When was the last time you saw the headline, “Cost of [Pentagon-weapons-system-of-your-choice] halved”? Probably never. Still, the thought came to mind when this recent Associated Press headline caught my eye: “Pentagon: F-35 fighter jet cost doubles.”
Here’s the story behind it: Since 2001, when an F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was expected to cost an already hefty $50 million, the plane’s cost has soared into the stratosphere (despite the fact that the aircraft itself has barely left the ground). The estimated cost today is $113 million per plane. Yes, that’s per plane. This supposed future workhorse of the U.S. military is now priced like the planet’s most precious gem. It’s also 2 ½ years behind schedule. Keep in mind that the Marines, the Air Force, and the Navy are planning to buy a combined 2,450 of them for what’s now an eye-popping $323 billion. And if you think the costs are likely to stay in the $113 million range, given the history of Pentagon cost overruns, then I have a nice little national security bridge to Brooklyn I think the U.S. public might love.
In other words, if all goes well from here (an unlikely possibility), a single future weapons system is now estimated to cost the American taxpayer almost one-third of what the Obama administration’s health-care plan is expected to cost over a decade. You could even think of the Pentagon’s weapons procurement process as the health-care system of the national security state. Its costs just never stop rising. In fact, the Government Accountability Office pegs major weapons systems cost overruns since 2001 at $295 billion, another near third of the cost of the health-care bill supposedly coming to a vote this week.
And here’s what’s remarkable: You barely hear about such overruns. They’re almost never front-page headline news, even though the money’s being taken from not-so-deep taxpayer pockets. And when truly terrible news, as with the F-35, comes in, all that happens in Washington is that a few politicians mutter a little. John McCain, for example, offered this less than stirring quote on the F-35: “The taxpayers are a little tired of this. I can’t say that I can blame them”; and an irritated Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “We cannot sacrifice other important acquisitions in the DOD [Department of Defense] investment portfolio to pay for this capability.” (Bet you didn’t even know that future weapons were part of a Pentagon “investment portfolio.”) In the case of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, he’s planning to hold back $614 million in “performance bonuses” from the plane’s lead contractor Lockheed Martin. (And you thought only bankers and financial wheeler-dealers got performance bonuses!) But it’s striking that there are no tea party movements out in the streets of America demanding our money back or claiming that we’re going to be broken by this.
Here’s an American reality: the Pentagon is our true welfare state, the weapons makers our real “welfare queens,” and we never stop shoveling money their way. Somebody should raise a few tough questions about the Pentagonization of our country and its finances. Fortunately, TomDispatch has retired Lt. Col. William Astore, historian and regular contributor to this site, to take on the task. Tom
The Pentagon Church Militant and Us
The Top Five Questions We Should Ask the Pentagon
By William J. AstoreWhen it comes to our nation’s military affairs, ignorance is not bliss. What’s remarkable then, given the permanent state of war in which we find ourselves, is how many Americans seem content not to know.
These days, when I stop at my local newsstand to pick up the New York Times, I almost invariably think about the 1950s sci-fi film, The Incredible Shrinking Man. In it, a fellow on a vacation in the Pacific passes through an irradiated mist -- assumedly from U.S. atomic tests -- and subsequently shrinks down to doll size, then to nothing at all. Now, the newspaper of record seems to be doing the same thing. In August 2007, it literally shrank, losing an inch and a half in width, and has been thinning ever since, while only its price has grown. Its almost ad-less magazine section is now a wisp of its former self. As the paper dwindles, it increasingly puts the news on a starvation diet. And it’s in good company, if you’ve been paying attention to other papers nationwide (the Wall Street Journal excepted), to the newsweeklies which are shadows of their former selves, or to so many other magazines.
It’s strange that, when it came to the Internet challenge, the print editions of newspapers generally reacted like deer in the headlights. To take an example, you might think that, faced with the “voicey-ness” of the online world, newspapers, which already had a near monopoly on reporting, might have transformed their op-ed pages into far wilder, more expansive, more inviting places. But no such luck. Most have, in fact, done next to nothing in print that might be considered a response, other than committing hara-kiri by gutting themselves and their newsrooms. The major move of the Times in this regard was to create a two-page, expanded table of contents (of the paper you were about to read!) in 2008, a forlornly useless feature which it axed a year or so later.
All of this has revealed just how mistaken most of us were about what a newspaper was. We thought it was a medium for the news, but it turned out to be, above all, a vessel for the distribution of ads. And once those ads began to flee (mainly online), the news has had little choice but to curl up and prepare to die. How surprising then to run across one fat, confident new publication, filled with strangenesses and wonders: Lapham’s Quarterly. Run by the famed former editor of Harper’s Magazine, Lewis Lapham, it picks a single topic four times a year -- recently, “Medicine” and “Religion,” and this week, “Arts and Letters,” mixing what it calls “Voices in Time” with original work. In other words, it ransacks history for gems and so, like the poker game in Star Trek involving the android Data, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Stephen Hawking, you can find Doris Lessing, Mikhail Bulgakov, Barbara Ehrenreich, George Orwell, Hammurabi, and Atul Gawande all discussing “doctors and patients” or “remedies and treatments” in LQ’s pages. To say the least, it’s invigorating, so much so that I gave asubscription to my son-in-law this Christmas.
Lapham, who wrote an essay introducing every Harper’s issue, has transferred that habit to his new publication and, in an experiment for both LQ and TomDispatch, has agreed to let this website release the March “Arts and Letters” essay online. So just remember, you read it here first. (And if you have an extra moment, don’t miss Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast -- in which Lapham discusses art, money, and his magazine -- by clicking here, or, if you prefer to download it as a podcast, here.) Tom
The Great White Whale in San Francisco Bay
Or How the “Lively Arts” Became “the Media”
By Lewis Lapham[This essay appears in the March 2010 issue of Lapham's Quarterly and is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]
Art as a medium of exchange is the gift in the hand of its creator, alive in the mind of its beholder, converting the private to a public good, and thereby adding it to the common store of human energy and hope. It’s the embodiment of the spirit in the flesh to which Leo Tolstoy refers as “a means of communion among people… the capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of other people,” by “feelings, the most diverse, very strong and very weak, very significant and very worthless, very bad and very good.”
"I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me," Charles Ponzi once told the New York Times. An Italian, who emigrated to the New World in 1903, his glory, such as it was, involved leaving countless immigrants and other Americans with only $2.50 in their pockets and nothing to hope for.
While he was hardly the first Ponzi schemer, he milked his particular con with particular success and dramatic flair in the 1920s. Ever since, his name has been attached to any scam in which you promise outrageous returns -- he offered a 50% return on investment in only 45 days -- and pay off old investors with the money eagerly offered by newer ones. The aura of success only brings in more money until, of course, it all goes bust. Ponzi’s last recorded words to a reporter caught the financial-showman spirit of his time: “Even if they never got anything for it,” he said of those whose lives he destroyed, “it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over."
Like the early years of the twenty-first century, the 1920s was a moment in our history when many people thought wealth was there for the asking, more or less for free. Of course, such a moment, such a mood, opens the door to every scam artist in sight and there are always many like Ponzi ready to offer a “helping” hand. The remarkable Stephen Sondheim has since his youth been fascinated by two brothers, Addison and Wilson Mizner, one a visionary architect, the other Charles Ponzi’s rightful heir, who created Boca Raton, Florida, as a Ponzi land scheme for the wealthy in the 1920s. Bounce, his musical about them, caught the extravagant spirit of fraud in our own age, the Madoff era, as well as theirs.
TomDispatch associate editor and regular contributor Andy Kroll focuses in his latest post on two brothers of this century who could undoubtedly star in Bounce II. Never, it seems, had the American landscape been quite so stuffed with get-rich-quick schemers as in the last boom years before the global economy melted down in 2008. Kroll offers a veritable Ponzi-scheme mapping of America. (If you have a moment, catch him discussing the geometry of delusion in the Ponzi Era on the latest TomCast audio interview by clicking here, or download it as a podcast by clicking here.) Tom
Ponzi Nation
How Get-Rich-Quick Crime Came to Define an Era
By Andy KrollEvery great American boom and bust makes and breaks its share of crooks. The past decade -- call it the Ponzi Era -- has been no different, except for the gargantuan scale of white-collar crime. A vast wave of financial fraud swelled in the first years of the new century. Then, in 2008, with the subprime mortgage collapse, it crashed on the shore as a full-scale global economic meltdown. As that wave receded, it left hundreds of Ponzi and pyramid schemes, as well as other get-rich-quick rackets that helped fuel our recent economic frenzy, flopping on the beach.
Premature Withdrawal
Washington’s Cult of Narcissism and Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Hubris? We’re bigger than that!
We’ve now been at war with, or in, Iraq for almost 20 years, and intermittently at war in Afghanistan for 30 years. Think of it as nearly half a century of experience, all bad. And what is it that Washington seems to have concluded? In Afghanistan, where one disaster after another has occurred, that we Americans can finally do more of the same, somewhat differently calibrated, and so much better. In Iraq, where we had, it seemed, decided that enough was enough and we should simply depart, the calls from a familiar crew for us to stay are growing louder by the week.
The Iraqis, so the argument goes, need us. After all, who would leave them alone, trusting them not to do what they’ve done best in recent years: cut one another’s throats?
Modesty in Washington? Humility? The ability to draw new lessons from long-term experience? None of the above is evidently appropriate for “the indispensable nation,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once called the United States, and to whose leaders she attributed the ability to “see further into the future.” None of the above is part of the American arsenal, not when Washington’s weapon of choice, repeatedly consigned to the scrapheap of history and repeatedly rescued, remains a deep conviction that nothing is going to go anything but truly, deeply, madly badly without us, even if, as in Iraq, things have for years gone truly, deeply, madly badly with us.
An expanding crew of Washington-based opiners are now calling for the Obama administration to alter its plans, negotiated in the last months of the Bush administration, for the departure of all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. They seem to have taken Albright’s belief in American foresight -- even prophesy -- to heart and so are basing their arguments on their ability to divine the future.
The problem, it seems, is that, whatever may be happening in the present, Iraq’s future prospects are terrifying, making leaving, if not inconceivable, then as massively irresponsible (as former Washington Post correspondent and bestselling author Tom Ricks wrote recently in a New York Times op-ed) as invading in the first place. Without the U.S. military on hand, we’re told, the Iraqis will almost certainly deep-six democracy, while devolving into major civil violence and ethnic bloodletting, possibly of the sort that convulsed their country in 2005-2006 when, by the way, the U.S. military was present in force.
The various partial winners of Iraq’s much delayed March 7th election will, we were assured beforehand, jockey for power for months trying to cobble together a functioning national government. During that period, violence, it's said, will surely escalate, potentially endangering the marginal gains made thanks to the U.S. military “surge” of 2007. The possibilities remain endless and, according to these doomsayers, none of them are encouraging: Shiite militias coulduse our withdrawal to stage a violence-filled comeback. Iranian interference in Iraqi affairs is likely to increase and violently so, while al-Qaeda-in-Iraq could move into any post-election power void with its own destructive agenda.
[Note to TomDispatch readers: When you’re done with today’s surprising and, I think, revelatory post, you may want to check out Michelle Alexander’s recently published book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. As I’ve discovered, it’s worth considering her case in depth (and she happens to be a superb writer). Keep this in mind as well: every time you click on a book link or cover-image at this site, go to Amazon.com, and buy anything, book or otherwise, you make a painless contribution to TomDispatch -- we get a small cut -- without spending an extra penny. Tom]
California is, as the time-worn adage has it, our nation's bellwether, and nowhere is that truer than in the Golden State’s prison crisis. California’s inmate population is among the highest in the nation. Its complex of prisons spills over with tens of thousands of inmates housed in every available inch of space and sleep-stacked three-high. So overcrowded are California’s prisons that the state penal system has been successfully sued for violating the constitutional rights of inmates -- essentially by subjecting them to a public-health crisis. That its inmates consistently resort to violence in prison should come as no surprise.
The dire state of California’s prisons can, in part, be traced to its draconian “three-strikes law,” which throws three-time felons behind bars for a mandatory 25 years. Overflowing prison populations have, in turn, contributed to that state’s bleak economic future, helping consign California to a perpetual budget deficit, annual financial crises, and repeated deep cuts in education and social funding. The state currently spends a staggering 10% of its annual operating budget, or $10.8 billion, on its prison system and its nearly 170,000 prisoners -- more than it spends on the University of California system, once the jewel in the crown of American public higher education.
And which Americans have borne the brunt of California’s prison boom? Mostly minorities, African Americans especially. In 2005, the state was incarcerating, on average, 5,125 for every 100,000 male adult blacks in the population -- nearly four-and-a-half times more than for Latino men and six-and-a-half times more than for white men. California’s prisons are also notorious for separating their prisoners by skin color, a form of segregation that was, one lawyer remarked, “not tolerated in any other aspect of American life and hasn't been for fifty years. It's the shame of California.”
As Michelle Alexander, legal expert and author of a startling just-published book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, points out in her first TomDispatch post, California’s racially infused prison quagmire is only a snapshot of a growing racial divide, one which includes the formation of a new undercaste in America that loses its normal rights at the prison gates and often never recovers them. (To check out the latest TomCast, Timothy MacBain’s striking audio interview with Alexander in which she explains how she came to realize that this country was bringing Jim Crow into the Age of Obama, click here.) Andy
The New Jim Crow
How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste
By Michelle AlexanderEver since Barack Obama lifted his right hand and took his oath of office, pledging to serve the United States as its 44th president, ordinary people and their leaders around the globe have been celebrating our nation’s “triumph over race.” Obama’s election has been touted as the final nail in the coffin of Jim Crow, the bookend placed on the history of racial caste in America.
Obama’s mere presence in the Oval Office is offered as proof that “the land of the free” has finally made good on its promise of equality. There’s an implicit yet undeniable message embedded in his appearance on the world stage: this is what freedom looks like; this is what democracy can do for you. If you are poor, marginalized, or relegated to an inferior caste, there is hope for you. Trust us. Trust our rules, laws, customs, and wars. You, too, can get to the promised land.
Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.
