California Free Press

Chairman Sanders Announces Senate Budget Committee Hearing on Wasteful Pentagon Spending

WASHINGTON - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today announced that the Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing Wednesday, May 12 at 11 a.m., on “Waste, Fraud, Cost Overruns, and Auditing at the Pentagon.”

Over the past 20 years, the military industrial complex has spent over $2.6 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions to influence Congress. Currently, the U.S. spends more on our nation’s military than the next nine countries combined and over half of our discretionary spending goes to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, half of our people are struggling paycheck to paycheck, over 40 million Americans are living in poverty, and over 500,000 Americans are homeless including roughly 40,000 veterans.

Congress has appropriated so much money for the Defense Department that the Pentagon does not know what to do with it. About half of the Pentagon’s budget goes directly into the hands of private contractors, not our troops. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), between 2013 and 2018 the Pentagon returned more than $80 billion in funding back to the Treasury.

A major reason why there is so much waste, fraud, and abuse at the Pentagon is the fact that the Defense Department remains the only federal agency in the United States that hasn’t been able to pass an independent audit. And, over the past two decades, virtually every major defense contractor in the United States has paid billions of dollars in fines and settlements for misconduct and fraud—all while making huge profits on those government contracts.  

Sanders, who has for years pressed the Pentagon to get control of waste, fraud, and abuse by military contractors, has invited Dr. Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; William Hartung, Director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Oversight; and Mandy Smithberger, Director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight to testify. Also testifying will be Roger Zackheim, Director of the Ronald Reagan Institute and LTG (Ret) Thomas Spoehr, Director of the Center for National Defense at The Heritage Foundation.

Hearing Details
What: Hearing of the Committee on the Budget to consider “Waste, Fraud, Cost Overruns, and Auditing at the Pentagon.”
When: Wednesday, May 12, 2021, 11:00 a.m. ET
Where: Room SD-608. The hearing will also be livestreamed on the Budget Committee’s website and Sanders’ social media pages.
Who: Dr. Lawrence Korb, Mr. William Hartung, Ms. Mandy Smithberger, Mr. Roger Zackheim, and LTG (Ret) Thomas Spoehr.

Off the Top of My Head

Instead of Sanctioning Foreign Actors Sanction Domestic Terrorists

by John Lawrence, January 12, 2021

The best development so far post insurrection is taking away Trump's twitter account permanently. The FBI, CIA and other law enforcement are rounding up the insurrectionists and they should get lengthy jail sentences and sanctions. The biggest threat to American democracy is not out there; it's in here. Their gathering places on social media such as Parler have been taken down or will be taken down soon. If the terrorists can't meet to spout their vitriol as well as plan future insurrections, we'll be making progress. Rush Limbaugh and other domestic terrorists should be sanctioned. Anyone egging on, benefiting from, taking advantage of the poor mental health or encouraging hatred and violence of the American people needs to be sanctioned. The fact that these terrorists could overwhelm the Capitol Police was a huge security failure. The fact that it took the Pentagon three hours to supply troops shows the fact that we are wasting huge amounts of money on a worthless military establishment that does not confront the real threats to this country. Perhaps these domestic terrorists need to be reeducated. We don't have the moral authority to mock China any more for doing this with its domestic terrorists.

Right now security forces in the US are on high alert. The National Guard is out in force. There are more forces on the streets of Washington, DC now than there are in Afghanistan. They should stay on high alert for the time being. I think the situation will get under control. Massive arrests and the total deplatforming and isolation of Donald Trump and domestic terrorist social media sites needs to be carried out. If they don't have gathering places on social media, they won't be able to organize. That's important. There needs to be a recognition that the militarization of the mindsets of young Americans which happens in the military and the glorification and seeming ubiquity of war as the only way to deal with other nations is a cause of the recent problems. Instead of funneling all non-college bound youth into the military, there needs to be an upsurge in funding and encouragement for young people to go into the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. We need to demilitarize the mindsets of the American people.

Terrorist and threatening phone calls need to be traced and the perpetrators brought to justice. No public official should have to live in fear for their lives and their family's lives because of death threats on phone calls or on social media. Social media is a big problem. They have gotten rich off the fact that their algorithms have encouraged, aided and abetted the domestic terrorists. Their business model showed that there was a lot of profit in encouraging conspiracy theories and other activities detached from reality. It's good that it has become evident by reporting on legitimate news outlets that social media is not subject to the First Amendment because that only applies to government hindrance of free speech. Social media platforms are private entities and they do not have to honor so-called free speech. Private entities also don't have to honor the Second Amendment so that there is space to restrict guns on private property which is probably 99% of the property in the US.

The next administration has its work cut out for them. Good leaders and good people will prevail. Deplatforming all right wing media and groups that espouse conspiracy theories and outright lies will be an important step. Sober analysis and critical thinking must replace narcissistic fantasy and entertainment values. This starts with children in school. They need to taught how to distinguish truth from lies. They need to be taught the value of peace and harmony not only in their daily lives but in the pursuit of that status among and between nations. They should be taught that the US has not always been but should aspire to moral and ethical behavior with regard to other nations and within its own country.

Money must be drained from the military establishment which is oriented towards either non-existant or phony threats and reoriented towards the real threats and funded at appropriate levels rather than be treated to carte blanche amounts of superfluous cash. Budgets both military and domestic need to be appropriate to their realistic needs. Right now the greatest need is in overcoming the pandemic and responding to the economic needs of the lower half of the population. Also eliminating energy production from fossil fuels needs to proceed post haste. It's obvious that the private economy can not do this at the rate necessary to save the planet from the ravages of global warming. Only big government programs in conjunction with the programs of other countries can possibly achieve the reality of zero carbon emissions by 2030.

The last word is that Trump must be denied any post Presidential influence or following by any and all legal means. This is the greatest thing that can be done to heal and deradicalize the country. America also will pay a heavy price if it doesn't get its promotion of gun culture under control.

Off the Top of My Head

The Boeing 735 MAX isn't the Only Aircraft with Problems. Take the Lockheed Martin F-35 Fighter, for Example.

by John Lawrence, January 16, 2019

By now it's doubtful whether Boeing's 735 MAX will ever fly again. Probably it should not given that it is a design kluge that was supposed to be fixed by computer software, something like squaring the circle. Then there's Lockheed's F-35. It was supposed to replace Lockheed's F-22, a plane that couldn't help but be successful since it's development and production was spread over 44 states. That gave it 88 Senators when it came to voting on it. Despite cost overruns and a lack of performance, the F-22 program was continued but scaled down. It made little difference to Lockheed Martin in the long run because the F-35 program, also a Lockheed product was scaled up. Republican Tom Price excoriated President Obama for his decision to cut back the F-22 program saying, "It' outrageous that President Obama is willing to bury the country under a mountain of debt with his reckless domestic agenda but refuses to fund programs critical to our national defense."

William D Hartung in his book Prophets of War says:

"The most amazing thing about the F-22 affair was that Lockheed Martin was so large, and involved in so many weapons systems, that in the end, despite all its alarmist rhetoric, the company may well have come out ahead of the game under the [Secretary of Defense] Gates budget package, owing in large part to the counterbalancing increases in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, designed to be the largest project in the history of military aviation."

Almost immediately the F-35 program was beset by schedule slippages and cost overruns. By 2014, 13 years after Lockheed won the contract for the F-35, only one actual plane had been produced. That plane was supposed to debut at an airshow in Britain, but never made the flight due to an accident that almost killed a pilot. According to the New York Times Magazine: "Officials from the Pentagon and the aircraft’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, had eagerly anticipated the opportunity to show off a working, flying F-35 after a decade of delays and spiraling cost overruns. The F-35 initiative is the Defense Department’s most expensive weapons program ever, expected to cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion over its 60-year lifespan." But the plane, having provided a jobs program for the last 20 years, is already obsolete. It flew a couple missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and dropped a few bombs on some ISIS fighters, but that's a total waste of what was supposed to be the world's most advanced fighter. It has yet to be in a dogfight, the mission it was supposedly designed for.

The Times article goes on:

Yet even as the program plows forward, unresolved technical issues have continued to emerge. In June, my colleagues and I at Defense News reported that the plane still faced at least 13 severe technical deficiencies during operational testing, including spikes in cabin pressure, some rare instances of structural damage at supersonic speeds and unpredictability while conducting extreme maneuvers — all problems that could affect the pilot’s safety or jeopardize a mission’s success. At the same time, the F-35s already delivered to squadrons have introduced new complications: On military bases around the United States, the high cost of operating the aircraft, a shortage of spare parts and a challenging new approach to updating the jet’s crucial software code have program officials and military leaders urgently looking for solutions. Still, they assure the public that nothing will prevent the program from moving forward. It’s a stance that breaks with the advice of the Government Accountability Office, which advised that all serious problems should be resolved before transitioning to full-rate production.

They have a big problem getting spare parts some of which may take up to a year to obtain since they come from all over the world. In both 2017 and 2018, only about half of the United States’ F-35 fleet was available to fly at a given time, with the rest down for maintenance. Serious problems resulted from starting production while the aircraft was still under development, a process the Pentagon calls concurrency. The strategy was meant to allow the services to begin flying their F-35s sooner. Instead, F-35s started rolling off the production line with unresolved technical problems, forcing the Pentagon to continually retrofit even newly built jets.

Similar to the Boeing situation where the government abdicated its oversight responsibilities and let Boeing essentially monitor itself with disastrous results, the Pentagon let Lockheed run the show and took Lockheed's word for it that everything was copacetic with the design and production of the airplanes.  “I had a sense, after my first 90 days, that the government was not in charge of the program,” said Bogdan, who assumed oversight as the program’s executive officer in December 2012. It seemed “that all of the major decisions, whether they be technical, whether they be schedule, whether they be contractual, were really all being made by Lockheed Martin, and the program office was just kind of watching.”

Since all these planes, both military and commercial, are run by lines of computer code, it is common to blame any malfunction on computer code. The idea that perhaps this is not the right way to design a plane, that computer code shouldn't be relied on to produce a safe and effective plane seems to have eluded them. Boeing executives are trying to convince the public that changing a few lines of computer code will correct the deficiencies in the 737 MAX when the real deficiency is that the plane was not designed from scratch using sound aerodynamic principles. It is a kluge in other words. In 2016, Senator John McCain of Arizona labeled the [F-35] program a “scandal and a tragedy with respect to cost, schedule and performance.”

It's ridiculous to develop a high performance aircraft like the F-35 if the only thing it's tasked to do is to drop a few bombs on ISIS. That could be done with World War II era airplanes. Yet the public goes along with this colossal waste of their taxpayers dollars in order to create a jobs program that keeps the economy humming. That is the true raison d'etre of the military-industrial complex. Soon the Pentagon will declare that the F-35 is obsolete after we've spent a trillion dollars on it in light of the artificial intelligence and 5G technology. China is already developing planes with those capabilities. Then Lockheed and the Pentagon will come up with an even more ambitious plane to develop the world's most technologically advance aircraft given that the F-35 will be now obsolete.