| LaborTalk – February 8, 2006 The Pentagon Is Labor’s ‘Untouchable,’
So Working People Are Paying the Price By Harry Kelber
In case you missed it, the Army has awarded the Halliburton company a $385 million contract to build detention centers for the Department of Homeland Security. Detention centers? To jail Americans who may protest being spied on under the Patriot Act? Is that the best way to spend $385 million of taxpayers’ money? Imagine giving such a juicy contract to Halliburton, Vice President Cheney’s former company that brazenly cheated the U.S. government of millions of dollars as a favored Pentagon contractor in Iraq. Should they be rewarded for their outrageous overcharges and bungled projects by giving them a new, no-bid contract? The remarkable thing is that leaders of both the AFL-CIO and the Change to-Win Coalition have not questioned either the reason for the new detention centers or the cost. In fact, they never question any Pentagon project or its cost, no matter what. Whatever the Defense Department says it needs, it gets, not only with the approval of Congress but the silent assent of our labor leaders. The Pentagon is notorious for the cost overruns and extraordinary waste on its military projects, including those that it started and then aborted. It is adept at shrugging off scandals. (Remember the $700 toilet seats?) When government inspectors found that the department had no receipts for millions of dollars it had spent, so what? Pentagon procurement executives have an easy relationship with defense contractors, so that costly failures or delays are worked out with almost no attention from either Congress or anyone else. They operate a “revolving door” so that there is an interchange of personnel between the military and defense contractors. * * * * * President Bush’s budget for fiscal 2007 allots the Defense Department $439.3 billion, a gain of 6.9 percent over this year’s budget. Since 2001, the Pentagon’s budget has increased by 20 percent. The proposed military budget does not include $120 billion in additional financing which the Bush administration is requesting in its fiscal 2007 budget to pay for continuing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Until this most recent request, the total cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has been about $331 billion since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Steven M. Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington-based research group. Meanwhile, the overall cost of the “war on terror” — relabeled by the Pentagon as “The Long War” — is already close to half a trillion dollars and will soon equal the cost of the 13-year Vietnam War — with no end in sight. The War¹s “Collateral Damage” to Our Poor, Sick and Elderly To help pay for the tax cuts to the wealthy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush reduced or eliminated entirely 141 programs, many of which serve the poor, children, sick and elderly, at a “saving” of $39 billion. Almost one-third of the targeted programs are in education, including ones that provide money to support the arts, vocational, training, parent resource centers and drug-free schools. It cuts $12.2 billion from the federal student loan program, the largest cut in the program’s history. Bush also proposes to stall the growth of Medicare, the health program of the elderly and disabled, by cutting $35 billion over five years. The higher premiums and co-payments will force many workers and retirees to drop their health insurance. The legislation is also expected to end health insurance for thousands of Medicaid enrollees, 60 percent of whom are children. * * * * * Neither AFL-CIO President John Sweeney nor CTW President Anna Berger mentioned the 6.9 percent increase in the Pentagon budget or the $120 billion that the Bush administration is proposing as a supplemental outlay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when they criticized the proposed federal budget. Why the silence? Does it mean they favor giving Bush and the Pentagon a blank check on the two wars, no matter how long they last and how much they cost? Isn’t it clear that Bush is using the “war card” to strip working people of domestic programs they need for survival? And can we afford to remain silent and passive? Our weekly "LaborTalk" and "World of Labor" columns can be viewed at our Web site: www.laboreducator.org. Harry Kelber's e-mail address is: hkelber@igc.org. 
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