Editorial

The Washington Post reported December 5 that, “The Pentagon buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget.”

News of the $125 billion in Pentagon waste and allegations of its attempted cover-up should be welcomed by President elect Trump, who said he would pay for a $500 billion increase in military spending using a “full audit” at the Pentagon, cutting redundant bureaucracy and unwanted programs. Although Mr. Trump is now waffling on campaign promises to “lock her up,” “build a wall,” “get rid of ‘Obama care,’” and “bring back waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse,” he also promised to “eliminate waste and budget gimmicks” in the federal budget.

The Post’s report of waste and accounting fraud comes on the heels of a June 2016 military Inspector General’s report which said the Army made $2.8 billion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 billion for the year. “Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up,” Reuters reported. The Pentagon’s 2016 fiscal year budget was $573 billion—more than half of the total federal budget appropriated by Congress.

The Post notes that the newest investigation “identified ‘a clear path’ for the Department of Defense to save $125 billion over five years,” but was met with disdain by high-ranking officers. The Post reported, “Some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds.”

Saving the $125 billion could be done, the Pentagon report’s authors said, without job losses, through attrition, early retirement, and by reigning in the most high-priced military contractors, like Lockheed Martin (with $29 billion in weapons deals), United Technologies ($6.6 billion), Boeing ($15 billion), Northrup Grumman ($9.5 billion), Raytheon ($12 billion), and General Dynamics ($12 billion).

Trump’s speeches about “US military decline” will help Congress keep these giant weapons dealers well-funded, but should not fool the public. The 2017 military budget of $768 billion is four times China’s $190 billion, and 14 times Russia’s $53.02 billion; it is bigger than the nine next biggest military budgets combined.

In November 2013, a Reuters investigation found that since 1996, a staggering $8.5 trillion (with a ‘t’!) in Pentagon spending had never been accounted for. The report explained that the military regularly uses a budget gimmick of entering false and sometimes completely made-up numbers called “plugs” into ledgers in order to hide lost or missing data. In fiscal year 2012 alone, the military reported $9.22 billion in such faked “plugs.” This was up from $7.41 billion in 2011 fakery the president elect promises to root out.

This Reuters’ report on waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon came after the little-remembered admission made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on September 10, 2001. In a shocking speech that was buried in the aftermath of 9/11, Rumsfeld said, “According to some estimates, we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions.” He decried the accounting mess as “monumental” and “terrifying.”

Sadly, the billionaires and generals appointed by Trump to oversee the treasury and the military budget cannot be expected to tear into the Pentagon’s monumental, terrifying, and unaccountable transfer of federal taxes to the shareholders of the weapons contractors. After all, they themselves are major shareholders.             —JL

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2016

Through the Prism of Nonviolence

By John Heid

“All our problems stem from our acceptance of this filthy, rotten system.”
— Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker

“Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state.”
—Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

“The task at hand is not to abandon or deconstruct civil society but to establish our civilization on a foundation of justice.”
—Jim Corbett, Sanctuary For All Life

The business-sized, lime green envelopes began appearing in the neighborhood in August. Two landed in our mailbox. The contents were identified in bold print: “Official Ballot Material Enclosed.” It’s election time, with its implied summons to perform the quintessential civic duty, voting. Refusing is branded unpatriotic or anarchistic, or both, and once again the door opens for that lively discussion I have not had since the last presidential election. The topic: anarchism. This single word stops other conversations in a crowded room. While electoral politics is just the tip of the iceberg in a serious conversation about anarchism, the election is still someplace to start.

Why does the mere mention of anarchism cause a Pavlovian response of disgust, even righteous anger? I often hear: “Well, that’s pure violence, mayhem and madness. You just want to smash the state.” Historian Howard Zinn once asked: “How did the social philosophy of anarchism become such a dirty word?” Why does this issue of voting, or rather nonvoting, let alone anarchism, rile our friends and family?

Catholic Worker co-founder and lifelong anarchist Dorothy Day observed: “How strange it is that the anarchists I have met have been the most disciplined of men (sic), lawful and orderly, while those who insist that discipline and order must prevail are those who, out of plain contrariness, would refuse to obey and are the ones most unable to regulate themselves.”

In the opening chapter of Anarchism and Christianity the French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote: “By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence. Hence I cannot accept either nihilists or anarchists who choose violence as a means of action.”

Institutionalized violence is the primary tool of the state. The military-corporate-academic complex is the terra firma of democratic republics. In the US, no major party from ultra-conservative Republicans to liberal Greens has a nonviolent platform. Not one of them significantly addresses the military budget, let alone nuclear weapons, drone warfare, forced occupation of other states, etc. Not only are such matters left off the ballot, they’re not even on the table. State violence is non-negotiable. There is no “Bernie fix,” nor is there a Green Party fix. All matters of social import take their place in the shadow of US militarism. Civil rights activist Diane Nash once said, “If violence truly brought about social change, by now we’d be living in a utopia.”

Anarchism envisions another way to build community, ensure security, and exercise liberty. In other words, anarchists seek a civil society worthy of the concept, not one regulated by violence and man-made laws that compel people to act justly out of fear. We’re talking about “building a new world in the shell of the old”—a favorite phrase of Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker. This construction is two-fold. Challenging and dismantling the old, tried and failed means of “might-makes-right” by means of non-cooperation with the “tyrannical forces of State and Church”—as Catholic Worker and anarchist Ammon Hennacy wrote—and simultaneously engaging in civil initiative. These two practices operate in tandem.

Civil initiative was most notably practiced here during the Sanctuary movement of the 1980s. US citizens, who believed that no one should be denied the basic rights that constitute a civil society, took direct, personal responsibility for refugees fleeing violence in Central America. Often risking arrest, Sanctuary anarchists worked at feeding, clothing, sheltering and transporting the refugees to safe havens. According to Sanctuary activist Jim Corbett, civil initiative “must be societal rather than organizational, nonviolent rather than injurious, truthful rather than deceitful,… substantive rather than symbolic, volunteer-based rather than professional, and based on community powers rather than government powers.” These concepts are the heart of civil society.

Even though an ideal anarchist society may never be fully actualized, we can put our energy toward an anarchist movement as a social model. While challenging the status quo of domination enforced with its military/corporate apparatus, we can work together to create non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian, grass roots bodies which respond to the needs of civil society. Personal responsibility is fundamental. We cannot delegate our responsibilities as human beings and members of society to bureaucracies and institutions, state or church. This is not to say that these institutions do not have a role in the current complexion of our society. They absolutely do. Still, their presence is no substitute for personal, civilian responsibility.

When your only tool is a ballot, then all issues look like a big bucks lottery. On November 8, election day, I will vote with my feet, like I do most days. Civil responsibility is not a one-night stand. My day may include resupplying water stations along remote Arizona desert trails for refugee sisters and brothers walking north, or gathering discarded produce and dry goods for redistribution to families in need, or attending some consensus-based organizational meeting. My civic voice is not muted by my absence at the polling station. Hardly!

Anarchism challenges me to dig deep and think outside the ballot box, and then put my feet to the tasks at hand. At the end of the day, my motivation is best articulated by Dorothy Day. “What we would like to do is change the world.”

—John Heid lives and works at the Casa Mariposa Community in Tucson, Arizona. 

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2016

A Reuters investigation by Scot Paltrow published August 19 found $6.5 trillion in public Army funding is unaccounted for in the year 2015, after military book keepers fudged the numbers on a massive scale. The news of the mishandling of funds at an unfathomable scale—reported by the US Army’s own Inspector General (IG) July 26—prompted anti-militarist critics to action.

Worldbeyondwar.org published a scathing open letter to the Army Inspector General offering to launch its own inspection “until we determine exactly where the unaccounted for $6.5 trillion ended up—the $6.5 trillion that you report you just can’t locate.”

The group offered “to do this on a contingency basis, accepting as payment a 0.0001% percent finder’s fee each.”

To put the level of fraud in perspective, Worldbeyondwar.org’s letter pointed out to the Army that “$30 billion a year could end starvation and hunger worldwide”; “$11 billion a year could provide clean drinking water to everyone who needs it”; and “all the green energy projects ever envisioned that could preserve life on earth would collectively cost significantly less than this pocket change of yours that has gone missing.”

According to Paltrow’s investigation, the latest IG report “affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the [Pentagon] falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the [Pentagon]—far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget—spends the public’s money.”

Eric Pianin reported in Fiscal Times that the Pentagon “has never completed an audit of how they actually spend the trillions of dollars on wars, equipment, personnel, housing, health care and procurements.”

In 2009 Congress set a deadline of Sept. 30, 2017 for the Pentagon to be audit ready, a requirement that it may fail to meet leading to unknown penalties.

—Reuters, Aug. 19, 2016; US Dept. of Defense Inspector General Report, July 26, 2016; Fiscal Times, July 31, 2016, & Mar. 19, 2015; Oregon PeaceWorks, Aug. 24, 2016; Reuters, Nov. 18, 2013