Russia Specialist David Kerans: The West Is Trying to Drive a Wedge Between Russia and Eastern Europe — Victor Olevich interviews David Kerans

The deeper question is why the US has continued to target Russia beyond the West’s victory in the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And here we have to speak openly about the corruption of the US political and economic system over the last few decades, and how it has hijacked foreign policy to serve the interests of a narrow elite, not the nation as a whole.

Corruption has blossomed exponentially in the US over the last generation. For the most part, we are talking about “corruption, American-style”, as economist Joseph Stiglitz called it. In contrast to most other countries, where vultures pay off officials to look the other way, powerful people in America find ways to suborn legislatures into arranging laws and regulations to cater to their interests. For example. the financial crisis of 2008 stemmed largely from the manipulation and twisting of regulations to allow financial elites to enrich themselves beyond all measure – and crash the economy in the process.

Corruption has also flourished in the US defense sector, but here, I’m afraid, it has been more primitive. Consider first the mushrooming of military spending. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq served as an excuse to inflate the defense budget by 44 percent over the first decade of the century, adjusted for inflation. The base defense budget for the decade was $5.9 trillion. Meanwhile, monitoring and control of these funds are shamefully weak. Already in 2001, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that the Pentagon could not track $2.3 trillion in expenditures made over many previous years. And as budget allocations increased thanks to the wars, waste and misappropriation seem to have accelerated. Thus, we know that in 2005 both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Office of Management and Budget singled out the Pentagon for being particularly lax in managing its money. And figures made available in 2009 showed an astonishing $300 billion in research cost overruns for 96 ongoing weapons programs. Further, the scale of the overruns had jumped sharply, from an average of 27 percent in 2001 to 42 percent in 2008.

The Pentagon’s response to evident mismanagement on an enormous scale was telling: the Department of Defense reduced audits of its contracts with equipment and service providers, inviting ever more rampant abuse, in the form of overpricing-plus-kickback schemes. By 2010, the value of non-competitively sourced contracts had nearly tripled from 2001, to $140 billion. The percentage of non-competitive contracts in the military sector finds no parallel elsewhere in US government. And, not surprisingly, the officials dispensing these contracts reap rewards on leaving government service for private industry. The number of Pentagon functionaries leaving through the “revolving door” has doubled since the 1990s.

Congress is aware of the escalating waste and malfeasance in the defense sector, and it could take steps to clean the sector up. A model is at hand, namely the experience of the US Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, popularly known as the Truman Committee, which functioned from 1941 to 1948. the Truman Committee genuinely rooted out corruption and war profiteering, and during the mid-2000s, a number of Senators agitated openly for establishment of a similar effort. But the Bush administration actively resisted this proposal, and it got little support in Congress. This raises another question, of course: what is to explain Congress’s disinterest in monitoring the use of the funds it sends to the defense sector? The answer is not merely payoffs, campaign donations, and revolving door employment offers, but also the structural dependency of the economies of a large minority of congressional districts on military projects. As researcher Rebecca Thorpe outlines in a recent book, The American Warfare State, the US made a conscious effort from the end of the Second World War to broaden the geographical apportionment of defense sector contracts. In consequence, large numbers of districts depend heavily to this day on the defense sector. A large minority of congressmen, therefore, are predisposed to vote up defense allocations at every opportunity.

So the upshot is that prodigious amounts of defense sector money are sloshing around Washington, which would suffice all by itself to tilt America’s foreign policy posture towards confrontation with real or imagined enemies. Combine this with a large and intractable constituency in Congress for ever increasing military spending, and you get a system geared to projecting power beyond its borders. It is a system which does not serve the needs of the American people or the US economy. It is also a system that needs enemies, and Russia is a primary legacy candidate.

Again, follow the money.

Russia Insider

Russia Specialist David Kerans: The West Is Trying to Drive a Wedge Between Russia and Eastern Europe

Victor Olevich interviews David Kerans