SPOTLIGHT EMAIL NEWSLETTER #22
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Who Benefits From War With Yugoslavia?
Taxpayers can expect another huge transfer of wealth from their wallets to
the coffers of the military-industrial complex.
EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPOTLIGHT
By Warren Hough
The Clinton administration's air wars against Yugoslavia and Iraq are losing
support everywhere, except in one community: The consortium of U.S. military
contractors, who are reaping a bonanza of windfall profits from the bloodshed.
"Giant defense corporations such as Raytheon have been furiously lobbying
Congress against what they call 'crippling cutbacks' in their share of the
budget," says Dr. Vanessa Hughessen, an arms-control scholar at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
At a reported $49 billion, the Pentagon's current procurement outlays are
"not even a shadow" of the fat Reagan years when similar programs consumed
more than $110 billion annually (in today's dollar) Raytheon President
William H. Swanson complained last December.
As a result, Raytheon's reported profits dropped by a whopping 95 percent in
the third quarter of l998 over the same period in the previous year, Swanson
revealed.
But by March of this year, the "merchants of death" were in the money again,
Wall Street analysts reported.
Raytheon CEO Swanson confirmed the good news. In April, he announced that
Raytheon was suddenly looking at an "avalanche" of new defense orders worth
almost $20 billion for 1999-2000.
The slumping stock of the troubled defense contractor soared rapidly on
such "positive developments," nearly doubling to an all-time high of $52 per
share last month.
Raytheon is the primary supplier of Tomahawk cruise missiles. Land-based
Tomahawks cost between $750,000 and $900,00 each. The Navy's version comes
in at about $1 million. But the air-launched cruise missiles are $2 million
apiece-a steep jump in cost that is typical of all advanced armaments,
defense analysts say.
The U.S. air war against Yugoslavia has expended an officially reported $17
million worth of cruise missiles every day since it began, sources have
confirmed.
Other mammoth military contractors are also anticipating a boom.
Lockheed-Martin says that in the wake of the Balkans crisis, funding for its
next-generation tactical fighter, the YF-22, is "just about assured."
This high-tech aircraft will be priced at $165 million each, for total
production budget of some $30 billion over the coming decade.
The Navy has been told by congressional supporters to go ahead with plans to
buy as many as 1,000 advanced F/A-18 fighter-bombers from Boeing. The total
budget, projected well into the next century, is now estimated at $81 billion.
"And these numbers are, of course, what the Pentagon charitably calls
'conservative estimates,' " warned Dr. Hughessen. "I would just call them
lies. We all know the real cost is bound to run much higher."
The Clinton administration says it will pay for its air wars from the
vaunted "budget surplus."
"This is the same 'surplus', largely a product of accounting legerdemain,
that the politicians promised us for shoring up Social Security and cutting
taxes," says financial writer Andrea Kellerman.
Clinton Critic's Plane Goes Down
The senator who ran on a platform of "God, guns and guts," showed plenty of
the latter during a recent scare.
EXCLUSIVE TO THE SPOTLIGHT
By FRED LINGEL
One of President Clinton's most vocal critics in the Senate was forced to
make an emergency landing in an Oklahoma airport, on May 9 after the
propeller on his single-prop airplane flew off.
According to reports, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) took off from Ketchum,
Okla., where he keeps his 1979 Grumman Tiger. He was in the air for 10
minutes before he noticed "a vibration."
Inhofe told an Associated Press reporter he heard a pop and noticed that the
propeller had fallen off. Inhofe then glided the plane another eight miles
without the propeller before landing unharmed at Claremore Airport.
G.W. Curtis, a former high school classmate of the senator's, found the
propeller four miles from the airport on a country road and returned it to him.
Inhofe, who has been flying for 41 years and is a commercially rated pilot,
was traveling from northeastern Oklahoma to Oklahoma City to meet Clinton on
a tour of tornado-damaged sites in Oklahoma.
Inhofe's Press Secretary Gary Hoistma told The SPOTLIGHT: "The FBI and NTSB
are looking into it-it's unusual for a propeller to fall off of a plane."
Inhofe has been a stalwart critic of Clinton. During Clinton's impeachment
trial in the Senate, Inhofe criticized the GOP for "whimping out" when it
appeared his colleagues were backtracking in the proceedings.
After a recent trip to Albania, where he spent time with U.S. troops, Inhofe
issued a press release critical of the Clinton administration's policy in
the Balkans. He said he was concerned that Clinton's policy was an example
of "mission creep" which would lead to a drawn-out and expensive war.
"The only way to stop U.S. ground troops from getting involved in a Kosovo
quagmire is for the American people to wake up and realize that we are
getting involved in a war where we don't have a vital national security
interest," Inhofe said.
Undaunted by the incident, Inhofe scolded the White House in a May 14, press
statement on the China cover-up, charging that the Clinton administration
willfully withheld critical information about China's theft of secret
nuclear technology from Congress.
"The fact that the Clinton administration, for political reasons,
deliberately kept vital information about it from Congress for more than
three years is a scandal of gigantic proportions," Inhofe said.
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