| Number 477 | April 25, 2011 |
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This Week: Arms and the Budget |
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Greetings, This week's Nygaard Notes is all about weapons. USAmericans are supposed to believe that there is not enough money these days to pay for the things needed to maintain a strong society, such as health care, education, infrastructure, or anything else that serves human needs. Meanwhile, we are asked to accept—no, provide—the money needed to maintain the U.S. Empire. Some of those costs are enumerated in this week's issue. If you are outraged by what you see in these pages, I encourage you to take some action. There is a May Day rally, or some other rally, being planned near you. (In Minnesota, visit this website ) Wherever the rally is that's closest to you, please join in, and support the organizations that are making it happen. They can't make it happen without you. Peacefully yours, Nygaard
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Earlier this month SIPRI (the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) released their annual report on global military expenditures. This major report was covered in four newspapers in the United States: The Wilmington Star News in N. Carolina, the Bismarck Tribune in N. Dakota. the Lewiston Morning Tribune in Idaho and the Monterey County Herald in California. That's not exactly a list of the nation's agenda-setting media, which is disappointing given the importance of the information for U.S. activists and voters, especially in this time of Deficit Mania. While I give credit to these small regional newspapers for covering the report, it's unfortunate that they all adhered to the angle chosen by the single Associated Press wire story on the report. That angle was the fact that the overall rate of growth in worldwide military spending slowed a bit in 2010. It's down quite a bit from the annual average increase of 5.1 percent since 2001, and thus is newsworthy. But still, the role of the United States, which was highlighted in the report for good reason, was ignored by the media in this country. I'll highlight it here. The general slowdown in global military spending growth in 2010 was judged to be largely "a delayed reaction to the global financial and economic crisis that broke in 2008." Note that this is the rate of increase, and that the rate of global spending actually increased 1.3 percent in real terms last year. And here's where the U.S. role starts to be important. SIPRI notes that the spending "increase in 2010 is almost entirely [due] to the United States, which accounted for $19.6 billion of the $20.6 billion real-terms increase. Excluding the USA, the total in the 'rest of the world' barely changed in 2010, increasing by a statistically insignificant 0.1 per cent." (The report consistently puts the phrase "the rest of the world", by which they mean everyone except the U.S., in quotation marks.) The report notes that "the USA continues to be exceptional in terms of its military spending. As well as being overwhelmingly the largest spender in absolute terms, with 43 per cent of the global total, six times its nearest rival China, it has led the way in the global increase since 2001, with an 81 per cent rise in real terms compared to 32.5 per cent in the 'rest of the world'. Moreover, the share of [the US economy] devoted to the military—the 'military burden'—has increased sharply, from 3.1 per cent in 2001 to an estimated 4.8 per cent in 2010, while in the majority of other nations worldwide the military burden has fallen or remained steady." The other key quotation from the report appears as this week's "Quote" of the Week elsewhere in this issue. Finally, I want to mention a brief section of the report that has to do with official U.S. enemy, and media bogeyman, Venezuela. "The region with the largest increase in military expenditure in 2010 was South America," says the report, which SIPRI says has to do with economics, the rise of regional power Brazil, and structural issues internal to the nations in question. Then, in a comment that would raise eyebrows in this country (if it were reported widely) the report tells us that "In Venezuela, military spending fell by 27.3 per cent in 2010, against the regional trend, and is now slightly below its 2001 level in real terms." The actual number may be somewhat higher due to some purchases being paid on credit and not showing up in the budget, but this fact still must be a bit of a downer for the propagandists who want US'ers to be scared of Venezuela. You can read the 8-page SIPRI fact sheet for yourself at this website. |
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I've just been discussing the "exceptional" role of the U.S. in the global arms trade. I noted how the facts of U.S. behavior in this realm remain largely unreported and un-analyzed in the media. But, besides failing to report this information about the U.S. role in the world, the media also functions to perpetuate the myth that the U.S. wants to stop the arms trade. Bizarre, but true. Here's an example that I hope will illustrate one of the subtle ways the media does this. Back on December 7th the New York Times ran a front-page article headlined "STATE'S SECRETS DAY 9; America Prods and Protests But Can't Halt Arms Trade." (The article was part of a series of articles – "State's Secrets"—about the diplomatic cables released last year by WikiLeaks.) The article begins by describing some of the cables that had to do with Syria supplying arms to the Lebanese group Hezbollah. Said the Times: "The Syrian episode offers a glimpse of the United States' efforts to prevent buildups of arms—including Scud missiles, Soviet-era tanks and antiaircraft weapons—in some of the world's tensest regions. Wielding surveillance photos and sales contracts, American diplomats have confronted foreign governments about shadowy front companies, secretive banks and shippers around the globe, according to secret State Department cables obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations." Now, it should be noted that the Times does mention that the U.S. is by far the world's leading provider of weapons, which is a fact. Here's the paragraph that includes that fact and, along the way, provides a classic example of how one can get the facts right and the story wrong. As you read the following, watch for the telling use of the word "but": "The United States is the world's largest arms supplier, and with Russia, dominates trade in the developing world. Its role as a purveyor of weapons to certain allies—including Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states—has drawn criticism that it has fueled an arms race. But it has also taken on a leading role as traffic cop in trying to halt deliveries of advanced weapons and other arms to militants and adversaries." So, the U.S. provides weapons to some countries—or, rather, to some "allies" within some countries. And it tries to stop weapons from getting to "adversaries." Does this dynamic sound, in any way, like a nation trying to "halt the arms trade," as the headline claims? The real story here is easy to understand. Like most nations, the United States wants its friends to be strong and its enemies to be weak. So it provides arms to its friends and tries to be a "traffic cop"—albeit one that enforces the rules very selectively—when it comes to its enemies. Yet, according to the Times reporters (one of which is the infamous Michael Gordon, about whom I've been writing for years), the two roles of arms supplier and arms denier are mysteriously at odds. As they put it, the U.S. is " a purveyor of weapons to certain allies" BUT is As the Times spells out two different narratives about the U.S. role in the world—amoral superpower vs global peacemaker—its use of the single word "but" tells us that the Times accepts the latter while rejecting the former. After all, it is only if one accepts the peacemaker mythology that the US role in the arms trade seems at all confusing. The dual roles of arms supplier and arms denier are completely predictable for a country like the United States. It's no accident that the U.S. is referred to as a superpower and not as a superpeacemaker. For those who accept the idea that the U.S. is a superpeacemaker, all the propaganda put out to support that idea is readily accepted. Many in the media accept it, so the idea that the U.S. is trying to "halt the arms trade" appears in the headline, even when the article itself tells us that the U.S. is the world's leading arms supplier. War is peace, you see. The other thing that happens when the primary interests of the U.S. are understood to be peace and democracy is that there is little or no substantive investigation into what it means to be a superpower. Thus, when our superpower policies over many decades occasionally result in vengeance or retribution—sometimes called "blowback"—the great majority of people who have relied on the corporate media to help them understand the world find that they are mystified. Here's the late Chalmers Johnson, scholar and CIA consultant, clearly spelling out the propaganda effect of such media-supported misunderstandings: "Blowback. It's a CIA term. Blowback does not mean simply the unintended consequences of foreign operations. It means the unintended consequences of foreign operations that were deliberately kept secret from the American public. So that when the retaliation comes, the American public is not able to put it in context, to put cause and effect together, and they come up with questions like 'Why do they hate us?'" |
The previous article quoted a study saying that the USA leads the world in military spending (in the process spending almost as much on war as the rest of the world combined.) There are many reasons for that, one of which is reported all the time, most recently on March 30th. This story appeared on page 4 of the Business Section of the New York Times with the headline: "Audit of Pentagon Spending Finds $70 Billion in Waste." Yes, that's right, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) put out a report on March 28th that the Times summarized like this: "Despite improvements, more than half of the Pentagon's big weapons systems still cost more than they should, with management failures adding at least $70 billion to the projected costs over the last two years, government auditors said Tuesday." If you read the report, I think you'll come to the conclusion that it's not only "waste," but also fraud and abuse that are at issue here. This figure of $70 billion, by the way, comes from figures provided to GAO by the military. It could well be much worse, since the average bureaucracy is not known for freely admitting the full extent of its own venality and incompetence. Still, even if it's "only" $70 billion, consider that the total cost of the Federal Food Stamp Program was about $68 billion last year. In the era of Deficit Mania, might this not be considered front-page news? Not in the U.S. media. To be fair, this might be in part due to the fact that the pattern is so well-known and well-documented that it's a kind of "Dog Bites Man" story. That is, it's not "news." Consider: Last June ABC News (and nobody else) reported that "a new report from the Government Accounting Office found that [the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency] is ordering so many supplies, it is leading to tremendous waste. The DLA has bought billions of dollars worth of equipment at taxpayer expense that is not even needed by the military." (Emphasis added.) Back in 2005 the Washington Post (and nobody else) reported on another GAO study, saying that "The U.S. government's biggest department is also one of the most prone to waste, fraud and abuse, raising concerns about the effectiveness of many of its programs, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office." The "biggest department" is the Pentagon. "'This is unacceptable and should not be tolerated,' Comptroller General David M. Walker said yesterday at a news conference," reported the Post, adding, "Walker said that the Defense Department's failure to turn around many of the problem areas 'results in billions of dollars in waste each year and inadequate accountability to the Congress and the American taxpayer.'" (Emphasis added.) Cheryl Irwin, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said that "officials need time to study the report before commenting." Said she, "We are certainly reviewing it. It's a little bit premature at this time for us to have a full response." I probably don't need to add that Cheryl was never heard from again on this subject. Well, what's a few billion dollars, anyway? Back in 2003, a couple of weeks after George W. Bush declared that it was "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, the San Francisco Chronicle (and nobody else) reported that "Though Defense has long been notorious for waste, recent government reports suggest the Pentagon's money management woes have reached astronomical proportions. A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn't properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units." Some would argue that all or most of the Pentagon budget—even the parts we know about—is waste, as so much of it is used not to defend, but to attack, or to enforce the maintenance of the U.S. Empire, an illegitimate mission at its core. I am one of those people. But even those who consider the mission legitimate may agree that these billions and trillions of dollars being stolen, wasted, and mis-spent should be reclaimed and spent on meeting real human needs. The numbers in this issue of Nygaard Notes illuminate not just a budget deficit, but a moral deficit. |
