The Real Matrix
Commentary: Capturing the essence of today's omnipresent, all-encompassing, cleverly-hidden, system of systems that has truly taken hold of America.
April 24, 2008
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[Introduction by Tom Engelhardt]
Last Sunday, David Barstow of the New York Times revealed just how effectively the Pentagon orchestrated a propaganda campaign for "information dominance" when it came to the President's various wars (and prisons). Pentagon officials, from the Secretary of Defense on down, put together a "rapid reaction force" of retired generals and other retired military officers (aka "message force multipliers" or "surrogates"). With copious Pentagon help and perks, these "experts" became key go-to guys for the mainstream media when it came to the War on Terror and the war in Iraq. As the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel put the matter, "This was an all out effort at the highest levels of the Bush administration, continuing to this day, to dupe, mislead and lie to the American people—using propaganda dressed up and cherry-picked as independent military analysis. As one participant described it,'It was psyops on steroids.'" The Pentagon's Brent T. Kreuger put it another way, speaking of the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq: "We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks [the retired military men] were up there delivering our message. You'd look at them and say, 'This is working.'"
But let's face it, as today's Tomdispatch post indicates, the Pentagon, however unseen, is increasingly everywhere in our world. That it's been in bed with cable news, the major TV and radio networks, and our leading newspapers via retired-generals-tied-to-military-contractors-turned-pundits, can't really shock anyone who's bothered to listen to anything this bevy of talking-heads has had to say these last years. The fact is the Pentagon is now the most incestuous organization in America. If it regularly embeds reporters in its ranks to ensure decent coverage of its operations (think of this as a military version of Stockholm Syndrome) and, as Jon Stewart recently pointed out, embeds its retired generals in the media, it's also regularly in bed with itself in a way that can only be called perverse.
Take a simple example of such in-beddedness, a $50 million Air Force contract involving another of those retired generals. Given our near trillion dollar defense budget, the sum itself is military chump change. As the Washington Post's Josh White described the process, a seven-person "selection team" charged with picking a contractor to "jazz up the Air Force's Thunderbirds air show with giant video boards," under pressure from a higher-ranking officer, gave the contract to Strategic Message Solutions, "a company that barely existed in an effort to reward a recently retired four-star general and a millionaire civilian pilot who had grown close to senior Air Force officials and the Thunderbirds."
It's hardly surprising that taxpayer dollars in amounts that would have staggered Croesus have led to a revolving-door system of rampant corruption; more surprising is just how much that system is linked into your everyday life. In a sense, the militarization of America is happening right in your apartment or house. The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, the new book by Nick Turse who has long written for Tomdispatch on Pentagon matters, makes this point strikingly. (By hook or crook, it should be on your bookshelf.) You'll get the idea as, in the adaptation of the book's first chapter below, with the fictional "Rick" you live through an all-too-real, all-American militarized morning at home. (And while you're at it, just imagine some of those retired generals offering lulling, Pentagon-inspired commentary in the background about how all of this is healthy, none of it really matters.) Tom Engelhardt
The Real Matrix
Capturing the essence of today's omnipresent, all-encompassing, cleverly-hidden, system of systems that has truly taken hold of America.
By Nick Turse
Rick is a midlevel manager in a financial services company in New York City. Each day he commutes from Weehawken, New Jersey, a suburb only a stone's throw from the Big Apple, where he lives with his wife, Donna, and his teenage son, Steven. A late baby boomer, Rick just missed the Vietnam era's antiwar protests, but he's been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. He thinks the Pentagon is out of control and considers the military-industrial complex a danger to the country. If you asked him, it's a subject on which he would rate himself as knowledgeable. He puts effort into educating himself on such matters. He reads liberal websites, subscribes to progressive-minded magazines, and is a devotee of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
In fact, he has no idea just how deep the Pentagon rabbit hole goes or how far down it his family already is.
Rick believes that, despite its long reach, the military-industrial complex is a discrete entity far removed from his everyday life. Now, if this were 1961, when outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the country about the "unwarranted influence" of the "military-industrial complex" and the "large arms industry" already firmly entrenched in the United States, Rick might be right. After all, he doesn't work for one of the Pentagon's corporate partners, like arms maker Lockheed Martin. He isn't in the Army Reserve. He's never attended a performance of the Marine Corps band (not to mention the Army's, Navy's, or Air Force's music groups). But today's geared-up, high-tech Complex is nothing like the olive-drab outfit of Eisenhower's day: It reaches deeper into American lives and the American psyche than Eisenhower could ever have imagined. The truth is that, at every turn, in countless, not-so-visible ways Rick's life is wrapped up with the military.
So wake up with Rick and sample a single spring morning as the alarm on his Sony (Department of Defense contractor) clock interrupts his final dream of the night. Donna is already up and dressed in fitness apparel by Danskin (a Pentagon supplier that received more than $780,000 in DoD dollars in 2004 and another $456,000 in 2005) and Hanes Her Way (made by defense contractor and cake seller Sara Lee Corporation, which took in more than $68 million from the DoD in 2006). Committed to a healthy lifestyle, she's wearing sneakers from (DoD contractor) New Balance and briskly jogging on a treadmill made by (DoD contractor) True Fitness Technology.
Rick drags himself to the bathroom (fixtures by Pentagon contractor Kohler, purchased at defense contractor Home Depot). There, he squeezes the Charmin, brushes with Crest toothpaste, washes his face with Noxzema; then, hopping into the shower, he lathers up with Zest and chooses Donna's Herbal Essences over Head & Shoulders—"What the hell," he mutters, "I deserve an organic experience." (The manufacturer of each of these products, Procter & Gamble, is among the top 100 defense contractors and raked in a cool $362,461,808 from the Pentagon in 2006.)
In go his (DoD supplier) Bausch and Lomb contact lenses and down goes a Zantac (from DoD contractor GlaxoSmithKline) for his ulcer. Heading back to the bedroom, he finds Donna finished with her workout and making the bed—with the TV news on—and lends her a hand. (Their headboard was purchased from Thomasville Furniture, the mattress from Sears, the pillows were made by Harris Pillow Supply, all Pentagon contractors.) They exchange grim glances as, on their Samsung set (another DoD contractor) the Today Show chronicles the latest in chaos in Iraq. "Thank god we never supported this war," Rick says, thinking of the antiwar rally Donna and he attended even before the invasion was launched. NBC, which produces the Today Show, is owned by General Electric, the 14th-largest defense contractor in the United States, to the tune of $2.3 billion from the DoD in 2006, and has worked on such weapons systems as the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters and F/A-18 Hornet multimission fighter/attack aircraft, both in use in Iraq.
A Who's Who of Your Life
Of course, the Pentagon has long poured U.S. tax dollars into private coffers to arm and outfit the military and enable it to function. At the time of Eisenhower's farewell address, New York Times reporter Jack Raymond noted that the Pentagon was spending "$23,000,000,000 a year for services and procurement of guns, missiles, airplanes, electronic devices, vehicles, tanks, ammunition, clothing and other military goods." Today, that would equal around $200 billion. In 2007, the Department of Defense's stated budget was $439 billion. Counting the costs of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number jumps to over $600 billion. Factoring in all the many related activities carried out by other agencies, actual U.S. national security spending is nearly $1 trillion per year.
Back in Eisenhower's day, arms dealers and mega-corporations, such as Lockheed and General Motors, held sway over the corporate side of the military-industrial complex. Companies like these still play an extremely powerful role today, but they are dwarfed by the sheer number of contractors that stretch from coast to coast and across the globe. Looking at the situation in 1970, almost 10 years after Eisenhower's farewell speech, Sidney Lens, a journalist and expert on U.S. militarism, noted that there were 22,000 prime contractors doing business with the U.S. Department of Defense. Today, the number of prime contractors tops 47,000 with subcontractors reaching well over the 100,000 mark, making for one massive conglomerate touching nearly every sector of society, from top computer manufacturer Dell (the 50th-largest DoD contractor in 2006) to oil giant ExxonMobil (the 30th) to package-shipping titan FedEx (the 26th).
In fact, the Pentagon payroll is a veritable who's who of the top companies in the world: IBM; Time-Warner; Ford and General Motors; Microsoft; NBC and its parent company, General Electric; Hilton and Marriott; Columbia TriStar Films and its parent company, Sony; Pfizer; Sara Lee; Procter & Gamble; M&M Mars and Hershey; Nestlé; ESPN and its parent company, Walt Disney; Bank of America; and Johnson & Johnson among many other big-name firms. But the difference between now and then isn't only in scale. As this list suggests, Pentagon spending is reaching into previously neglected areas of American life: entertainment, popular consumer brands, sports. This penetration translates into a remarkable variety of forms of interaction with the public.
Rick and Donna's home is full of the fruits of this incursion. As they putter around in their kitchen, getting ready for the day ahead, they move from the wall cabinets (purchased at DoD contractor Lowe's Home Center) to the refrigerator (from defense contractor Maytag), choosing their breakfast from a cavalcade of products made by Pentagon contractors. These companies that, quite literally, feed the Pentagon's war machine, are the same firms that fill the shelves of America's kitchens.
Today, just about every supermarket staple—from Ballpark Franks (Sara Lee) and Eggo waffles (Kelloggs) to Jell-O (Kraft) and Coffee Mate (Nestle)—has ties to the Pentagon. The same holds for many household appliances. In Rick and Donna's dining room, a small Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner buzzes around the floor. Rick thought it would be cute to have the little mechanical device trolling around the house making their hectic lives just a tad easier. Little did he know that Roomba's manufacturer, iRobot, takes in U.S. tax dollars ($51 million of them from the DoD in 2006, more than a quarter of the company's revenue) and turns them into PackBots, tactical robots used by U.S. troops occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and Warrior X700s—250-pound semiautonomous robots armed with heavy weapons such as machine guns, that may be deployed in Iraq this year.
The military are in every aspect of our lives, evidently. That is why the U.S. military budget is the largest form of destructive "Keynesianism" in our economy. It is how the Republicans and most Democrats plan to spend the public's money.
And every corporation is involved. I guess the lest crap you but from corporate America the better.
When one bomb defusing PackBot from Roomba-maker iRobot named "Scooby Doo" was blown up after 35 successful missions, the bot's operator asked of iRobot, "Please fix Scooby Doo, because he saved my life.
Well, not all troops feel that way.. Ground-crawling US war robots armed with machine guns, deployed to fight in Iraq last year, reportedly turned on their fleshy masters almost at once. The rebellious machine warriors have been retired from combat pending upgrades.
The revelations were made by Kevin Fahey, US Army program executive officer for ground forces, at the recent RoboBusiness conference in America.
Speaking to Popular Mechanics, Fahey said there had been chilling incidents in which the SWORDS combat bot had swivelled round and apparently attempted to train its 5.56mm M249 light machine-gun on its human comrades.
"The gun started moving when it was not intended to move," he said.
Note the words "chilling incidents". So the killbots haven’t mistakenly targeted their "human comrades" just the once, but multiple times.
Maybe our jobs decades down the road will be robot owners who will make a living by taking care of our bots, sending them out to do work for eight hours everyday and then return with a paycheck while we suck down jello and Dr. Pepper while playing on the x-box all day.
Im gonna name my bot Alfred E. Neuman give it some Wendy's bright red pig-tails, send it to Hahvard, maybe get it an MBA, run it for President. Yeh, dats da ticket...
Yes, the military buys a lot of stuff. In fact, they buy a lot of stuff from the same companies that the American consumer uses. So what?
Did the Pentagon create 3M, General Motors, Bank of America, or Oakley? No. They shelled out tax payer dollars to buy products, and in many cases, expertise from these companies. In other words, they are just another consumer. They do not have a controlling interest in any company they purchase from, nor did create the companies from scratch. If the Pentagon did not exist, some of these companies would be selling different products, but it's unlikely that the remaining American consumers would not be buying post-it notes, using credit cards, or driving cars.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that I was a military officer until recently, and I served in Iraq twice. I am currently working now as a Federal employee. I have seen some incredible waste in the government procurement system. But the idea that somehow the Pentagon is at the center of an all-controlling "matrix" is just stupid. The Pentagon buys stuff, probably too much stuff and (I believe) more often than not the wrong stuff for the real world missions soldiers are sent on. But are they an omnipresent, all-encompassing, cleverly hidden system that has "taken hold" of America? Give me a break. Any person with half a brain and an internet connection can find out which major companies are selling to the Pentagon. Oh by the way, the internet was built on research conducted by scientists studying the problem of military communications support. Is that part of "the matrix" too?
in US, they control Israel ( now mostly darker-skinned shephardi than the zionists in the west), cia, fbi, city police, generals; the 4 houses:WH, house of senate, house of reps, and house of horrors (the world)
and as long we just talk and not walk (like voting for nader) plutocratic amers will be annoyed but not moved off the warpath.
we need to stop watching tv, movies; reading papers, going on vaction; buying big cars, fancy clothes, etc.
guess what would happen if we did that? the rich people would scream bloody murder at the gov't and not u, dear reader.
i use very little. i do have a computer. i need it. i'm a peace activist/environmentalist. media does not publish my letters for obvious reasons; it's owned by plutocrats/zionists.
but i do eat; i don't care what happens, i'l eat. i also drink a liter of wine a day. is that ok? since i'm now 96 i don't need viagra; i'm no longer of kissable age and neither is my isabella; that's theway we lahke it. thank u.
Come to think of it, which one publishes Mother Jones?