A new report has uncovered the disgusting pipeline between the Pentagon and defense contractors – where the Pentagon sends TRILLIONS of dollars worth of contracts to these companies in exchange for getting lucrative jobs for themselves. Then, grocery store chains used the pandemic to raise prices on everything, and those higher prices appear to be here to stay. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A new report has uncovered the disgusting pipeline between the Pentagon and defense contractors, where the Pentagon sends trillions of dollars worth of contracts to these companies in exchange for getting lucrative jobs for themselves. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins to talk to me about that. Wow. This is like lobbying on steroids. You take a top general in the country, maybe in the world, and you give them to this little contractor over here, and they’re supposed to be schooled up by that little contractor. Well, the little contractor is Raytheon, it’s all the huge, it’s all of the huge weapons manufacturers. And then that guy that you’ve sent over goes to the Department of Defense and gets trillions of dollars for those contractors. I mean, really? This is something that was put in place by Bill Clinton of all people.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And it’s really funny because a lot of times we talk about this revolving door between industry and government agencies, but this isn’t even a revolving door. It’s not something secretive. This is literally a government program. Okay. This is called the Secretary of Defense Executive Fellows Program. It is a documented thing that they do every year where they send about 20 of the top generals, the majors, the high ranking folks, and they send them off to the Boeings and Raytheons and Lockheed Martins for a year. And then those people come back and they tell the Pentagon what the contractor needs or what the contractor sees as the problems with the Pentagon itself. And every time, and this is a wonderful report by the Lever, which is by the way, just the best outlet out there right now.
Mike Papantonio: No question about it. If you’re not reading the Lever, you’re just not getting news. If you think you’re turning on MSNBC or CNN or ABC and getting the news there, you’re kidding yourself. Lever has got the news.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And so what they do is these people come back after spending a year at Raytheon and they say, well, Raytheon wants us, because now I work back at the Department of Defense, Raytheon wants us to contract them more. They want us to outsource all of our jobs over to Raytheon, and I think we should do it. Oh, and by the way, Raytheon needs more money. They’re not getting enough from you, even though we have sent over the last 20, 30 years, $7 trillion to these contractors.
Mike Papantonio: To contractors, yeah. Now it’s not just weapons contractors. It’s information contractors.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, tech companies.
Mike Papantonio: Tech companies, all kinds of subcontractors, contractors that the Department of Defense sends these trillions of dollars to. I mean, it is so obvious. The general goes over there. He does the bidding for that little company, and then everybody sits when he’s making his presentation like, oh, wow. That sounds objective. Hell, there’s nothing objective about it. That general ends up getting a job at the end of the day for Raytheon. It’s the worst system. And look, not only that, but they’re dealing with companies like, well, what is it? L3Harris Technologies. That’s one of the big ones. $22 million they had to pay because of false claims to the Department of Defense. They, arms trafficking in 2021. And so, Lockheed Martin, $18 million to resolve multiple allegations of fraudulent government contracts. These are the people that these generals are going to be sent to by the, they’re working through the Pentagon. Pratt & Whitney, $52 million for defective jet engines, that are still getting money from the government. Enron, how about that one? How about Enron? We sent one of our generals to Enron, and we all know the story about Enron.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: But the point is, it still is happening. It’s something that came up, what was it, under Bill Clinton.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. 1995 I think is when it began.
Mike Papantonio: 1995.
Farron Cousins: And this is comical, right? This is something you would see in a bad movie, lazy plot. Oh, okay, we’re sending our people over there. That’s not creative. But it’s real life. This is actually happening. And these generals and military brass that go to these companies and come back, every time the report says, every time they say, my guys over here need more money. We’ve really gotta come through for them. So half of the Pentagon budget every year, the $900 billion we’re at now, half of it goes straight to defense contractors. And that’s still not enough for them. They want more than $450 billion a year and they’re gonna keep getting it. This program is not stopping. We’re gonna keep feeding them. They love all these global conflicts we’ve got right now. They’re making money hand over fist and this is what’s driving it. This right here.
Mike Papantonio: There are more multi, multimillion dollar mansions around the DC area that are built by weapons contractors than any time in American history, right now.
The cost of groceries in America is out of control and a new report says the prices can no longer be blamed on inflation or supply chain issues. It’s all due to corporate greed. Grocery store chains used the pandemic to raise prices on everything and those higher prices are here to stay. Now what’s so interesting about this, when I was reading this story, I thought about you because you were doing some of the first stories, I remember when we were saying, these prices go crazy, where you said, this is here to stay. They’ve used the pandemic as this big fraud and they’re here to stay. Pick the story up for me, because you were early on in this story. I remember that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And listen, we had that period of super high inflation when we had the supply chain issues. So yeah, that was market trying to fix itself and it never does a good job of it. And while that happens, while inflation hits 10% on prices, the corporations come in and say, okay, well we gotta raise ’em 10%, but what if we raise ’em 20%? Because eventually that first 10% from inflation does go away. But that second 10% never does. That becomes the new base price. So they, the corporations that do this, their profits are already up that 10% on every good. But consumers think, oh, well the price came down because it was $3 last week, but now it’s $2 and 70 cents. Well, it should be $2. You’re getting screwed out of that extra 70 cents.
Mike Papantonio: They learned from the healthcare story, didn’t they?
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: They learned from the healthcare story. And now we’re seeing grocery prizes five times the inflation rate, where you’ve got families that are working two or three jobs and you can have price control mandates. But really, the economists are saying, it’s basically, it is some activity by the corporations, but we have an inflation problem that’s here to stay, period, until something dramatic happens. Add that, this greed, I don’t know how people even buy eggs and milk anymore. It’s that bad.
Farron Cousins: Right. If it were just inflation, that would be difficult enough, but it would be manageable to a degree. With that price gouging that’s coming on top of that, that as you said, is far more than inflation could ever dream of being, that’s what’s really killing these people because we know these grocery store CEOs every year, they’re pocketing tens of millions of dollars because we’re doing such a good job of making sure this single mother can’t feed her kids because we’re stealing extra money from her, for her eggs and milk.
Mike Papantonio: How about the argument where you hear ’em, well, if we can get bigger? Okay. If Walmart or whoever, if we can just get bigger and more of a conglomerate, we can pass the savings onto you. That story. You hear that all the time. It’s nonsense. It’s just ridiculous. It sounds good. Yeah, they get bigger. Gee, I guess the economy of scale, they can give us better prices, right. Just the opposite is taking place.
Farron Cousins: Well, and it used to be, you had your, typically in a state you would have your grocery stores that you wouldn’t see in any other state. Publix originally was only a Florida thing. Now it’s all over the country. Same thing with Kroger’s or Albertsons.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: You used to have your Winn-Dixie’s and your Food Worlds and all these options and slowly they’ve all been consolidated. So that’s all you see. It’s homogenous across huge swaths of the country because we don’t have your little local grocers anymore or maybe a grocery that owns two or three stores in the state. They have been snatched up by these, by the Walmarts and your Kroger’s and all these folks.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
