Bill Clinton's Military Budget Deception

This past week saw a "mysterious" explosion at Hanford--mysterious because, as local media failed to point out, Congress and the Dept. of Energy (DOE) gutted the clean-up funding needed at Hanford to determine exactly what chemicals comprise the evil stew at hundreds of toxic buildings and waste sites across the Reservation.

Also last week: the leaking of an April letter from Gov. Gary Locke to DOE Secretary Federico Pena, advocating not only the restart of nuclear weapon production but its privatization and the awarding of the contract to a shadowy, questionably financed outfit called American Nuclear Medical Systems. (Local media hasn't picked this up--yet--either. However, ETS! will have much more on the story next week; we're still working on it at press time.)

The week's big military headline, though, was on the budget: the release of a plan by Pres. Clinton to close bases and otherwise make the Pentagon, as a top-of-page-one P-I headline put it, "leaner."

The problem? The headline is false, and the story (along with Clinton's release of it) intentionally misleading. Pentagon spending under Bill Clinton is going up, not down.

Last year, for Fiscal Year 1997, Clinton got some bad press (though not enough) for adding into the budget several weapons systems the Pentagon didn't request and didn't even want. So did the Senate. So did the House. By the time they were through, in this era of severe cuts for social spending, Clinton et al had authorized $31 billion more than the Pentagon--not the thriftiest of outfits to begin with--had even wanted. Clinton did the same thing in 1994 ($25 billion) and 1993 ($11.4 billion).

Hence, in the shadow of this year's budget agreement, comes last week's headline: "Clinton calls for a leaner military" (P-I, 5-20). The story detailed a newly released Pentagon plan that will "cut back military bases, backup forces, and weapons purchases." The timing of the plan's release, just after budget negotiations, is an obvious attempt at image management.

The budget Clinton just agreed to, once again this year, substantially adds to Pentagon requests. Congress adds $3 billion in defense (sic) budget authority over the original requests, and another $7 billion in outlays for next year. Overall, it's up $3 billion from last year's Republican budget resolution. In almost every category, budget negotiators "compromised" on a defense figure higher than either Clinton's or the Republicans' budget numbers.

Why the discrepancy with the "leaner military" headlines? Think of the military as a very large corporation, competing in the global economy. (This isn't just an analogy--it's what's actually driving the policy.) Like many corporations, our killing guys and gals are downsizing; cutting back jobs, expanding markets, and reaping big bonuses and stock options for upper management. In this case, the profits are realized through the funding of expensive, but useless, weapons systems designed to fight non- existent enemies, simultaneous non-existent enemies, and/or meteors and comets. The much-beloved (by Boeing and Lockheed) F-22 is a prime example. A combination land/air/water heat-seeking modular project (est. cost: $345672 billion) to fight the Loch Ness Menace can't be far behind.

These boondoggles are costly beyond comprehension, and create relatively few jobs. As in virtually every other sector of the economy, middle and working class folks get stiffed (base closures, downsized ranks) while the rich get richer. It is a middle ground--acceptable to wealthy elites and feel-good liberals alike--that has defined the entire political career of Bill Clinton, and has enabled him to enact systematic assaults on the poor, on workers, on the environment, on civil rights, on education and health care, ad infinitum, with success far beyond the fondest Reagan/Bush wet dreams. And the inability (or unwillingness) of major media to note even obvious policy deceptions like this one makes his job that much easier.

THE MICROBOEING WATCH

Tracking the volume of The Only News That Matters to Seattle's Dailies

 
Seattle Times           Seattle P-I 
Microsoft       Boeing   Microsoft    Boeing 
Week of 5/4-5/10 
Front page           6             1          1          3 
Front section        9             2          1          4 
Business             6             8          3          4 
total in paper      19            10          5          9 
5/11-5/17 
Front page           1             2          1          1 
Front section        1             2          1          1 
Business             3            10          3          3 
total in paper       8            12          4          4 

MediaWatch is written every two weeks by members of the MediaWatch collective, a local group monitoring Seattle news media. For info or to get involved, e-mail mediawatch@u.washington.edu or call 632-1656.