accountability office says that if we do this the maintenance of uh over the lifetime these things will uh of these of this these planes they will no more just keeping them in the air and keeping them moving will make the total well over a trillion dollars of funds to just have this one weapon system quote unquote that as you point out isn't necessary it's probably almost obsolete already because of the increased use of drones and satellites and other forms of weaponry yes so this is another one of these things that's just going to go never get used in the course of its uh lifetime will only serve to enrich a few corporations and a few employees and will will harm the american public once again the public needs to understand the immensity of these numbers each plane will be from 182 million to 299 million per plane yeah that that should boggle the minds of our voting public that much per plane when back in world war ii the uh b-17 bomber only cost into the thousands per plane not not a hundred thousand less than that and now we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars per airplane hundreds per airplane and support and all the other costs are associated with it uh another example this type of boondoggle that the defense department refuses to give up is what they call the rq-4 global hawk it's a huge drone that's supposed to fly on its own around the world and replacing the u2 spy planes okay so the u2 spy planes we have 100 and some of those uh as i understand it and they've been around for 40 years and they've done the job more than adequately and they're being outdated by the use of satellites but the military is not satisfied that they want to play with another kind of machine a drone that would do the same function as u2's did or satellites do and these are priced at at least 35 million per plane and it's so interesting to point out that i'm sorry priced in 2005 at 35 million now they're talking about 227 million per plane and and what are these drones used for for bombing pakistan bombing in yemen bombing and other places these are these are countries that we have no right to be in at all this is a spy drone it's not going to bomb yet but but the point you know that we can get in the other drones i mean the other idea you know i saw in the l.a times a few days ago that a local company out in the san fernando valley in the business section who makes these little small drones the ones you're talking about and others i just announced a record quarterly profit and that that's the other side of this that's why there's always somebody lobbying somebody supporting this sort of thing nobody's lobbying for another school uh that has the same access to the politicians that these folks have bet we should point out it's our elected representatives and we really don't have a choice because we might glenn and i might say that the democratic candidate is a little better than the republican candidate but not not good enough to do correct the mistakes that our country has moved into well we're getting ready to wind up here and i think i'd like to go back to the eisenhower quote again and remind people that um dwight eyes now are the ally commander-in-chief in world war ii who saw some of the greatest death and destruction in the history of humankind every gun that is made every warship that is launched every rocket fired is a theft from those who hunger so with that i i'm going to leave the program and thank aliad attack and wanting to chat them and liz burke for their help in getting this production on the air and bud uh i thank you for your insight into the this war effort that you have protested for so long you do an excellent job glenn