Deficits and the military-industrial-intelligence complex

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

These days the discussion in Washington D.C. centers on deficits. Deficit hawks abound; they predict the country will be ruined unless the U.S. budget deficit is cut beginning now. Never mind that an economy teetering on the edge of a second recession needs stimulus, not budget cutting. Deficit reduction has become the Holy Grail of policy making elites not only in the United States but in Europe as well.

But the deficit hawks have tunnel vision. They want to balance the budget exclusively on the backs of the most vulnerable. Specifically, they want to cut “entitlements,” programs that help the middle class and the poor like Social Security, Medicare, unemployment compensation, and Medicaid. Left out of the equation are the enormous tax cuts for the rich enacted under George W. Bush, the huge subsidies to oil, agribusiness and other corporations, and the bloated military-industrial-intelligence complex.

A case in point: Last week, The Washington Post published a special series that detailed the sprawling size of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. It includes 854,000 workers with top secret clearance, many of them private contractors employed by thousands of corporations which together annually collect billions of taxpayer dollars from the U.S. government

(http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/).

Since 9/11, the intelligence complex has grown at a dizzying rate. The series reveals the tremendous amount of duplication and waste in the secret worlds of the CIA, the NSA, and the fourteen other known U.S. intelligence agencies, plus the myriad companies to which the government outsources such intelligence functions as interrogation and covert operations.

This intelligence apparatus, which is centered in the nation’s capital but also consists of numerous clusters scattered all around the country, is so vast that it represents an alternative and secret geography of the United States. It is so complex that nobody can grasp it in its entirety. And, for all its size, expense, and technological prowess, it is unclear whether this secret universe of intelligence has made the United States any safer.

The same can be said for the “war on terror,” the epicenter of which currently is Afghanistan. On Sunday, The New York Times, The Guardian (London), and Der Spiegel (Germany) published excerpts from a vast trove of secret U.S. documents on Afghanistan. The material, which was provided by the web site WikiLeaks, which specializes in collecting and disclosing secret information, puts a different face on the war in Afghanistan than the official version. It portrays a country rife with corruption, an Afghan army and police force that is ineffective and at times brutal, and a population that has grown weary of civilian casualties and foreign forces on their soil

(http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html).

Yet, so solid is the elite consensus around U.S. world military dominance that deficit hawks in Congress, the Tea Party, and the business community never look at the grotesque growth of expenditures for the military-industrial-intelligence complex as a possible source of deficit reduction.

The question is never asked whether the United States, which supposedly cannot afford to provide basic economic security for the elderly, the jobless, and the poor, really needs more than 800 military bases around the world. It is assumed as natural that the U.S. can afford to give billions of dollars a year in military aid to countries like Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and Colombia, but can’t afford to provide health care for all its citizens.

The deficit hawks may reflect the elite consensus but the country has other options. The United States does not need to victimize the most vulnerable among its people in order to put its economic house in order. The deficit can be tamed by taxing obscenely rich individuals and corporations, refraining from engaging in endless foreign wars, and generally reducing the footprint of the U.S. military around the world.

The real deficit in the United States is a deficit of popular mobilization and political pressure in favor of different priorities in foreign and domestic policy. Numerous surveys show the American people favor many of the needed policies. But the diffuse, unorganized views of the people rarely trump the enormous, concentrated power of money, special interests and lobbyists who benefit from the status quo.

Real change is difficult but not impossible. It has happened before. But the great transformations that have taken place in the United States, like the New Deal and the civil rights movement, have required not only inspired leadership from above but, even more importantly, unrelenting pressure from below. The movement that brought Obama to power has become nearly dormant since the election, and the President himself has failed to advocate for change with sufficient force. It is time for both the people and their leader to wake up.