Dave Lindorff on Pentagon Fraud

This week on CounterSpin: Early this year, Congress approved a budget of some $700 billion for the Department of Defense, more than the Trump administration even requested. Corporate media, for whom proposals like free college tuition or universal healthcare are all about the price tag, didn’t even blink. The Pentagon budget was “a rare act of bipartisanship,” the New York Times told readers, that “sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power.” That article had three sources—two approving state officials and a rep from a thinktank funded by Defense contractors, who said the US military is underfunded. The Times didn’t find it relevant that the US already spent more on “defense” than the next eight countries combined, six of whom are US allies—and the idea of standing that $700 billion alongside the estimate, of the UN and others, that it would cost just $30 billion per year to end world hunger—well, don’t be silly.

But if serious people are not supposed to consider Pentagon spending in any sort of context, or conversation about priorities, can we at least ask why it’s not just hard, but impossible, to find out how much the Pentagon spends and on what? Elite media reception of new research in that arena suggests they’d just as soon keep the whole thing under wraps—while reserving their right to entertain complaints about food stamps, however.

We’ll talk about Pentagon accounting—and accountability—with investigative reporter Dave Lindorff, author of that new expose, exclusive to The Nation magazine and the cover story in their new print edition. Lindorff is a veteran investigative reporter and author, and a founding member of the news collective This Can’t Be Happening.

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