the pentagon syndrome that something sick about u s military spending is certainly not keeping anyone safe this week why we the public spend billions on bad technology and what happens to service people who speak up then a piece economy what might gives three decades ago revelations that the u s military was paying six hundred and forty dollars for an aircraft toilet seat ignited while the media coverage and public outrage but no avail last year the air force paid ten one thousand dollars for a toilet seat cover just to cover our spiraling military budgets don't necessarily make for better defense but they do keep growing meanwhile the system is putting service people's lives at risk more often than not here to discuss how this mad military money machine or pentagon virus works i have pam campus political strategist and veteran of more than a decade in the u s air force phyllis bennis a fellow at the institute  policy studies who directs the new internationalism project there and joining us from ireland via skype my uncle andrew coburn washington editor of harper's magazine and the author of the article that sparked this conversation the military industrial virus it's a piece you will really want to check out andrew let me start with you your story drew on decades of your research you surprised by the kind of drop off in public outrage about pentagon spending well a little although you know things have gone downhill in seventy areas so much that i suppose i mean you a disappointment and depression on would have legs phyllis you you work on the hill as part of your work with the institute for policy studies you talk to both democrats and republicans you bring these sorts of subjects to their attention is andrew right on my right is there a kind of in your men that's happened if that's a word i think that what's much more important than the immediate response of people on the hill of any party is what happens in social movements i think that's how we change things and it is difficult i mean i think the ironically the ten thousand dollars toilet seat is the least of it the real issue is that zero dollars fifty four cents out of every discretionary federal dollar goes right to the military and that's why there's not enough money in our budget when we are the richest country that ever existed in the world in the history of the world that's why there isn't money available at all times for education and health care and jobs and infrastructure and green technology and all these things it's because of the diversion to the military even know how much we're spending on the military let me just bring pam in on this that do we actually know what the numbers are as you mentioned i served after nine hundred and eleven i served in a time where i think increasingly there's this big elephant in the room where we call ourselves the most powerful military in the world and yet we don't see ourselves being functional we even see ourselves as a very mismanaged and lacking in an organization that's just lacking in transparency and that is run like a corporation  and so i think one of the interesting parts of the article was the mention of whistleblowers what is the protections for people that are going to say hey this isn't working something here smells like fraud waste abuse we have a plague of fraud waste abuse and the people whose job it is to  bring checks and balances are not only complicit the military investigates itself and politicians have an investment and an incentive in raising up a war economy makes a very good point in his piece phyllis  when he says you know every other kind of technology has reduced in price from your every piece of consumer technology it isn't inevitable that the price and leslie inflates not at all and i think that is a huge issue we do know some  numbers the folks at my instituted i p s have worked with the people at brown university at the white an institute there to track the cost and one of the numbers just one this is the approximation of the cost of the military from two thousand and one from and eleven moment until two thousand and eighteen is five dollars trillion dollars now that doesn't include a whole bunch of stuff but it includes the the basics of the pentagon and the wars and that one includes some not all of the of the veterans costs looking ahead to what we've already committed to because so much of these wars were paid for with a credit card essentially so that's a number that i think most of us can't even fathom but i think that what we do have to look at is that we know that these wars have cost enormous amounts of not only money but lives the environment has paid a huge cost cost in human rights cost in international law i would just disagree with andrew on one thing which is this notion that it's not a very you know it's not a very strong military it's not a very good military we have killed hundreds of thousands of people in these wars and that can't be left out i don't think you have and i'm sure he would like i'm sure you know that but he didn't say it and so i think it is a context when you were serving and you were in the air force were you aware of the flaws i mean what was it like one of the most glaring pieces of my experience is how this mismanagement and corruption has led to brain drain i have seen the best leaders leave the military because it is so obvious they're running jokes about how we can't even get our computers to work great madison cell two years ago was very angry that we spent twenty eight million dollars on camouflage new uniforms i mean i can't even remember how many times we switched uniforms and these uniforms these most recent uniforms actually had a higher propensity of getting a shot at you know how so so explain that they call them a flush so they're like the camouflage was not can grew it with the environment that we were in simple things like this to me and i think to many folks in the community we see that we are flooded with money which has made us not really have a responsibility and the other really big point that i would add to andrew's piece is how we put so much stake on weapons systems and military equipment and people also are government property and it's fascinating to me i mean we can't have this conversation without also naming that the department of defense is making all of these cases for more weapons systems and yet we can't even take care of our people right saying that transgender health care for service members is too costly and so this is leading to a brain drain this is leading to  internally questions about is this a legitimate service and what are we doing here so if you were in the service and you said somebody and you're like we were in the wrong colors is that someone you go to like what happens how do you how do you even blow we have a missing conflation of listening to high ranking officers who have a stake in not necessarily and also don't have a vision or an understanding of what's happening on the ground we listen to it listed troops right politicians often will listen to generals  but you very seldom see the enlisted ranks who are experiencing the often traumatic and problematic operational costs to come back to you for a minute andrew on this question of the the pipeline of information and who has what is not security it is not defense it's not keeping even our own service people alive that we people all over the country watching the saying well that's not fat really is it really will just about money make a well i mean give me give you an least the post world war two period where you have the production of military stuff whether it's shipyards or planes or bombs or bullets or guns all of this stuff is produced in an extraordinarily in efficient way so instead of doing it all in one place where you you know you're not wasting time and money and energy and fuel and all those things sending pieces around the world and that sort of thing you have exactly that so you have for every major  military project for every new plane that comes off the board the f thirty five is everyone's favorite because it's so obviously not either what the pentagon wants or needs or works it doesn't work at all you have a situation where almost every military story almost every congressional district has some jobs producing some widget that become part of this and as a result members of congress even those who believe that the military budget is way too high who believe that the wars are wrong they're going to be very reluctant and in most cases simply will not vote against it because it's jobs at the same time if we look at this question of the you know if you look at boys and toys in the military as they like to say before there were significant numbers of women in the military that the toys get way more money and right now we're looking at a situation as recently as two thousand and seventeen just two years ago when these were the last figures we had twenty three thousand low ranking members of the service were making so little money that their families qualify for food stamps is out and it's a significant difference on the democratic side of the well that's what's changing now traditionally there hasn't been very much there were differences where individual members who tended to be democrats would be opposed to specific wars you would have anti war democrats but almost inevitably not always there were some exceptions but never enough to make a real difference there would never be enough people willing to vote against the military budgets what we're seeing now is that there's a whole new crop of people in congress led by the extraordinary mostly young mostly women of color who have come in the squad of about six who are taking the lead to challenge some of this military assumption that has been so unchallengable for so long and that's what gives us some hope that and the fact that at the level of civil society movements social movements mobilizing in a way we haven't seen so just recently a new coalition pulled together by public citizen called for cutting two hundred one billion dollars out of the military budget the poor people's campaign is calling for cutting three hundred and fifty billion dollars and what's important about those two is not just the amounts which are you know they're not chump change here these are serious cuts the group pulled together by public citizen has twenty different organizations that signed on to the coalition of those only half only ten are traditional peace groups the others are environmental justice organizations immigrant rights organizations fair taxation organizations all the groups that are coming to understand how the military budget is the biggest reasons not the only reason but it's the biggest reason why we don't have the money for a green new deal and for medicare for all and for jobs and for health care and all those things what role are veterans playing pam were you playing and you know even though as we've described how sort of see veterans of all different stripes military families with members who are still in the military who can't speak up for themselves organizing and getting more educated on the military industrial complex and on on like a big question that we're asking is which one of these presidential candidates who is taking contributions from defense contractors and the security corporations and interesting really and most importantly to me is the threats of the future we cannot shoot  right so we are ill positioned right now and this case that we keep making around lethality around fear of the unknown the global war on terror right it's it's a ruse to get us to open up our pocketbooks to keep kind of giving to this ghost that we're chasing when we know the thoughts of the future our climate change our cyber security our a slide into authoritarianism and and we see that by not tackling this militarism is seeping into our communities the militarization on the border the militarization of our police force these are things and i think veterans intimately who have been deployed who understand what security is and is not are rising up and saying that this does not make us safe and we need to have a bold vision of a prosperous future where we're looking at at truth and reconciliation right diplomacy st diplomacy at the top and diplomacy at the bottom transatlantic relationships  and so i see veterans not just here in the u s but for myself i'm working with the german counterparts who also understand that we need to shift our model andrew i want to come to you on the upside of what can change for the better and i want you to address that but i'm also super conscious of what is happening right now as we speak which is a expansion of one little conflicts that speak to me of just how dangerous it is that have so much stuff deployed in so many places if it's really just for the connections that we can't separate the green new deal from the military budget that we can't separate the need for public housing support from the military budget and when all of these movements together begin to look at all the ways in which we have to redirect the economy of this country taxing the rich taxing corporations and cutting the military budget dramatically so that's why the work of the poor people's campaign the work of veterans organizations like pam is talking about the work of the new coalitions that are coming together to focus on the military budget as a necessary component of working for a green new deal in medicare for all in free college education we're at a moment when big ideas are on the table in a way that they haven't been for a generation or more and every time it comes back to the question well that's a good idea about how you're gonna pay for it well here's part of the answer cut the military budget phyllis bennis you can find our article on the military budget and the green new deal at jac what is to be done after two decades opposing u s wars the women of the feisty activist group code pink have kicked off a campaign for what they're calling a peace economy i had a chance to talk with code pink co founder jodie evans at the ted women conference a few years ago here's some of what she said we started fifteen years ago a few weeks ago and we didn't really start an organization we came together in washington d c to called code pink as bush was framing the american people with his coat color coded terrorist alert orange red and yellow you know we thought that we would sit outside the white house and be rational and say this war is crazy and unconstitutional and illegal and it's going to open pandora's box and you don't want to do that it's going to cost way more than you're saying and it's wrong and fifteen years later it's worse than we could have ever imagined in iraq and around the world were now participated in like wars we have more bases and we had and more money's being spent on more out of your tax dollar and we need to really take on the whole war economy and grow local peace economies which has been really a wonderful way to spend the last couple of years and it showed up as we celebrated our fifteen years and went to different cities and how much more engaged our community is in their own community and then understanding you know what is a just transition and this work harmony which is oppressive and destructive and extractive and i call the piece economy the feminine economy because it is the caring sharing giving relational resilient economy without which none of us would be alive and the work on me is what drives us to death and it's extraction and oppression and struction so you know just kind of look at what you do in the day and what happens when you think when you're operating in your day out of separation and out of scarcity that's of our economy because we actually live connected in abundance so we actually have practices as we go local peace economy where each week we practice one of the things like time time or the work on a me just wants to use your time up what if you broke free of your time it's like a what if i give my time to the piece economy what does that look like what does it look like to give and to share and after a couple years of this i can promise you you're happier now one thing that everybody is happier shiny or more alive and really the work on to me is deafening it's deadening and it you know it takes away your creativity and we watch it all the time it could pink just in our own work how it's the natural thing like i need a result i need to be efficient i need to deliver and instead of like how do i do you know relationship with this person how do i step out of clicked of his i'm into relationship with my own community i think when i really came to the realization about the work on me it was global inequality global climate change and one dollar trillion dollars worth of weapons sold every year the only result historically has been fascism and i saw growing local peace economies as a way to address all of it because if you're relational if you've built trust if you're working together you can write out pretty much anything and if you look at the different cities that kind of our local peace economies even like look at asheville north carolina the unemployment stayed the same and in two thousand and eight houses were taken away from people you know when you demand relation ality and you own your own utilities when you've when you've pulled power back and you've not let everything be privatized you survive these situations that are going to definitely happen the congress and the white house are tough  i can't really go after them right now and the antiwar movement if we're going to build we have to have something that we can win out some lever we can paul well our schools our churches our cities our states our pension fans and our congress are all making a killing on killing so it's a way that everyone can engage there's some peace that you can engage in and engage in locally which is always a problem about war because it's so overwhelming and so complex the people just like i don't want to think about it it's not hit me yet but it's hitting us every day more and more and in our communities you know veterans veterans families please killings people are starting to recognize oh the war is home it has come home it plays out in so many ways it's plays out in policing is now thirty percent of some city budgets that we think that being violent is a way to solve anything has now part of our culture and it's part of our thinking and so we hope to like show different ways of yet capitalism is bad it's there i keep telling people when they're growing their local police economy they don't have to worry it's not going to fall apart too soon you we actually have time a bridge to where we can be growing the alternative it just takes our creativity it's the sense that war is always been or this is the only way we have to pray that that will st of all manufacturing jobs i mean if you stick with capitalism