As the country’s big wars on the Eurasian continent wind down, American war-making and war preparations fly ever more regularly under the radar. There has, for instance, been much discussion about the Obama administration’s policy “pivot” to Asia -- the only warlike act in the region so far has, however, been a little noted drone strike in the Philippines. At the same time, remarkably little attention has been paid to a massive build-up of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, and -- though both seem to be underway (and connected) -- who talks about the “pivot” to the Western Indian Ocean or the “pivot” to Africa?
For those keeping a careful eye out, U.S. drone (and air) bases in the region have been proliferating -- in the Seychelles Islands, in Ethiopia, and at an unidentified site on the Arabian peninsula, among other places. Recently, however, Wired’s Danger Room website reported that an Italian blogger had put the pieces together and offered impressive evidence of a larger war-making effort in the region, involving not only drones but F-15E fighter jets, possibly being used to bomb Yemen. Meanwhile, there are U.S. drone strikes in Yemen almost daily and at least 20 special forces operatives are reportedly now on the ground there, helping direct some of the fighting and even taking casualties.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Africa Command (Africom), set up in 2007, has been gaining clout. In 2011, 100 special operations troops, mainly Green Berets, were moved into Central Africa, officially to aid in the hunting down of Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Recently, it was reported that a brigade of regular U.S. combat troops will soon be assigned to the command and given training duties throughout the region. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been organizing a proxy war, supported by drone attacks, against al-Shabab rebels in Somalia, using Ugandan, Kenyan, and other African troops as those proxies. And more’s afoot. It’s just that, if you weren’t an obsessive news watcher, you would have next to no way of knowing that any of this was taking place.
War American-style, already long detached from the lives of most Americans, is growing more so: ever more secret, presidential, and beyond the control of, or accountability to, citizens or Congress. In only one way is this not true: we taxpayers still fork over the massive sums that make our perpetual state of war and war state possible. As Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer of the invaluable National Priorities Project report, the expense of all this is blowing a hole in your wallet and our treasury. To offer but one small example, if someday soon the Pakistani/Afghan border is reopened to U.S. war supplies, you will be paying the Pakistanis $1,500-$1,800 for every truck that crosses it, at an estimated cost of at least $1 million a day (with other "fees" likely). And yet, it’s remarkable how little Americans know about what’s coming out of their pockets when the subject is “national security,” or where exactly it’s all going. Which is why we need Hellman and Kramer (and their new book, A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget) to keep us in the loop. Tom
War Pay
The Nearly $1 Trillion National Security Budget
By Chris Hellman and Mattea KramerRecent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.
Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?
When workers drilling tunnels at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, began to die, Union Carbide had an answer. It hadn’t been taking adequate precautions against the inhalation of silica dust, a known danger to workers since the days of ancient Greece. Instead, in many cases, a company doctor would simply tell the families of the workers that they had died of “tunnelitis,” and a local undertaker would be paid $50 to dispose of each corpse. A few years later, in 1935, a congressional subcommittee discovered that approximately 700 workers had perished while drilling through Hawk’s Nest Mountain, many of them buried in unmarked graves at the side of the road just outside the tunnel. The subcommittee concluded that Union Carbide’s project had been accomplished through a “grave and inhuman disregard of all considerations for the health, lives and future of the employees."
Despite the “Hawk’s Nest Incident” and thousands of Depression-era lawsuits against foundries, mines, and construction companies, silicosis never disappeared. In the decades since, as TomDispatch authors David Rosner and Jerry Markowitz have repeatedly demonstrated, industry worked tirelessly to label silicosis a “disease of the past,” even while ensuring that it would continue to be a disease of the present. By the late 1990s, the Columbia University researchers found that from New York to California, from Texas all the way back to West Virginia, millions of workers in foundries, shipyards, mines, and oil refineries, among other industries, were endangered by silica dust.
Today, there’s a new silicosis scare on the horizon and a new eco-nightmare brewing in the far corners of rural America. Like the Hawk's Nest disaster it has flown under the radar -- until now.
Once upon a time, mining companies tore open hills or bored through or chopped off mountain tops to get at vital resources inside. They were intent on creating quicker paths through nature’s obstacles, or (as at Gauley Bridge) diverting the flow of mighty rivers. Today, they’re doing it merely to find the raw materials -- so-called frac sand -- to use in an assault on land several states away. Multinational corporations are razing ancient hills of sandstone in the Midwest and shipping that silica off to other pastoral settings around the United States. There, America’s prehistoric patrimony is being used to devastating effect to fracture shale deposits deep within the earth -- they call it “hydraulic fracturing” -- and causing all manner of environmental havoc. Not everyone, however, is keen on this “sand rush” and coalitions of small-town farmers, environmentalists, and public health advocates are now beginning to stand firm against the big energy corporations running sand-mining operations in their communities.
Ground zero in this frac-fight is the rural Wisconsin towns to which TomDispatch’s roving environmental reporter Ellen Cantarow traveled this spring to get the biggest domestic environmental story that nobody knows about. Walking the fields of family farms under siege and talking to the men and women resisting the corporations, Cantarow offers up a shocking report of vital interest. There’s a battle raging for America’s geological past and ecological future -- our fresh food and clean water supplies may hinge on who wins it. Nick Turse
How Rural America Got Fracked
The Environmental Nightmare You Know Nothing About
By Ellen CantarowIf the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out. As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand -- and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep.
Gordon Gekko, the infamously cutthroat capitalist and lead character in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, captured the heady years of the 1980s with a single, indelible line: Greed is good. Today, it is Edward Conard, a friend and former colleague of Mitt Romney's at the private equity firm Bain Capital, who has offered a new mantra for the 1%, a cri de coeur for the Gekkos of the twenty-first century: Inequality is good.
In his new book Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong, Conard argues that gaping income inequality is an indication of a healthy economy, not a sick one. The more unequal we are, Conard told the New York Times Magazine, the better off we all will be. Why? Because economies grow and thrive when smart people devise solutions to our thorniest problems by inventing or perfecting goods and services. Conard singled out a group of twentysomethings sitting at a Manhattan coffee shop one afternoon, deriding them as lazy "art-history majors." Those people should be out creating businesses and taking risks, he insisted, because that’s how societies prosper. And the way to encourage that risk-taking is the promise of obscene wealth for those who succeed (and, implicitly, dismal poverty for those who don’t).
How obscene should that wealth be? In 2008, the top 1% commanded 21% of all income in America. Conard says our society would improve if only that figure were doubled.
Needless to say, there is no shortage of Conard critics. The more respectful ones ask: Teachers do not fit Conard's entrepreneurial ideal -- are they no use to society? What about judges? Government regulators? Others dismiss Conard as an out-of-touch millionaire living in a fantasy land. For instance, Conard claims that wages for American workers have climbed in recent decades; in fact, as liberal economist Dean Baker notes, wages have barely kept pace with inflation. "We'll leave it to his shrink," Baker quipped, "to determine whether the problem is that Conard is deluded or dishonest."
It’s not hard to imagine how members of the working poor would react to Conard's message. Here he is urging them to take the leap and design more efficient soda cans or search engines, when, as TomDispatch regular Barbara Ehrenreich makes strikingly clear, the working poor who dare share food with the down-and-out or kick up their feet on a subway seat can land in a debtor's hell created for them by state and local governments and law enforcement agencies. Unlike Conard, Ehrenreich, the author of the bestselling Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, had an actual urge to help those in trouble. She’s just launching the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which will “will pay laid-off and/or underemployed journalists who are themselves caught in the maw of economic hardship to produce compelling stories.” (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Ehrenreich discusses how the poor get soaked and her latest project to fund investigative journalism on poverty, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Andy Kroll
Preying on the Poor
How Government and Corporations Use the Poor as Piggy Banks
By Barbara EhrenreichIndividually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.
The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.
Let’s start with this: according to the Pentagon, the production and acquisition costs of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, the military’s most expensive weapons program, have risen yet again, this time by 4.3% since 2010 to $395.6 billion. If you’re talking about the total cost of the system, including maintenance and support for the nearly 2,500 planes that will some (endlessly delayed) day be produced for the military, that has now reached an estimated $1.51 trillion, a 9% rise since 2010. All this for a plane that some experts doubt has any particular purpose in the future U.S. arsenal.
At last, however, the House of Representatives seems to have had enough of wasteful spending programs. Perhaps its members also read the recent poll that shows Americans generally support more funds for the Defense Department -- until, that is, they are told just how much is spent on defense compared to other budget items. Then, 75% of them (67% of Republicans) back significant cuts, an average of 18%, in that budget to reduce the federal deficit.
Whatever the explanation, last week the Republican-dominated House finally took out the pruning shears and acted with remarkable decisiveness. They sent a bill to the Senate cutting $310 billion from the deficit over the next decade. The F-35 program went down in flames.
Oh wait, that’s my mistake. Actually, they slashed food stamps, children’s health care, funds to hospitals that serve the poor, and Medicaid -- all in order to shield the Pentagon from future cuts. In fact, the House bill actually adds more than $8 billion to the Pentagon budget. As the New York Times reports, if the House bill were to become law, “the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that more than 20 million children would face reduced food and nutrition support, almost 300,000 would be knocked off the federal school lunch program, and at least 300,000 would lose access to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.”
Admittedly, at the moment, the House bill won’t make it through the Senate. But consider it a test-run for at least one possible future. A recent estimate of what Mitt Romney’s campaign-trail plans for Pentagon spending might mean suggests that, were he elected, defense spending would increase by more than $2 trillion over the next decade. Imagine what that would do to the poor. As TomDispatch regular and retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel William Astore suggests, by the time election 2012 is over, the Pentagon budget is likely to be locked and loaded for years to come. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Astore discusses how the two presidential candidates are sure to out-militarize each other in the coming campaign, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The National Security State Wins (Again)
Why the Real Victor in Campaign 2012 Won’t Be Obama or Romney
By William J. AstoreNow that Mitt Romney is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, the media is already handicapping the presidential election big time, and the neck-and-neck opinion polls are pouring in. But whether President Obama gets his second term or Romney enters the Oval Office, there’s a third candidate no one’s paying much attention to, and that candidate is guaranteed to be the one clear winner of election 2012: the U.S. military and our ever-surging national security state.
The reasons are easy enough to explain. Despite his record as a “warrior-president,” despite the breathless “Obama got Osama” campaign boosterism, common inside-the-Beltway wisdom has it that the president has backed himself into a national security corner. He must continue to appear strong and uncompromising on defense or else he’ll get the usual Democrat-as-war-wimp label tattooed on his arm by the Republicans.
[For TomDispatch Readers: Point of pride -- the TD post a Sunday ago of the last words of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach, “Epistle to the Ecotopians,” was chosen as a point of departure for a moving online column by the New York Times’ Mark Bittman. In it, this website was termed “essential,” a heartwarming word from an admirable columnist.
In addition, a couple of reminders: we’re always at the edge, financially speaking, and one good way to help keep us afloat, if you’re already an Amazon customer, is to do your shopping via any TomDispatch book link -- like this one for Ecotopia. As long as you arrive at Amazon via a TD link, we get a small cut of whatever you buy there at no cost to you. In addition, if you’re in a generous mood, you can still get a signed, personalized copy of my book, The United States of Fear, in return for a contribution of $75 (or more). Just visit our donation page to check out the offer. Believe me, we appreciate your support in any form! Tom]
America as a Shining Drone Upon a Hill
On Staring Death in the Face and Not Noticing
By Tom Engelhardt
Here’s the essence of it: you can trust America’s crème de la crème, the most elevated, responsible people, no matter what weapons, what powers, you put in their hands. No need to constantly look over their shoulders.
Placed in the hands of evildoers, those weapons and powers could create a living nightmare; controlled by the best of people, they lead to measured, thoughtful, precise decisions in which bad things are (with rare and understandable exceptions) done only to truly terrible types. In the process, you simply couldn’t be better protected.
And in case you were wondering, there is no question who among us are the best, most lawful, moral, ethical, considerate, and judicious people: the officials of our national security state. Trust them implicitly. They will never give you a bum steer.
You may be paying a fortune to maintain their world -- the 30,000 people hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country, the 230,000 employees of the Department of Homeland Security, the 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the 4.2 million with security clearances of one sort or another, the $2 billion, one-million-square-foot data center that the National Security Agency is constructing in Utah, the gigantic $1.8 billion headquarters the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency recently built for its 16,000 employees in the Washington area -- but there’s a good reason. That’s what’s needed to make truly elevated, surgically precise decisions about life and death in the service of protecting American interests on this dangerous globe of ours.
And in case you wondered just how we know all this, we have it on the best authority: the people who are doing it -- the only ones, given the obvious need for secrecy, capable of judging just how moral, elevated, and remarkable their own work is. They deserve our congratulations, but if we’re too distracted to give it to them, they are quite capable of high-fiving themselves.
