Another idea never mentioned on tee vee, from the Before Time…
Nationalize the Defense Industry!
BY JOHN STANTON
Counterpunch, July 6, 2006
In 1969 John Kenneth Galbraith penned a piece for the New York Times titled The Big Defense Firms Are Really Public Firms and Should be Nationalized arguing, among other things, that it was folly for defense contractors to claim that they were private corporations. Such claims made a mockery of free enterprise.
Nearly 40 years hence, Charlie Cray and Lee Drutman have resurrected and energized Galbraith’s argument in their work titled Corporations and the Public Purpose: Restoring the Balance (Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Winter 2005). They make an exceptionally compelling case for putting the defense industrial base (DIB) into the direct service of the American public through a form of nationalization: federal chartering.
“Converting the companies to publicly-controlled, nonprofit status would introduce a key change: it would reduce the entities’ impetus for aggressive lobbying and campaign contributions. Chartering the defense contractors at the federal level would in effect allow Congress to ban such activities outright, thereby controlling an industry that is now a driving force rather than a servant of foreign policy objectives. As public firms, they would certainly continue to participate in the policy fora designed to determine the nation’s national security and defense technology needs, but the profit-driven impetus to control the process in order to best serve corporate shareholders would be eliminated. Thus, by turning defense and security firms into full public corporations, we would replace the criteria by which their performance is judged from quarterly earnings targets to criteria that is more consistent with the national interest.”
If Cray and Lutman’s notion seems radical, it’s only thanks to a fanciful story telling by those who move back and forth through the revolving, and always open, doors of the national security apparatus that link the Department of Defense, the US Congress, and the players who dot the DIB landscape. Apologists for the DIB have always distorted the importance of the defense industry to the nation’s security, particularly after the demise of the Soviet Union. They really believe that their industry should get special recognition for producing the goods and services used to wage war. To sell that concept, they’ve made sure that the difference between contractor and uniformed government employee is completely blurred. With that, it’s impossible to know who is protecting the balance sheet and who is protecting the US Constitution. In short, they’ve sold the public good.
There’s a lot of evidence to show that the DIB is not functioning in the nation’s best interest. Two interesting studies stand out. An April 2005 report by the Government Accounting Office titled Defense Logistics took a hard look at the system that supplies US troops in Iraq and concluded that it needed repair. The pipeline failed to deliver basic supplies, such as MRE rations, in a timely manner. Another from the National Defense University (see below) indicated that defense isn’t reaping broad benefits from information technology. That does not bode well for the push to network centric warfare.
Continues…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/07/06/nationalize-the-defense-industry/
= new reply since forum marked as read
