In Montgomery County, Maryland — just outside of Washington, DC — the county executive recently proposed, as a part of his annual budget, a no-strings-attached grant of $900,000 to Lockheed Martin, the largest military contractor in the world. Citizens of the county objected to the handout in public hearings that the county council held on the budget.
Communities all over the United States are reeling from budget cuts. Military contractors, meanwhile, have remained fat and well-fed on the one part of federal spending that so far hasn’t been touched by budget-cutting fever: the Pentagon. One community recently decided to call attention to this disparity. In Montgomery County, a relatively wealthy Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, Peace Action Montgomery got together with a group of City Council members to craft a simple, straightforward resolution.
Blackwater (rebranded as Xe in an effort to escape the negative publicity associated with their former name), recently received a $100 million contract from the CIA to secure its bases in Afghanistan. The State Department also awarded them $120 million to provide security for new diplomatic buildings, including consulates outside Kabul, giving the firm a total of $220 million in new contracts in Afghanistan. This seems remarkable, given the extremely negative image Blackwater has throughout the world. That people even know about a private security company is a bad sign in itself. Not surprisingly, CIA Director Leon Panetta had to go on the offensive to defend the contracts.
Kigali felt muggy on July 20, the temperature unusually high. The police and army were on high alert at every corner as the Rwandan capital was getting ready for the big political event. About to begin was the two-week election campaign leading up to presidential elections on August 9.
The “Hidden World” series in The Washington Post by Dana Priest and William Arkin reveals the true extent to which the U.S. government has become a secretive national security state.
The full-page ads in The Washington Post seem so reasonable. The military contractor Pratt & Whitney has been arguing that America doesn’t need to spend $485 million to develop a second engine for the F-35 jet fighter. It’s a compelling argument. We’re in a serious economic crisis, so why on earth would we build another jet engine when the first one is sufficient?