How The Rich Stay Rich And The Stupid Stay Stupid

Buck McKeon, Republican Representative from California's 25th district which is home to a major facility for each of the services, a naval weapons plant, a Marine training center an Air Force base and an Army base might be said to be the Representative of Lockeed Martin, Northrop Grumman,  Boeing and the National Rifle Association, his biggest campaign contributors (sponsors.)

Opening the fifth of a series of hearings by the House Armed Services Committee, he intoned, "There are some in government who want to use the military to pay for the rest, to protect the sacred cow that is entitlement spending."  (By which he meant Social Security and Medicare.) "Not only should that be a non-starter from a national-security and economic perspective, but it should also be a non-started from a moral perspective."  He added that cuts should be made not to the "protector of our prosperity," but to the "diver of our debt." [Jill LePore, The New Yorker]

Notice what he has done here. Military spending is a good thing, because it protects American prosperity.  Now, what does he mean by that?  Well, in a sense, he is correct.  Government spending does do what Paul Krugman suggests the government should do, i.e. pump money into the American economy, putting money into the hands of the citizens of the 25th district so they can go out and spend. 
So, that is the kind of government stimulus package Mr. McKeon admires and defends and finds morally superior.

On the other hand, government money going to hospitals, nurses, nurses' aides, workers who clean the operating rooms, doctors, hospital administrators, that is government money which does not enhance prosperity but only adds to our debt. That is immoral spending, as Mr. McKeon would have it.

In the first instance, taking money out of government coffers and sprinkling out over the 25th district is a moral imperative, but sprinkling it over the Minnesota district that contains,say, the Mayo Clinic, that's bad. That drives our debt, not our prosperity.

This is economics 101 which Mr. McKeon learned when he was on mission or running his Western apparel store which went bankrupt. Mr. McKeon struggled through college, but apparently he mastered economics 101, as taught by Rush Limbaugh.

Someone from the gallery shouted, "The driver of our debt is our military complex machine!"  

Capitol Hill Police arrested that heckler and hustled him out of the hearing room.

Only Mr. Keon and other Congressmen are allowed to speak at these "public hearings." Comments from the hoi polloi are not allowed, especially when they call a spade a spade.

So, the police moved in and squashed the speakers of the truth and ensured only the speech of the Congressman is free.

Now, to be fair, I'm sure Mr. McKeon would argue that our military ensures our prosperity by killing the bad guys, like Al Qaeda, who would fly planes into our world trade center and cripple our airline industry, and play havoc with our financial institutions, at least for a few weeks, and he has a point.  

But what is more true is what the heckler said. Had there been no planes flying into the World Trade Center, we would have found another reason to have a huge military to support  the 25th district: some embassy getting blown up in Tanzania, some terrorist act somewhere, which we must resist by having a huge standing army, navy and air force. We have been inventing reasons to have all this huge apparatus since Vietnam. 

One of the Phantom's strangest memories is on the day of 9/11, when he stepped outside his house, which, as the crow flies was exactly 10 miles from the Capitol Building and the Rayburn Building, where Mr. McKeon later held his hearings. The Phantom was waiting for his wife to get home from her office a few blocks from the White House, and he heard a roar he had never heard before.

 It was the sound of an airplane. Now, the Phantom's house was hard by the Potomac River, which is the river commercial airplanes follow to National Airport, downstream, so the sound of airplanes was so commonplace he hardly heard them any more. But the sound of this airplane was very different.  The Phantom looked up and saw an F-15 fighter swooping low, above the tree line, and other fighters, black silhouettes against a crystal blue sky, higher up. 

The Air Force had scrambled jets.  They continued flying in big circles around Washington, DC for most of the afternoon, and that brought them over the Phantom's neighborhood, which was across the Potomac from Langley, Virginia, and the headquarters of the CIA.

And the Phantom thought, what good could those magnificent war machines do?  Even by that hour, around 6 PM the day of the attack, we all knew it was terrorists who had hijacked the airplanes and directed them into the Twin Towers. How are you going to fight a few men inside a few planes, who took everyone by surprise with fighter jets?  Sure, you could shoot down any other commercial airplanes headed for the Capitol and the White House, but by that time of day there were no other planes in the air but those fighters. It's not like the terrorists had their own fighters or bombers. 

Those airplanes in the sky were the most visible incarnation of the futility of an air force built to fight other fighters. But terrorism is an asymmetric battle. Terrorists would strike again, using surprise, stealth, cunning and low tech weapons, bus bombs, improvised explosive devices. And none of the billion dollar weapons systems we had built, none of those Top Gun pilots would be any use at all in thwarting the will of those terrorists. We were trying to fight the war we wanted to fight, not the war they were bringing to us. 

Those airplanes which Mr. McKeon to this day wants to pump moral federal dollars into were battleships of their time, but the enemy had discovered he could sink those majestic looking behemoths with stealth. The terrorists had found a stealth weapon as effective as the submarine against the great big battleship. The terrorists had found: Surprise. Those airplanes were just impotent relics of a bygone war.

There are, of course, some effective air weapons against terrorists: Inexpensive drones, made with off the shelf stuff so cheap we can lose dozens of them without worrying about even the expense. But those drones are too cheap to interest Mr. McKeon's financiers  and they are not made in his district

And Mr. McKeon is not the only fool on this stage: Mr. Panetta  testified:  "One thing we do not want is Afghanistan becoming a safe haven again for Al Qaeda."

As if we could simply scrub Afghanistan clean and once that is done, no Al Qaeda would ever creep back.  As if we could simply erase Afghanistan and no Al Qaeda would take root in Yemen or Mali or Pakistan or Somalia or anywhere else in the world. 

Do you have to be a Congressman or a Secretary of Defense to be stupid enough to think that your enemy, who has no tanks or fighter planes, will come out and wave a flag at you and invite you to bomb him? 

Do you have to be a common, ignorant citizen, like the Phantom, to suppose, if you were waging war against the United States,  you would find a nice spot in some mountains or some hospitable village somewhere, or some part of a big city where you could hide?  Or maybe, you would find a nice, convenient jungle. Like the Viet Cong. And that way, you survive and day by day, you could keep drawing blood, day after day, until you'd bled the big bad beast dry.

Do we believe we can defoliate a forest with Agent Orange  and then we will see all the little terrorists running around in Al Qaeda uniforms, out in the open, for us to shoot?

But the Congressmen sit around and pontificate. And those in power talk, while making sure those who see clearly and think clearly are muzzled by the Capitol Police. And that's how the powerful remain in power, the rich armament makers stay rich, the Congressmen in their pocket stay in Congress and the stupid stay stupid.

God Bless America.