Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?
Antuan Goodwin/CNET
William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, January 2011.
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you?? No?? Then you haven't been paying much attention.? Let me put it this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.
True, Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well.? After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history.? It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.? It's involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.
Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes the F-35 Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) -- and when it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.
A For-Profit Government-in-the-Making
If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin's sheer size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf. It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone.?
Not surprisingly, it's the top contributor to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described "#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress."
Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have facilities in 46 states, and the scale of its clout starts to become clearer.? While the bulk of its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has quite a track record when it comes to law-breaking: it ranks number one on the "contractor misconduct" database maintained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-DC-based watchdog group.?
How in the world did Lockheed Martin become more than just a military contractor?? Its first significant foray outside the world of weaponry came in the early 1990s when plain old Lockheed (not yet merged with Martin Marietta) bought Datacom Inc., a company specializing in providing services for state and city governments, and turned it into the foundation for a new business unit called Lockheed Information Management Services (IMS).? In turn, IMS managed to win contracts in 44 states and several foreign countries for tasks ranging from collecting parking fines and tolls to tracking down "deadbeat dads" and running "welfare to work" job-training programs. The result was a number of high profile failures, but hey, you can't do everything right, can you?
Under pressure from Wall Street to concentrate on its core business -- implements of destruction -- Lockheed Martin sold IMS in 2001.? By then, however, it had developed a taste for non-weapons work, especially when it came to data collection and processing.? So it turned to the federal government where it promptly racked up deals with the IRS, the Census Bureau, and the U.S. Postal Service, among other agencies.?
As a result, Lockheed Martin is now involved in nearly every interaction you have with the government. ?Paying your taxes?? Lockheed Martin is all over it.? The company is even creating a system that provides comprehensive data on every contact taxpayers have with the IRS from phone calls to face-to-face meetings.
Want to stand up and be counted by the U.S. Census?? Lockheed Martin will take care of it.?
The company runs three centers -- in Baltimore, Phoenix, and Jeffersonville, Indiana -- that processed up to 18 tractor-trailers full of mail per day at the height of the 2010 Census count.? For $500 million it is developing the Decennial Response Information Service (DRIS), which will collect and analyze information gathered from any source, from phone calls or the Internet to personal visits. According to Preston Waite, associate director of the Census, the DRIS will be a "big catch net, catching all the data that comes in no matter where it comes from."
Need to get a package across the country?? Lockheed Martin cameras will scan bar codes and recognize addresses, so your package can be sorted "without human intervention," as the company's web site puts it.
Plan on committing a crime?? Think twice.? Lockheed Martin is in charge of the FBI's Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a database of 55 million sets of fingerprints.?
The company also produces biometric identification devices that will know who you are by scanning your iris, recognizing your face, or coming up with novel ways of collecting your fingerprints or DNA.? As the company likes to say, it's in the business of making everyone's lives (and so personal data) an "open book," which is, of course, of great benefit to us all. "Thanks to biometric technology," the company proclaims, "people don't have to worry about forgetting a password or bringing multiple forms of identification.? Things just got a little easier."
Are you a New York City resident concerned about a "suspicious package" finding its way onto the subway platform?? Lockheed Martin tried to do something about that, too, thanks to a contract from the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to install 3,000 security cameras and motion sensors that would spot such packages, as well as the people carrying them, and notify the authorities.? Only problem: the cameras didn't work as advertised and the MTA axed Lockheed Martin and cancelled the $212 million contract.
Copyright 2011 CBS. All rights reserved. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
Have you noticed that Lockheed Martin, the giant weapons corporation, is shadowing you?? No?? Then you haven't been paying much attention.? Let me put it this way: If you have a life, Lockheed Martin is likely a part of it.
True, Lockheed Martin doesn't actually run the U.S. government, but sometimes it seems as if it might as well.? After all, it received $36 billion in government contracts in 2008 alone, more than any company in history.? It now does work for more than two dozen government agencies from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency.? It's involved in surveillance and information processing for the CIA, the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, the Census Bureau, and the Postal Service.
Oh, and Lockheed Martin has even helped train those friendly Transportation Security Administration agents who pat you down at the airport. Naturally, the company produces cluster bombs, designs nuclear weapons, and makes the F-35 Lightning (an overpriced, behind-schedule, underperforming combat aircraft that is slated to be bought by customers in more than a dozen countries) -- and when it comes to weaponry, that's just the start of a long list. In recent times, though, it's moved beyond anything usually associated with a weapons corporation and has been virtually running its own foreign policy, doing everything from hiring interrogators for U.S. overseas prisons (including at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.
A For-Profit Government-in-the-Making
If you want to feel a tad more intimidated, consider Lockheed Martin's sheer size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a "Lockheed Martin tax" of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf. It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone.?
Not surprisingly, it's the top contributor to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described "#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress."
Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have facilities in 46 states, and the scale of its clout starts to become clearer.? While the bulk of its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has quite a track record when it comes to law-breaking: it ranks number one on the "contractor misconduct" database maintained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-DC-based watchdog group.?
How in the world did Lockheed Martin become more than just a military contractor?? Its first significant foray outside the world of weaponry came in the early 1990s when plain old Lockheed (not yet merged with Martin Marietta) bought Datacom Inc., a company specializing in providing services for state and city governments, and turned it into the foundation for a new business unit called Lockheed Information Management Services (IMS).? In turn, IMS managed to win contracts in 44 states and several foreign countries for tasks ranging from collecting parking fines and tolls to tracking down "deadbeat dads" and running "welfare to work" job-training programs. The result was a number of high profile failures, but hey, you can't do everything right, can you?
Under pressure from Wall Street to concentrate on its core business -- implements of destruction -- Lockheed Martin sold IMS in 2001.? By then, however, it had developed a taste for non-weapons work, especially when it came to data collection and processing.? So it turned to the federal government where it promptly racked up deals with the IRS, the Census Bureau, and the U.S. Postal Service, among other agencies.?
As a result, Lockheed Martin is now involved in nearly every interaction you have with the government. ?Paying your taxes?? Lockheed Martin is all over it.? The company is even creating a system that provides comprehensive data on every contact taxpayers have with the IRS from phone calls to face-to-face meetings.
Want to stand up and be counted by the U.S. Census?? Lockheed Martin will take care of it.? The company runs three centers -- in Baltimore, Phoenix, and Jeffersonville, Indiana -- that processed up to 18 tractor-trailers full of mail per day at the height of the 2010 Census count.? For $500 million it is developing the Decennial Response Information Service (DRIS), which will collect and analyze information gathered from any source, from phone calls or the Internet to personal visits. According to Preston Waite, associate director of the Census, the DRIS will be a "big catch net, catching all the data that comes in no matter where it comes from."
Need to get a package across the country?? Lockheed Martin cameras will scan bar codes and recognize addresses, so your package can be sorted "without human intervention," as the company's web site puts it.
Plan on committing a crime?? Think twice.? Lockheed Martin is in charge of the FBI's Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a database of 55 million sets of fingerprints.?
The company also produces biometric identification devices that will know who you are by scanning your iris, recognizing your face, or coming up with novel ways of collecting your fingerprints or DNA.? As the company likes to say, it's in the business of making everyone's lives (and so personal data) an "open book," which is, of course, of great benefit to us all. "Thanks to biometric technology," the company proclaims, "people don't have to worry about forgetting a password or bringing multiple forms of identification.? Things just got a little easier."
Are you a New York City resident concerned about a "suspicious package" finding its way onto the subway platform?? Lockheed Martin tried to do something about that, too, thanks to a contract from the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to install 3,000 security cameras and motion sensors that would spot such packages, as well as the people carrying them, and notify the authorities.? Only problem: the cameras didn't work as advertised and the MTA axed Lockheed Martin and cancelled the $212 million contract.
- no previous page
- next
1/2
Recommended
- Top Twelve Most Patriotic Songs Ever
- American dystopia more reality than fiction
- Who Lives The American Dream?
- Here's Why People Don't Buy Global Warming
- George Washington: First In Politics
- Many British Muslims Put Islam First
- Poll: Stem Cell Use Gains Support
- Why I'll take Bill Gates over Steve Jobs every time
This is not investigative reporting, this is another demonization of big business by the left. If you want to send all the money we borrow from china and send it back to them for these products, along with all the jobs, that is apparently the liberal democratic way? Export jobs and cash! We will end up a nation of hamburger slingers. We don't need colleges to turn them out. What does this country want High tech, high paying jobs and industry, as well as products that other countrys will buy, or do we want a bunch of paper pushers and fast food workers, that purchase everything from Japan, china, india and germany?
If you want to investigate something find out where 1 trillion dollars of stimulous went! and leave businesses alone. The US has been loosing big companies every year going overseas with what use to be high paying skilled jobs, and technology. Make up your minds! Security, jobs, or more people on welfare?
http://******/cHbmqV
At Lockheed Martin, we count people for profit:
http://******/feUPNE
At Lockheed Martin, we coerce people for profit:
http://******/gk1fUE
At Lockheed Martin, we control people for profit:
http://******/dQVdT9
At Lockheed Martin, we kill people for profit:
http://******/eABhOY
At Lockheed Martin, we never forget what we're working for...
http://wp.me/p19dS3-5d
1. Congress should have term limits
2. A recall process should be installed to make sure that members are abiding with promises made to their constituencies.
3. Eliminate lobbyists once and for all
4. make the bidding process for government contracts a transparent one on the internet without revealing details that could jeopardize national security.
5. Impose laws requiring that any project that goes over budget should be cancelled immediately.
6. Set strict guidelines and rules on evaluating underperforming military and space vehicles and equipments with a specific threshold for pulling the plug on underperforming stuff.
7. Finally, ban the recycling that is former government workers going to work for contractors and coming back to government positions that clearly put them in a direct conflict of interest with their former employers - government contractors!
Good luck!
It was not a short note....it was a large part of his address to the nation awaiting the new Democratic President to be sworn into office.
He spoke of the military industrial complex that had to be maintained in order to keep the peace and be ready in those "cold war" times. But he also enjoined us to be vigilant about this structure...surely a time for its dismantlement is close by..or is with us now.
The American people for generations have paid BILLIONS for weapons systems and now that the age of nuclear confrontation has diminished...there seems to be no END of this relationship that dictates we remain on the edge of destruction. Can we not choose to make the dividend of peace turn into sharing the wealth for our people?
Yet, it is the same kind of corporate greed that had an army LARGER than the government's own Armed Forces in the field fighting the war...was providing security in Iraq for the government officials and costing the taxpayers even more....and some of those major stockholders in Halliburtion and Security services...were making big bucks off the war...Nothing about that relationship has changed. And our economy went into the dirt over greed, however you may spell it or who has the benefit of it.
Welcome to the new century and the enlightened public who have a right to know....and resist not only government violations of privacy...but those of corporate businesses who want to maintain the status quo and keep us in our place beneath these 'princely' powers
that have as their duty...to maintain our security for 'our' sake.