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Defense Contractor's Pentagon Hustle Exposed & Grocery Outlets Still Use Pandemic Excuse To Gouge
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September 6, 2024
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8:48Now PlayingA 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.
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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To contractors, yeah. Now it's not just weapons contractors. It's information contractors.
Yeah, tech companies.
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.
Right.
But the point is, it still is happening. It's something that came up, what was it, under Bill Clinton.
Yeah. 1995 I think is when it began.
1995.
And this is comical, right?
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