Joe Galloway: The Pentagon Is Financed Like Enron and Run Like General Motors

[babylonsister]

The Pentagon Is Financed Like Enron and Run Like General Motors
by Joseph L. Galloway


When George W. Bush disappears out the door of the White House, he’ll leave his successor a long list of horrendous problems, not least of them a Defense Department budget of more than $518 billion that doesn’t even include another $170 billion or so to continue funding a year of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If you add in the war money and the bits and pieces of national security spending in other departments’ budgets, you begin closing in on the real figure for defense spending, which is close to $1 trillion for the fiscal year that will begin this October and end on September 30, 2009.

Much of that, like all of President Bush’s war spending for the last seven years, will be deficit spending. Washington will sell bonds to foreign nations such as China in a continuing Ponzi scheme, assuming that the foreigners haven’t noticed by then that the dollar is sinking like the Titanic and our economy is in the toilet.

We might hope that our representatives in Congress, who have to pass this expensive monstrosity of a bill, would hold it up to the light and see how much of our money is being poured down a rat-hole. But of course that’s much too much to expect of those courageous folks in an election year - or any year, for that matter.

Pentagon procurement spending, according to the experts, is so totally out of control that no one even attempts to separate the good and necessary weapons programs from the bad, useless and even harmful ones. When money gets tight, the brilliant thinkers in the five-sided puzzle palace even starve good programs to feed bad ones.

Under the Bush administration, defense spending has skyrocketed since 2001, but the money hasn’t been spent wisely. With a recession looming, or already here, and the national debt heading north of $10 trillion, the next president and Congress may want to give serious thought to whether we can afford to go on spending like a drunken sailor on a defense establishment that’s financed like Enron and managed like General Motors.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/04/7470/

[bemildred]

1. Actually, General Motors is run a good deal better than the Pentagon. nt

[Demeter]

2. Yeah, They Managed To Foist Off GMAC on Cerebus!

How far the arrogant have fallen!

[bemildred]

4. Hey, I didn't say it was run well. nt

[katty]

3. as bad a GM is, it's run better than the Pentagon-although

same top-down, rigid, caste system, everyone (except chosen few) on a 'need to know nothing' basis.

[Hissyspit]

5. k&r