Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → robbing the public and spending irresponsibly → bloated military budget → shady Pentagon accounting
Excuses, excuses: Between working hard at this contract and experiencing a two-day internet outage at home, I haven’t been able to update The Picket Line much lately — which is too bad, because there has been plenty to write about.
There’s more news on the torture policy front:
- Fafblog weighs in as only it can on the confirmation of Alberto “Obsolete & Quaint” Gonzales and the torture of John McCain.
- And that links to The New Yorker’s in-depth article on “extraordinary rendition” in which torture policy architect John Yoo continues his post-election policy of believing that there’s no reason to hide behind euphemisms:
As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”
And yet there’s activism afoot:
- With the sort of astute planning that has made the U.S. peace movement so effective, Northern California War Tax Resistance held a workshop for prospective war tax resisters in the middle of the afternoon on . Still, the event attracted a dozen people who were determined to start resisting their taxes and were eager to find out how.
- Meanwhile, peace activists in Ireland are trying to encourage the thousands of U.S. troops who stop in Ireland on their way to the Middle East to desert and seek refuge.
The invitation for some of these troops effectively to desert comes from members of the Irish parliament and even a former Irish army commandant, Ed Horgan — who made it clear he wouldn’t make such a suggestion lightly.… ¶ Irish and international law on refugees makes it clear that soldiers are not excluded from making asylum applications, which can be made to any Irish police officer (Garda) or immigration official. Soldiers who face being forced to obey “unlawful orders” are explicitly mentioned in the refugee statutes.
And then there’s Stupid Budget Tricks:
- The Progress Report tells us:
- The National Review remembers all the times Dubya has promised us fiscal responsibility before.
- And Salon tells us how Dubya plans to cut the deficit in half: “The budget deficit for was $412 billion. To cut that in half by , one might think that you have to reduce the deficit to $206 billion. One would be wrong, at least if the White House is doing the math. The White House doesn’t use the actual deficit for . Instead, it uses the deficit that [it] projected for — a much higher number, $521 billion.” It’s actually worse than that. Dubya isn’t promising to halve the deficit in terms of its actual size, but as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product — and of course he predicts a spectacular rise in the GDP in order to meet these numbers.
- You may have noted that the new budget request includes a record-breaking military budget — but as Slate shows, billions of dollars that the government will spend on the military this year are not included in even that grotesquely large sum.
And that’s just what I was able to filter from the krill while I was busy doing other things.
Remember that budget that came out a few days ago? You know, the one that was the largest one ever, with a gigantic deficit, that the press kept trying to describe as “spare” and “full of deep cuts” to “rein in spending”?
Well, you probably heard that it included a record-breaking military warchest (and “In another sign of the times, financing for the apprehension of Army deserters would double”). And maybe you heard that a lot of things you might think of as belonging to the military — like, say, nuclear weapons development — aren’t even part of the Defense Department allotment but are snuck into other parts of the budget (the Department of Energy gets the A-bomb funding, for instance).
But even that wasn’t good enough. , the Dubya Squad asked Congress for an additional $82 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the greater glory of American foreign policy (you know, like payoffs for foreign governments that backed the Iraq War fiasco).
Why didn’t they include this money in the budget they just released? Well, you know, these wars are big, unpredictable, exceptional things. Huge asterices that get in the way of reasonable budgeting. Besides, the rules on these supplemental warbucks packages are faster and looser and the bills get much less Congressional scrutiny… which means, of course, that they’ll try to sneak in as much as they can.
There’s not much in the way of specifics in any part of this document — no breakdown, beyond a billion or so, of that $17.3 billion for Army operations and maintenance, or of $5.6 billion for Air Force operations and maintenance, or of $990 million for Army military construction in Iraq. The list could go on and on.
This is one reason the administration is loading so much military spending in a supplemental instead of the regular budget. The budget is scrutinized; supplementals aren’t.… ¶ [T]his supplemental includes quite a lot of money for items that have nothing to do with the costs of war in Iraq.…
Finally, there is the slush fund for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. When that $87 billion supplemental came out in , I noted provisions giving Rumsfeld the authority to move around $9.3 billion — 11 percent of the total amount — from one account to another at his discretion. This time, I’ve spotted between $7.5 billion and $11 billion (10 percent to 14 percent), depending on how it’s counted.
I wonder what would have happened if John Kerry had won in — would he stop this military gluttony?
Sen. John Kerry called for tens of thousands of new U.S. troops on and said the country should adopt a series of initiatives to support military families.
Kerry said he plans to file legislation to increase the size of the military by 40,000 — 30,000 in the Army and 10,000 in the Marines — to help support the country’s efforts in Iraq and the larger war on terrorism.…
“The war in Iraq proved that a lightning-fast, high-tech force can smash an opposing army and drive to Baghdad in three weeks. But there is no substitute for a well-trained and equipped infantry to win the peace,” Kerry said in remarks delivered at an annual ceremony sponsored by the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester.
Fred Kaplan at Slate takes a look at the Defense Department’s budget and writes a “Dog Bites Man” story about how much money is chasing how much superfluous high-tech weapons bloat.
And the folks at Defense Tech take note of some Pentagon Budget Blackmail:
Give us more money, or soldiers aren’t going to get paid. That’s the cynical game the Pentagon’s leadership has been playing with the Army’s budget in recent months. And now, it’s crunch time.
, Rumsfeld & Co. have been dipping into the Army’s day-to-day funds — like money for soldiers’ paychecks — and then daring Congress not to make up the difference with a second, “supplemental” pile of cash.
They’re playing the same game with that extra “death benefit” that Bush promised a little while back. You may remember how with showy generosity, Dubya promised that “[i]f a soldier was killed in war… his loved ones would get a $100,000 lump sum — up from just $12,420 — plus an extra $150,000 in life insurance payouts.”
The money is part is a larger, $4.8 billion package of Army “ Shortfalls and Requested Legislative Authorities” — programs that the service’s chiefs felt should have received more money from the Pentagon budgeteers. Every year, the Army, Navy, and Air Force appeal directly to Congress to infuse these programs with more cash. This year’s Army list also includes $443 million for more M16s and other small arms and $227 million for night vision equipment…
Iraq is like… well it’s like the world’s biggest slush fund, except it’s on fire.
Iraqi investigators have uncovered widespread fraud and waste in more than $1 billion worth of weapons deals arranged by middlemen who reneged or took huge kickbacks on contracts to arm Iraq’s fledgling military…
Knight Ridder reported last month that $300 million in defense funds had been lost. But the report indicates that the audit board uncovered a much larger scandal, with losses likely to exceed $500 million, that’s roiling the ministry as it struggles to build up its armed forces.…
The audit board’s investigators looked at 89 contracts of and discovered a pattern of deception and sloppiness that squandered more than half the Defense Ministry’s annual budget aimed at standing up a self-sufficient force, according to a copy of the 33-page report.…
“There’s no rebuilding, no weapons, nothing,” said retired Iraqi Lt. Gen. Abdul Aziz al-Yaseri, who worked in the Defense Ministry at the height of the alleged corruption. “There are no real contracts, even. They just signed papers and took the money.”
, Congress has appropriated $357 billion for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and for enhanced security at U.S. military bases and embassies abroad, according to CRS. Of this, the Department of Defense received $326 billion, and $31 billion went to the Department of State and others. So far, $251 billion has been spent in Iraq, and $82 billion has been for Afghanistan. Compared to , average monthly spending for Iraq has increased by 18 percent to $6 billion. The CBO reports that if the wars go well and we are able to ramp down operations gradually starting , an additional $260 billion will be needed for operations . Grand total: $617 billion.
The costs, while large, are not the most important news. According to the GAO, the Department of Defense has “lost visibility” over $7.1 billion of the war money appropriated to it by Congress. That means it’s gone, but Pentagon managers don’t know what they did with it. Worse, the GAO also found DoD is so inept at tracking all of its spending that neither DoD nor Congress “can reliably know how much the war is costing… [or] how appropriated funds are being spent….” The GAO was not even able to determine whether the costs that it and the other agencies cite as reasonable estimates are too high or too low.
“Just How Big is the Defense Budget?” asks Winslow T. Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information.
On , Congress passed a defense appropriations bill, which according to the press releases of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and many news articles subsequently written, funded “defense spending” for the United States for the . The impression made by the press releases and the news articles was that the $453 billion advertised in the bill, H.R. 2863, constitutes America’s defense budget for .
But hiding elsewhere in the budget (and outside of it in supplemental appropriations bills) are funds for certain other “defense”-related things — little things like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or the building and maintaining of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Wheeler does a full run-down, and concludes:
If you count all these costs, the total is $669.8 billion. This amount easily outdoes the rest of the world. In fact, if you count just the costs of the National Defense budget function, the approximate $538 billion we spend is $29 billion more than the $509 billion the entire rest of the world spends.
Some links you might find interesting:
- Per Bylund promotes counter-economics in his essay Creating a Calculated Revolution — In Your Neighborhood.
- War tax resister and Gandhian Jeff Knaebel writes that We Must Build Our Own Dawn.
- Here’s a little peek at how America’s war profiteers crow to their stockholders about their recent fortunes.
- And The New Yorker notes that much of these fortunes are made by shovelling tax dollars at useless pork projects: “Not only are we buying stuff we don’t need; we’re buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine.”
- Huck Gutman notices that the government is Lying about the Ruinous Cost of the War in Iraq: “In , at the start of the Korean War, supplemental appropriations comprised almost three quarters of all appropriations. By , supplementals were under 3 percent. By , supplementals were down to zero. ¶ In , supplemental appropriations were seven times as high as regular appropriations. , they were roughly equal. In supplementals were less than a fifth of regular appropriations, and by they were down to zero.” In contrast, 90% of the cost of today’s wars are being paid for off-budget.
- Ned Netterville, an “unlicensed disciple of Jesus,” thinks he’s figured out that Jesus’s foes were right when they accused him of promoting tax resistance.
- Aaron Russo’s constitutionalist tax protester propaganda film “America: Freedom to Fascism” has picked up a couple of critical reviews from news.com and The New York Times.
- You can listen to audio versions of Thoreau’s Walden, Cecile Andrews’s The Circle of Simplicity, and other works from the voluntary simplicity movement at SimpleRadio on simpleliving.net.
The Guardian reports that:
The US flew nearly $12bn in shrink-wrapped $100 bills into Iraq, then distributed the cash with no proper control over who was receiving it and how it was being spent.
The staggering scale of the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve has been graphically laid bare by a US congressional committee.
In the year after the invasion of Iraq in nearly 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad for disbursement to Iraqi ministries and US contractors. Using C-130 planes, the deliveries took place once or twice a month with the biggest of $2,401,600,000 on , six days before the handover.
The article goes into some details, and it’s mighty ugly. Suppose any of that “363 tonnes” was once your money before it was taxed away and then stuffed in a duffel bag to pay off a contractor, handed out in bundles from the back of a pickup truck, or paid to one of the thousands of “ghost employees” of Iraq’s quasi-government?
Some bits and pieces from around the web:
- Fred Kaplan notes that the “emergency supplementals” Congress keeps passing to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are also being used to inflate the rest of the military budget.
- Paul Kramer reminds us that U.S. waterboarding and otherwise torturing of its prisoners is nothing new. We had this debate , and dropped the ball then too.
- Thanks to Vegetarian Carnival, Social Memory Complex, and The Humanist Symposium for plugging The Picket Line in recent days.
Some tabs that have slid through my browser in recent days:
Miscellany:
- The U.S. Department of Defense budget is notoriously sloppy. This is by design, as it allows for a lot of kickbacks and graft and such, and is the most popular place for politicians to put their pork projects. An independent audit recently conducted by “a Michigan State University economist [Mark Skidmore], working with graduate students and a former government official,” concentrating on the budgets for , found trillions of dollars of Pentagon spending that was never authorized by law. The Defense Department has announced that for the first time ever (!) the agency will conduct an audit of its finances.
- According to a new study by Marius Frunza, the underground economy in the European Union succeeds in resisting €132 billion in Value-Added Tax each year, about 14% of the total amount of that tax the Union collects. Compare this to the “tax gap” in the U.S., which is estimated to be about 16%. This suggests to me that if the U.S. were ever to drop its income and payroll tax in favor of a VAT (as so-called “Fair Tax” promoters advocate), this might not have much effect on the over-all tax gap.
- Reason magazine looks at a new biography of H.D. Thoreau.
- The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement is still at its Archibald Tuttle-like ways: this time surreptitiously reestablishing a family’s utilities over the Christmas holidays after they had been cut off by the government utility monopoly for failure to pay tax-inflated charges.
- Quaker Peace & Social Witness is a project of Britan Yearly Meeting. They have a new project called “Take Action on Militarism.” War tax resistance is nowhere mentioned as one of the actions you might consider taking, however, so chalk this up as another example of the decay of the practice of war tax resistance among Quakers since the end of the Cold War.
- Some Spanish war tax resisters engaged in a collective redirection of their resisted taxes — donating that money to Stop Mare Mortum, which advocates for refugees.
New Tax Law Follies:
- Kimberly Amadeo, at the balance, has written up a good summary of the various aspects of the new U.S. federal tax law. Some of it is still sketchy (she documents parts of the bill that were dropped before the bill was passed, for instance), so read it with caution, but it’s more thorough than most summaries I’ve seen.
- Ruth Benn at NWTRCC looks at how the provisions of the new law may affect war tax resisters in particular.
- Parts of the new law reduce the ability of people to deduct state taxes on their federal tax returns. This has the effect of raising federal taxes on people in higher-tax states — these are typically states like California and New York with high property values and affluent cities… also, not coincidentally, states that tend to vote Democrat. Those states are now considering ways to fight back by rejiggering their own tax systems in such a way that they can bring in as much revenue while preserving their citizens’ federal deductions. This may end up making the new tax law even more damaging to the fiscal health of the federal government than had been originally anticipated.
