Excerpt:
Too Big to Fail: Lockheed Martin's "Got Their Fingers Everywhere", Says Author
Posted Jan 04, 2011 09:05am EST by Stacy Curtin in PoliticsToo big to fail?
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14307
Excerpt:
Dick Cheney's son-in-law, Philip J. Perry, a registered Lockheed lobbyist who had, while working for a law firm, represented Lockheed with the Department of Homeland Security, had been nominated by Bush to serve as general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security. His wife, Elizabeth Cheney, serves as deputy assistant secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs.
Vice President Cheney's wife, Lynne, had, until her husband took office, served on the board of Lockheed, receiving deferred compensation in the form of half a million dollars in stock and fees. Even President Bush himself has a Lockheed Martin connection. As governor of Texas, he had attempted to give Lockheed a multimillion-dollar contract to reform the state's welfare system.
Soon after taking office in 2001, Bush had also appointed Lockheed president and CEO Robert J. Stevens to his Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. The future of that industry was, of course, in an expanding defense budget, and a war in Iraq wouldn't hurt Lockheed's bottom line.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4183/is_20030425/ai_n10055413/
Excerpt:
The vote for Frank Savage, 64, came after sharp objections for the second year by union representatives during Lockheed's annual shareholders meeting.
Savage served as a director on Enron's board from 1999 to 2002, during which time the company filed for bankruptcy.
"We do not believe Frank Savage can be an effective director at Lockheed Martin in protecting the interest of shareholders [and] employees," said David White of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers at the meeting in Dayton, Ohio, which was broadcast via the Web. His union represents 20,000 Lockheed employees who hold about 10 percent of Lockheed's outstanding shares.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Stevens
Excerpts:
1) Robert J. Stevens, born in 1951, is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Lockheed Martin.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14307
Excerpt:
Dick Cheney's son-in-law, Philip J. Perry, a registered Lockheed lobbyist who had, while working for a law firm, represented Lockheed with the Department of Homeland Security, had been nominated by Bush to serve as general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security. His wife, Elizabeth Cheney, serves as deputy assistant secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs.
Vice President Cheney's wife, Lynne, had, until her husband took office, served on the board of Lockheed, receiving deferred compensation in the form of half a million dollars in stock and fees. Even President Bush himself has a Lockheed Martin connection. As governor of Texas, he had attempted to give Lockheed a multimillion-dollar contract to reform the state's welfare system.
Soon after taking office in 2001, Bush had also appointed Lockheed president and CEO Robert J. Stevens to his Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry. The future of that industry was, of course, in an expanding defense budget, and a war in Iraq wouldn't hurt Lockheed's bottom line.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4183/is_20030425/ai_n10055413/
Excerpt:
Lockheed Martin shareholders re-elect former Enron director to board
by Kathleen Johnston Jarboe
Lockheed Martin Corp. shareholders yesterday sided with board recommendations in re-electing a former Enron Corp. director to the company's board.The vote for Frank Savage, 64, came after sharp objections for the second year by union representatives during Lockheed's annual shareholders meeting.
Savage served as a director on Enron's board from 1999 to 2002, during which time the company filed for bankruptcy.
"We do not believe Frank Savage can be an effective director at Lockheed Martin in protecting the interest of shareholders [and] employees," said David White of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers at the meeting in Dayton, Ohio, which was broadcast via the Web. His union represents 20,000 Lockheed employees who hold about 10 percent of Lockheed's outstanding shares.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_J._Stevens
Excerpts:
1) Robert J. Stevens, born in 1951, is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Lockheed Martin.
2) is Lead Director of the Monsanto Company
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=90254.5;wap2
Excerpt:
Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a "highly secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused," shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped the cold war.
Every member of the military would have "a picture of the battle space, a God's-eye view," he said. "And that's real power." [INSERT: And you murdered 3,000 on 9/11, 1.3 mil iraqis, and 13+K American troops for your sinful lust for this power, which you cannot take to your grave, and will be held accountable for.]
http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Bright-Green/2008/1119/is-general-motors-too-big-to-fail-or-just-too-big
Excerpt:
Is General Motors too big to fail, or just too big?
How did we become so dependent on a single corporation?
http://bevnapdiaries.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/defending-enron-the-first-of-the-too-big-to-fail/
Excerpt:
Note: First an explanation, of sorts of how the Enron scandal came about: You are a rancher named En Ron and you have a neighbor Arthur Anderson. En Ron owns two cows, sells one of them to himself and leases the other one back to himself. Now he has four cows and Arthur swears to it but no one has seen the cows in weeks. Taking the four cows he sells them to an offshore herder who never takes procession of them but leases them back to you. Now your herd is up to eight cows, even though one of the two and only two cows has been made into steaks for a big back yard bar-b-que to celebrate the success of your herd building. So with the remaining eight cows you buy a big ole pickup with Arthur swearing on paper you have eight cows for collateral. But still no one has seen the cows in months. You tell all your neighbors about how you are going to breed your herd and make millions, so they all contribute to get in on the action. You have another bar-b-que. So your herd has grown to 16 cows, the original and only two are now in your freezer ready for the next big celebration. Now your farm electricity has been turned off and for no clear reason, so you call it a brown out. Then the repo man comes to get the truck you bought on the success of your herd which is now in a freezer in the basement rotting since you could not pay the electric bill and Arthur goes to jail. Basically that is the Enron Scandal. Just multiply it by about a couple of billion.
http://www.internetnews.com/fina-news/article.php/1380561/Will+WorldComs+Woes+Engulf+UUNet.htm
Excerpt:
Will WorldCom's Woes Engulf UUNet?
By Brian Morrissey | July 03, 2002
Page 1 of 1
Page 1 of 1
Holding court yesterday with reporters after a terrible week for his company, WorldCom
CEO John Sidgmore made clear the company was too big to fail. Exhibit No. 1: its UUNet subsidiary, an Internet backbone provider that routes over half of the world's e-mail messages.
While admitting a WorldCom bankruptcy is a real possibility, Sidgmore vowed UUNet would remain steady.
"I honestly don't think that under any of the scenarios under discussion there'd be a blip in the level of the service," he said. "I don't see any chance of the UUNet network going dark, under any circumstances."
http://2012indyinfo.wordpress.com/2011/08/06/panel-too-big-to-fail-firms-harming-us-economy/
Excerpt:
Published on Friday, August 5, 2011 by BankInvestmentConsultant.com
WASHINGTON — The problem of “too big to fail” is continuing to bedevil the US economy despite claims by some regulators that the Dodd-Frank Act effectively ended it.
A board at the New York Stock Exchange shows the final trading numbers for the day, August 4, 2011. (Credit: Reuters/Brendan McDermid)At a hearing Wednesday by the Senate Banking financial institutions subcommittee, several prominent economists said the existence of large financial institutions that receive benefits from the government is harming economic growth.http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1886538,00.html
Excerpt:
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/audit_notes_the_too_big_to_fai.php
Excerpt:
The nation’s four biggest banks can grow even bigger, with the potential to add at least another trillion dollars onto their balance sheets before they even reach the limits imposed by the Obama administration, according to an administration study released Tuesday…http://www.topix.com/movies/w/2011/08/remembering-nixon-s-wage-and-price-controls
“I said the banks won,” said Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who now teaches at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and is a HuffPost contributing business editor. “It just tells you what the Treasury wants, and what they’re telling you is they’re going to cook it to let these banks expand.”
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner heads the Financial Stability Oversight Council, which produced the study and accompanying recommendations. They’re intended to guide regulators as they craft the rules that will attempt to restrain the growing concentration in the nation’s financial system.
Excerpt:
Remembering Nixon's wage and price controls
Remember "TARP," "Too Big to Fail," "Government Motors," "pay czar," the buzzwords of the Bush-Obama era? They reflected a disturbing trend toward presidential interference in economic life.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/16/wachdog-tarp-too-big-to-fail_n_836376.html
Excerpt:
It also said federal intervention transformed the notion of 'too big to fail' into a stark reality.
"Very large financial institutions may now rationally decide to take inflated risks because they expect that, if their gamble fails, taxpayers will bear the loss," said the report authored by the Congressional Oversight Panel.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/27/AR2009082704193.html
Excerpt:
Banks 'Too Big to Fail' Have Grown Even Bigger
![[The Big Get Bigger]](http://media3.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2009/08/28/GR2009082802397.gif)
TOOLBOX    Resize |
By David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, August 28, 2009
When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation's leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1877351,00.html
Excerpt:
Full List
Blameworthy
- Joe Cassano
- Ian McCarthy
- Frank Raines
- Kathleen Corbet
- Dick Fuld
- Marion and Herb Sandler
- Bill Clinton
- Stan O'Neal
- Wen Jiabao
- David Lereah
- John Devaney
- Bernie Madoff
- Lew Ranieri
- Burton Jablin
- Fred Goodwin
- Sandy Weill
- David Oddsson
Plenty of CEOs screwed up on Wall Street. But none seemed more asleep at the switch than Bear Stearns' Cayne. He left the office by helicopter for 3 ½-day golf weekends. He was regularly out of town at bridge tournaments and reportedly smoked pot. (Cayne denies the marijuana allegations.) Back at the office, Cayne's charges bet the firm on risky home loans. Two of its highly leveraged hedge funds collapsed in mid-2007. But that was only the beginning. Bear held nearly $40 billion in mortgage bonds that were essentially worthless. In early 2008 Bear was sold to JPMorgan for less than the value of its office building. "I didn't stop it. I didn't rein in the leverage," Cayne later told Fortune. Read more:
http://www.iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/240606
Excerpt:
Too Big to Fail: Lockheed Martin's "Got Their Fingers Everywhere", Says Author Posted Jan 04, 2011 09:05am EST by Stacy Curtin in Politics
Too big to fail?
That’s been the key question asked of Wall Street’s biggest banks since the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, which sent shock waves through the global financial system and led to the worst recession this country has seen since the Great Depression.
But, there is another firm far from the circles of Wall Street for which that same question should be asked, says William Hartung, author of the new book Prophets of War. The subtitle of his book says it all: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.
With $40 billion in annual revenue, Lockheed Martin is the single largest recipient of U.S. tax dollars. The company receives about $36 billion in government contracts per year. In 2008, $29 billion of that was for U.S. military contracts – a dollar figure 25% higher than its competitors Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman.
What does that mean for you, the U.S. taxpayer? According to Hartung, each taxpaying household contributes $260 to Lockheed’s coffers each year!
All evidence enough that the company is "too big to fail", as Hartung tells Aaron in the accompanying clip.
A prime example of Washington looking out for Lockheed happened just last year when debate ensued over whether to continue the company’s grossly expensive F-22 stealth fighter program, says Hartung, who has covered the defense industry for years and is also the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation.
The Pentagon eventually did suspend funds terminating Lockheed’s development of the F-22 Raptor, which has been the most costly fighter plane ever. But, at the same time the U.S. Defense Department cut off funds for the F-22, it added an additional $4 billion to the Lockheed’s F-35 fighter plane program. The government “basically took with one hand and gave back to Lockheed with the other,” says Hartung of a company that is the only major contractor of fighter planes for the U.S. Airforce.
Warning from the past
Two weeks from now marks the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower’s famous “military-industrial complex” speech cautioning against “undue influence” from large and politically powerful defense companies. According to Hartung, Lockheed Martin epitomizes the exact threat Eisenhower warned about.
By now you might be wondering where the defense contractor’s remaining $7 billion in government contract goes. “They have got their fingers everywhere now,” Hartung tells Aaron. As outlined in his book, Lockheed does way more than produce military aircraft and weaponry. From the U.S. Census Bureau to the U.S. Postal Service to the Internal Revenue Service, “pretty much name a government agency and they are involved,” he says.
Despite Lockheed sheer size, its stronghold on so many government agencies is evidence enough that the company is “too big to fail.” “If the government becomes so dependent on Lockheed, for many different activities it will be hard to hold them accountable if they underperform or if there is some sort of whiff of scandal.”
Bigger may not be better, but it's working
Hartung’s scathing criticism of Lockheed Martin comes from his belief that “they have not done the job well, often enough,” pointing to decades of cost overruns, a corporate history littered with corruption scandals and the fact that the company was one of the first ever to receive a federal bailout back in the 1970s.
When it comes down to it, Lockheed’s dominance – even with what some might call a checkered past – has much to do with the company’s ability to influence those in power, says Hartung. In 2009, it spent nearly $15 million on campaign contributions and lobbying fees — the second highest amount for defense contractors.
Another key factor that has helped the defense contractor secure the most U.S. military contracts is the company’s ability to exploit the revolving door between Washington, the industry and itself, says Hartung. Not only has this led to the company having strong influence over those who hold the U.S. government's purse stings, many who are former Lockheed employees or board members, it has allowed the company to influence foreign policy decisions like pressing for war with Iraq.
In the publicity notes for the book, Hartung claims “Lockheed Martin has also funded right-wing think tanks that have done everything from press for war with Iraq to lobby for the “Star Wars” missile defense program.” He tells Aaron that they are using these think tanks to make the points that are “embarrassing to make themselves.”
Hartung acknowledges that “we need companies like Lockheed Martin to defend the country,” but he says that a lot more can be done to regulate the industry by setting “stricter accountability rules.”
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/too-big-to-fail-lockheed-martin%27s-%22got-their-fingers-everywhere%22-says-author-535769.html
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Lockheed_Martin
Excerpt:
http://www.counterpunch.org/hartung01112011.html
Is Lockheed Martin Shadowing You?
January 11, 2011
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. Click here to listen to the author explain the unsettling reach of Lockheed Martin.
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 US 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 US overseas prisons (including at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq) to managing a private intelligence network in Pakistan and helping write the Afghan constitution.
Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have facilities in forty-six 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 forty-four 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 US 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 US Census? Lockheed Martin will take care of it. The company runs three centers—in Baltimore, in Phoenix, and in Jeffersonville, Indiana—that processed up to eighteen 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.
Tim Shorrock, author of the seminal book Spies for Hire, has described Lockheed Martin as "the largest defense contractor and private intelligence force in the world." As far back as 2002, the company plunged into the "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program that was former National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter's pet project. A giant database to collect telephone numbers, credit cards and reams of other personal data from US citizens in the name of fighting terrorism, the program was de-funded by Congress the following year, but concerns remain that the National Security Agency is now running a similar secret program.
In the meantime, since at least 2004, Lockheed Martin has been involved in the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which collected personal data on American citizens for storage in a database known as "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (and far more dramatically by the acronym TALON). While Congress shut down the domestic spying aspect of the program in 2007 (assuming, that is, that the Pentagon followed orders), CIFA itself continues to operate. In 2005, Washington Post military and intelligence expert William Arkin revealed that, while the database was theoretically being used to track anyone suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking or espionage, "some military gumshoe or overzealous commander just has to decide someone is a 'threat to the military' " for it to be brought into play. Among the "threatening" citizens actually tracked by CIFA were members of antiwar groups. As part of its role in CIFA, Lockheed Martin was not only monitoring intelligence, but also "estimating future threats." (Not exactly inconvenient for a giant weapons outfit that might see antiwar activism as a threat!)
Lockheed Martin is also intimately bound up in the workings of the National Security Agency, America's largest spy outfit. In addition to producing spy satellites for the NSA, the company is in charge of "Project Groundbreaker," a $5 billion, ten-year effort to upgrade the agency's internal telephone and computer networks.
While Lockheed Martin may well be watching you at home—it's my personal nominee for twenty-first-century "Big Brother"—it has also been involved in questionable activities abroad that go well beyond supplying weapons to regions in conflict. There were, of course, those interrogators it recruited for America's offshore prison system from Guantánamo Bay to Afghanistan (and the charges of abuses that so naturally went with them), but the real scandal the company has been embroiled in involves overseeing an assassination program in Pakistan. Initially, it was billed as an information-gathering operation using private companies to generate data the CIA and other US intelligence agencies allegedly could not get on their own. Instead, the companies turned out to be supplying targeting information used by US Army Special Forces troops to locate and kill suspected Taliban leaders.
The private firms involved were managed by Lockheed Martin under a $22 million contract from the US Army. As Mark Mazetti of the New York Times has reported, there were just two small problems with the effort: "The American military is largely prohibited from operating in Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying." Much as in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, when Oliver North set up a network of shell companies to evade the laws against arming right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, the Army used Lockheed Martin to do an end run around rules limiting US military and intelligence activities in Pakistan. It should not, then, be too surprising that one of the people involved in the Lockheed-Martin-managed network was Duane "Dewey" Claridge, an ex-CIA man who had once been knee deep in the Iran/Contra affair.
However, the "soft power" side of Lockheed Martin's operations (as described on its web site) may soon diminish substantially as the company has put PAE up for sale. Still, the revenues garnered from these activities will undoubtedly be more than offset by a new $5 billion, multi-year contract awarded by the US Army to provide logistics support for US Special Forces in dozens of countries.
Consider all this but a Lockheed Martin précis. A full accounting of its "shadow government" would fill volumes. After all, it's the number-one contractor not only for the Pentagon but also for the Department of Energy. It ranks number two for the Department of State, number three for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and number four for the Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development. Even listing the government and quasi-governmental agencies the company has contracts with is a daunting task, but here's just a partial run-down: the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Land Management, the Census Bureau, the Coast Guard, the Department of Defense (including the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency), the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Technology Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the General Services Administration, the Geological Survey, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of State, the Social Security Administration, the US Customs Service, the US Postal Service, the Department of Transportation, the Transportation Security Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
When President Eisenhower warned fifty years ago this month of the dangers of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," he could never have dreamed that one for-profit weapons outfit would so fully insinuate itself into so many aspects of American life. Lockheed Martin has helped turn Eisenhower's dismal mid-twentieth-century vision into a for-profit military-industrial-surveillance complex fit for the twenty-first century, one in which no governmental activity is now beyond its reach.
I feel safer already.
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 US 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 US overseas prisons (including at Guantánamo 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 fourteen 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 US Congress."Add to all that its 140,000 employees and its claim to have facilities in forty-six 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 forty-four 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 US 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 US Census? Lockheed Martin will take care of it. The company runs three centers—in Baltimore, in Phoenix, and in Jeffersonville, Indiana—that processed up to eighteen 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.
Collecting Intelligence on You
If it seems a little creepy to you that the same company making ballistic missiles is also processing your taxes, accessing your fingerprints, scanning your packages, ensuring that it's easier than ever to collect your DNA and counting you for the census, rest assured: Lockheed Martin's interest in getting inside your private life via intelligence collection and surveillance has remained remarkably undiminished in the twenty-first century.Tim Shorrock, author of the seminal book Spies for Hire, has described Lockheed Martin as "the largest defense contractor and private intelligence force in the world." As far back as 2002, the company plunged into the "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program that was former National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter's pet project. A giant database to collect telephone numbers, credit cards and reams of other personal data from US citizens in the name of fighting terrorism, the program was de-funded by Congress the following year, but concerns remain that the National Security Agency is now running a similar secret program.
In the meantime, since at least 2004, Lockheed Martin has been involved in the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which collected personal data on American citizens for storage in a database known as "Threat and Local Observation Notice" (and far more dramatically by the acronym TALON). While Congress shut down the domestic spying aspect of the program in 2007 (assuming, that is, that the Pentagon followed orders), CIFA itself continues to operate. In 2005, Washington Post military and intelligence expert William Arkin revealed that, while the database was theoretically being used to track anyone suspected of terrorism, drug trafficking or espionage, "some military gumshoe or overzealous commander just has to decide someone is a 'threat to the military' " for it to be brought into play. Among the "threatening" citizens actually tracked by CIFA were members of antiwar groups. As part of its role in CIFA, Lockheed Martin was not only monitoring intelligence, but also "estimating future threats." (Not exactly inconvenient for a giant weapons outfit that might see antiwar activism as a threat!)
Lockheed Martin is also intimately bound up in the workings of the National Security Agency, America's largest spy outfit. In addition to producing spy satellites for the NSA, the company is in charge of "Project Groundbreaker," a $5 billion, ten-year effort to upgrade the agency's internal telephone and computer networks.
While Lockheed Martin may well be watching you at home—it's my personal nominee for twenty-first-century "Big Brother"—it has also been involved in questionable activities abroad that go well beyond supplying weapons to regions in conflict. There were, of course, those interrogators it recruited for America's offshore prison system from Guantánamo Bay to Afghanistan (and the charges of abuses that so naturally went with them), but the real scandal the company has been embroiled in involves overseeing an assassination program in Pakistan. Initially, it was billed as an information-gathering operation using private companies to generate data the CIA and other US intelligence agencies allegedly could not get on their own. Instead, the companies turned out to be supplying targeting information used by US Army Special Forces troops to locate and kill suspected Taliban leaders.
The private firms involved were managed by Lockheed Martin under a $22 million contract from the US Army. As Mark Mazetti of the New York Times has reported, there were just two small problems with the effort: "The American military is largely prohibited from operating in Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying." Much as in the Iran/Contra scandal of the 1980s, when Oliver North set up a network of shell companies to evade the laws against arming right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, the Army used Lockheed Martin to do an end run around rules limiting US military and intelligence activities in Pakistan. It should not, then, be too surprising that one of the people involved in the Lockheed-Martin-managed network was Duane "Dewey" Claridge, an ex-CIA man who had once been knee deep in the Iran/Contra affair.
A Twenty-First-Century Big Brother
There has also been a softer side to Lockheed Martin's foreign policy efforts. It has involved contracts for services that range from recruiting election monitors for Bosnia and the Ukraine and attempting to reform Liberia's justice system to providing personnel involved in drafting the Afghan constitution. Most of these projects have been carried out by the company's PAE unit, the successor to a formerly independent firm, Pacific Architects and Engineers, that made its fortune building and maintaining military bases during the Vietnam War.However, the "soft power" side of Lockheed Martin's operations (as described on its web site) may soon diminish substantially as the company has put PAE up for sale. Still, the revenues garnered from these activities will undoubtedly be more than offset by a new $5 billion, multi-year contract awarded by the US Army to provide logistics support for US Special Forces in dozens of countries.
Consider all this but a Lockheed Martin précis. A full accounting of its "shadow government" would fill volumes. After all, it's the number-one contractor not only for the Pentagon but also for the Department of Energy. It ranks number two for the Department of State, number three for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and number four for the Departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development. Even listing the government and quasi-governmental agencies the company has contracts with is a daunting task, but here's just a partial run-down: the Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Land Management, the Census Bureau, the Coast Guard, the Department of Defense (including the Army, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force and the Missile Defense Agency), the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Technology Department, the Food and Drug Administration, the General Services Administration, the Geological Survey, the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Internal Revenue Service, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of State, the Social Security Administration, the US Customs Service, the US Postal Service, the Department of Transportation, the Transportation Security Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs.
When President Eisenhower warned fifty years ago this month of the dangers of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," he could never have dreamed that one for-profit weapons outfit would so fully insinuate itself into so many aspects of American life. Lockheed Martin has helped turn Eisenhower's dismal mid-twentieth-century vision into a for-profit military-industrial-surveillance complex fit for the twenty-first century, one in which no governmental activity is now beyond its reach.
I feel safer already.
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