Elaborate, expensive sting operations by the FBI are based on the premise that true terrorists will take the bait. This is not the same thing as preventing an actual attack.
By Petra BartosiewiczLos Angeles Times, September 18, 2011
Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, FBI Director Robert Mueller issued a memo to his field offices detailing “one set of priorities” for the agency: Stop the next terrorist attack. This directive marked a new “preemptive” style of law enforcement that has since become the hallmark of our domestic front in the war against terrorism.
Under this system, catching an actual terrorist would constitute a failure because the perpetrators would have committed the act. Instead, we are in effect seeking “pre-terrorists” — individuals whose intentions, more than their actions, constitute the primary threat.
Taking stock of the major “terrorist” prosecutions that this approach has yielded, however, it's not at all clear we're safer from another attack.
Below is a dynamite op-ed on the cost of the so-called war on terror by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. Without being critical, I think at least two additional aspects to these costs make the picture even worse than they say.
1. Some people in this [let them eat] cake walk became — and are still becoming — filthy rich spending other people's money and spilling other people's blood — the acknowledgement of which takes one into the murky question of what moral values are shaping this political-economic meltdown.
2. While not directly caused by the war on terror, the ramping up of defense expenditures magnified the the rate of distorting spillovers (the Melman* effects) that the MICC's politicization of R&D and manufacturing have on diminishing America's overall commercial manufacturing efficiency and industrial competitiveness. The costs may be incalculable, but that does not make them less real.
Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.
By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz
Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.
Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.
Phi Beta Iota: We judge defense to be 75% fraud, waste, and abuse (3 out of 4 dollars, not 1 out of four). The infantry is 4% of the force, suffers 80% of the casualties, and receives 1% of the budget. Our starting position is that 20% of the Pentagon budget can be justified in conference, everything else is on the table for draconian cuts toward a balanced budget. Agriculture, energy, and health are documented at 50% waste–the Pentagon is much less relevant to the society and the economy than those three, ergo we speculate that defense is half again as wasteful as these other core sectors.
This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution.
We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.
Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.
We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.
We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.
We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.
If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.
And so we call on people to act
We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.
We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.
We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.
We call for the organization of people's assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.
We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.
We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.
I've been driving the 1964 MGB (my last remaining possession, it needs $5,000 of underbody work to survive the winter) around New England and am in New York now. I've been following the US Day of Rage plans (they were also announced here) but have been surprised to find a number of normally intelligent middle-class men I have met along the way to be timid about the US Day of Rage movement. They cannot get past the name and of course never get to the part about non-violent demands for electoral reform and integrity.
So here is my short brief on US Day of Rage, perhaps it can help get past these perceptual barriers. I do recommend that US Day of Rage create an alternative web site, American for Electoral Integrity–kind of like the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference also calls itself the THINK Conference for the green eyeshade types without a clue. I'll be attending this year, 4-6 November in San Francisco area.
MEMORANDUM
Subject: US Day of Rage for the USA—Who, Why, What, When, Where, How
Date: 17 September 2011
IMPORTANCE: Understanding the US Day of Rage is vital to understanding the deeper mood of the public.
1. Who. US Day of Rage is an informal, social network based movement that started as a protest against Wall Street with a planned occupation today, and rapidly morphed into a cross-country network of mini-demonstrations. The “US Day of Rage” is being supported by internet groups who oppose corruption in the government such as Adbusters, Culture Jammers, and Anonymous. The original call to occupy Wall Street was put out by Adbusters, and the US Day of Rage and NYC General Assembly have since joined.
2. Why. Their capital demand is fair and free elections to overcome the special interest takeover of Congress and the Executive. Please note that there is real convergence and resonance between the Day of Rage network and the Tea Party/Sarah Palin remonstrations against “crony capitalism.”
Not only is the Super Committee headed straight for failure, the “automatic” cuts that would happen in the Pentagon budget are not going to occur. To “save” the Pentagon budget from further cuts, it's doomsday for budget restraint in the short term. The only thing to be elevated for the longer term and foreseeable future is our political and governmental dysfunction.
Congress has taken a hostage that no one wants to shoot
EXTRACT:
It is not going to happen that way.
First, the supercommittee is bound to fail; it will reach no meaningful budget agreement.
Second, when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur. That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen. While they are quite mistaken about the consequences, almost everyone on Capitol Hill (and in the Pentagon) thinks that those defense reductions will be “devastating,” “disastrous,” “doomsday” and any other apocalyptic term you can think of.
In short, the debt deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot.
. . . . .
That “frozen” 2011 level will be more than twice the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Somalia. It will be more than $80 billion more than we spent, on average, during the Cold War when we faced a threatening and heavily armed Soviet Union and a hostile, dogmatically communist China. In the absence of these two huge threats, we are now being told we need to spend more.
Seeking to whip up public support for what’s expected to be a hard-fought budget battle in Congress, a group of defense contractors launched a lobbying campaign urging an end to cuts in military spending.
The campaign, named Second to None, was introduced by the Aerospace Industries Assn. trade group Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington. The group, which represents manufacturers and suppliers of aircraft, space systems and engines, warned of potential job losses and national security risks.
“While we do have a fancy logo, this campaign will not be your typical, glitzy, short term inside the Beltway blitz of advertising followed by deafening silence after one piece of legislation or another is finalized,” said Marion Blakey, chief executive of the association. “This will be a sustained effort, in states, cities and towns, as well as in Washington, to caution the American people and our leaders of risks associated with cutting defense further.”
According to the association, aerospace and defense supports 1 million direct jobs in the U.S. and affects another 2.9 million indirect jobs.
Phi Beta Iota: The defense contractors are not being honest. As Winslow Wheeler and others have documented, most of the defense dollars go into overhead and out-sourcing. Just as it is costing us $50 million per Taliban in a body bag, here these maliciously deception people are suggesting that the $1 trillion a year for defense and homeland “security” will protect one million jobs. Do the math–at a time when 22% of workers are unemployed, with more on the way once the federal government starts taking cuts, this is not just idiocy, it is treason. We NEED to cut defense, homeland “security,” and secret intelligence SHARPLY–while providing all those cut with a year's termination pay–to achieve the savings necessary to “reset” the economy including full salary training for every unemployed person in America.
Sometimes it is difficult to decide what to write about in the world of private military and security contracting issues, as there are usually a few different stories in the news on any given day that are relevant.
Today, however, I don't have that problem as there is clearly only one story worth discussing. That is the report issued yesterday by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) comparing federal and private sector employee compensation.
Full disclosure alert: back in the eighties I worked a year at POGO's predecessor organization, the Project on Military Procurement, and earlier this year POGO published a report I co-wrote
To appreciate the importance of this report keep in mind that one of the biggest talking points of PMSC advocates is that the virtue of using them is that they are cheaper than using full time government employees and that private sector rates are cheaper than government salaries. That is because they can be hired just for the task/mission, don't have to be paid pensions and other benefits, et cetera. As talking points go it's a good one and seemingly difficult to dispute; although when it comes to using private military and security contractors in the field there has not yet been much in the way of methodologically sound, peer reviewed evidence to support it.
So POGO decided to fill the data gap, or lacuna, as an academic would say. It compared total annual compensation for federal and private sector employees with federal contractor billing rates in order to determine whether the current costs of federal service contracting serves the public interest.
