Empire of Illusion - Chris Hedges [83]
The problems we face are structural. The old America is not coming back. Our financial system was taken hostage and looted by bankers, brokers, and speculators who told us that the old means of making capital by producing and manufacturing were outdated. They assured us money could be made out of money. They insisted that financial markets could be self-regulating. Like all financial markets throughout history that have thrown off oversight and regulation, ours has collapsed. Speculators in the seventeenth century were hanged. Today they receive billions in taxpayer dollars and huge bonuses.
The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform. It would mean their extinction. These corporations, especially the oil and gas industry, will never allow us to achieve energy independence. That would devastate their profits. It would wipe out tens of billions of dollars in weapons contracts. It would cripple the financial health of a host of private contractors from Halliburton to Blackwater/Xe and render obsolete the existence of U.S. Central Command. This is the harsh, unspoken reality of corporate power. The unseen hands of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman, the nation’s top-three defense contractors, divided up $69 million in Pentagon contracts in 2007, the last year for which contracting data are available. These industries, which have judiciously spread their parts and supply business throughout the country, defend the production of weapons systems as vital for employment. But their leaders are clearly nervous. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA), which represents more than one hundred defense and aerospace corporations, has an ad campaign with the slogan: “Aerospace and Defense: The Strength to Lift America.” It claims its manufacturers contribute $97 billion in exports a year and employ 2 million people, a figure disputed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which puts the number at 472,000 wage and salary workers. But this has not dampened the promise made by these corporate executives to help lift the nation out of its economic morass. “Our industry is ready and able to lead the way out of the economic crisis,” Fred Downey, an associate vice president, told the Associated Press. The ads are useful, but so is the some $149 million a year the industry lavishes on lobbying firms, according to the Center for Representative Politics.
Seymour Mellman spent his academic career, which spanned the Cold War, at Columbia University, researching, writing, and speaking about the large military portion of the federal budget. In Pentagon Capitalism he described the redundancy and costliness of modern weapons systems—such as the next wave of fighter planes, missiles, submarines, and aircraft carriers. He said that high-tech weapons yet to be designed always escalate spending as new, costlier systems replace the old, which are often junked.
The United States has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions on the planet. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the Second World War. More than half of federal discretionary spending goes to defense. And so we build Cold War relics such as the $14 billion Virginia-class submarines as well as the stealth fighters we engineered to evade radar systems the Soviets never built. We spend $8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense systems that would be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb. The defense industry is able to monopolize the best scientific and research talent and squander the nation’s resources and investment capital. These defense industries produce nothing that is useful for society or the national trade account. They offer little more than a psychological security blanket for fearful Americans who want to feel protected and safe.
The defense industry is a virus. It destroys healthy economies. We produce sophisticated fighter jets while Boeing is