I don’t know if it was the complaint from the shopkeeper on Sixth Street about the current economic woes or the bombastic remarks from a local restaurateur about the escalating price of government these days that got me thinking. Both remarks have their root in the rising price of a country at war along with the rising cost of oil. One might argue they are one in the same.
It was Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler (1881-1940) who wrote a relatively obscure set of articles titled, “War Is A Racket” that got me thinking about how old this problem is. General Butler was no bleeding heart liberal or peacenik. He was awarded not only two Congressional Medals of Honor (1914 and 1917) but also the Distinguished Service Medal (in 1919). He also fought in the Great War to End All Wars—WWI. He starts off with saying, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” This from a jarhead who had lead men into multiple battles and seen them die by the scores in the muddy trenches on the Western, front between France and Germany. No one, not even Chuck Hawley (see letters this issue), can question his patriotism. The oldest problem with war is the obsessive profiteering that goes along every time Congress opens up the treasury for military spending and the patriots start feverishly waving their flags.
Butler claims that WWI created 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires who gorged themselves at the public’s expense on the “blood profits” of war. This racket-of-war, however, has been with us since the beginning of modern history, when Athens fought the Persians, or was it the Pharaoh fighting the Sumerians? It really doesn’t matter because the thing is readily apparent with Halliburton’s and Blackwater’s current contracts in the current war in Iraq.
With hundreds of billions of tax dollars siphoned off to fight a protracted war that nobody really wanted or planned for, including Rumsfeld, our country is the poorer. Every time I hear our Governor opine about having to slash spending and I hear the teachers protest about him cutting education––I say this is the price of this war. Even now, as the City of Los Angeles decides to raise taxes on the backs of its citizens, although they call them sanitation fees, I point out—this is the price of this war—and the exorbitant profits that go unregulated, mismanaged and disappear down the black
hole of the military budget are obscene. Even before the Iraq war in 2003, the Pentagon had simply lost track of over $1 billion, as the General Accounting Office (GAO) marked seven straight years of failed audits, and it’s only gotten worse since then. Yet, the drumbeat of war goes on, and on. The value of the dollar drops, the prices rise, and the country’s economy is sucked up by the speculators, while Main Street goes into hibernation.
Although this is the predictable rise and crash cycle that accompanies every war, there has been only one war in American history when the profiteers were reigned in and regulated by Congress to any extent.
The humble Mr. Truman who was elected to the US Senate at the beginning of the Great Depression from the state of Missouri had a less than stellar career up until the day that Congress passed the $10 billion arms budget leading up to WWII. This was for the time, a huge expenditure and Harry S. Truman, the future inheritor of the White House, was kind of a practical penny pincher. So without so much as an appointment to a sub-committee to oversee these expenses, he took it upon himself to go see where and how the money was being spent. He was shocked and appalled.
When he returned to the Capitol, he issued a report to the Senate on the waste, fraud and mismanagement of the budget—and even with the protests from FDR—was granted his own subcommittee on oversight of the defense contracts. Only after December 7, 1941 did everyone recognize the importance of the Truman Committee to the war effort as he ferreted out profiteering from every war industry from shipbuilding to aircraft manufacturing to ammunitions. And in the end, earned him a reputation that was strong enough to place him on the ballot as Vice-President in Roosevelt’s fourth and final term in office. This is where Truman’s famous desk sign,“the buck stops here,” came from.
Today with our never ending “War on Terror” with all of the corruption, both financial and legal of the Bush/Cheney club, it is easy to point out, but difficult to fix, the deficits of both our government and the domestic economy. But what we can do is to tell Congress this year as they go stumping for (re)election is that the war budget and the war stops here!
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