Your Tax Dollars at Work

continued - page 3

So to recap: a weapon that was designed to fight an enemy that no longer exists, which may be a spectacular design failure, and which costs up to ten times as much as the last generation's still-excellent and still-superior weapon, is to be mass-produced by a government steeped in a budget crisis of its own making, at a time when vital social services are being slashed. The funding bill for this plane was endorsed by a research group whose president is a board member of a subcontractor and was passed by a Congress heavily subsidized by the F-22's chief contractors. In just this one election year of 2006, members of Congress received $1,124,646 in contributions from Lockheed Martin alone ($949,271 to House reps, $175,375 to senators), and that doesn't even account for the huge contributions from other contractors like Connecticut-based Pratt and Whitney (still wonder why Chris Dodd and Joe Lieberman voted for the Chambliss amendment?) and Texas Instruments.

Defense appropriations remain the most hideously undercovered ongoing story in America. Some of this is probably due to the fact that defense companies have a long history of owning major media outlets (Westinghouse and GE being prime examples), but even beyond that there seems to be an instinctive reluctance on the part of reporters to even consider covering military waste stories.

An example: House and Senate conferees this week quietly restored some $109 million in funding for the Pentagon's Joint Cargo Aircraft program, after the Senate had slashed those funds from the budget earlier this year. The only news outlet to cover the conference decision was Congress' own The Hill. Such subterranean conference restorations of defense appropriations -- there was a similar restoration of $230 million for the notorious V-22 Osprey program last year, at almost exactly the same time as the better-publicized "emergency" social cuts -- almost never make the news.

Since both parties are heavily subsidized by defense contractors and accustomed to giving them whatever they want, whenever they want (Lockheed Martin even has the contract for the Internet server in Congress, for Christ's sake), neither party ever raises the issue with reporters. This allows people like John Boehner to keep a straight face when he sighs and says things like, "Look, we're broke," before slashing $600 million in foster care funding, as he did last year. And while Democrats may object to these same cuts, you'll hardly ever hear any of them mention -- oh, by the way -- that they just voted to buy 183 of the world's most useless airplanes at $361 million a pop. The F-22 -- useless as tits on a bull against Al Qaeda, but it sure will look nice flying over next year's World Series opener! Why not? It's not their money.

What a joke American journalism is. Our entire Army is on its knees before a few thousand gun-toting religious fanatics in the Arabian desert, and here's our government, taking food out of the mouths of foster kids and single moms to go binge-shopping with our tax money in the Sharper Image catalog of the industrial world. And what's on TV? Fucking Suri Cruise? Are you kidding me?