Much has been made of the Bush administration’s connections to the oil business, but there is another industry involved that has even greater geopolitical ramifications: the weapons industry. US military expenditures under this administration are literally staggering -- staggering the economy that is, which is faltering, and just might crater, the way the USSR economy cratered from armaments costs (among other things) back in the 1990s.

Almost half (47%) of all federal discretionary spending goes to pay for past, present or future weapons, says the War Resisters League. How exorbitant is that? At $400 billion a year, US spending accounts for one-third of the world military spending, as much as the next 27 highest spending countries –  more than $1 billion a day on arms. 

In fact, says Joel Andreas in his illustrated exposé, Addicted to War,  since 1948, the US has spent more than $15 trillion to build up its military. That amount is greater than the cumulative monetary value of all human-made wealth in the US – more than “the value of all the factories, machinery, roads, bridges, water and sewage systems, airports, railroads, power plants, office buildings, shopping centers, schools, hospitals, hotels, houses, etc,” in the US, put together.   

If the US were to put one year of military spending to world social concerns instead, it could solve most of the major world problems, according to statistics offered by osEarth (formerly the World Game Institute). OsEarth calculates that nineteen billion a year could end starvation and malnutrition.  At $1 billion a day, ten days’ spending could ensure everybody on earth had access to clean potable water.  Five days’ spending could eliminate illiteracy. Two days’ spending could eliminate landmines. Eleven billion a year could stabilize the world population. And so forth. 

Ah, but that would be a non-profit – not to say socialist – approach. In the existing corporate capitalistic model, the $1 billion a day goes mostly to for-profit companies, who in turn contribute to election campaigns, to help elect candidates who will in turn direct more public spending their way. 

“The arms lobby is exerting more influence over policymaking than at any time since President Dwight D. Eisenhower first warned of the dangers of the military-industrial complex over 40 years ago,” charge William Hartung and Michelle Ciarrocca, Director and Senior Research Associate at the World Policy Institute's Arms Trade Resource Center, writing in the Jan/Feb 2003 issue of Multinational Monitor. 

In a separate article published by Foreign Policy in Focus, Ciarroca elaborated: “More than any administration in history, the Bush team has relied on the expertise of former weapons contractors to outline U.S. defense needs. Thirty-two major Bush appointees are former executives, consultants, or major shareholders of top weapons contractors.... In 2000 the top six military companies spent over $6.5 million in contributions to candidates and political parties. In addition to these hefty campaign donations, defense contractors spent an astonishing $60 million on lobbying in 2000, the most recent year for which full statistics are available....” 

Then there’s the “ex-president’s club”, the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle website brags that, “Since its establishment in 1987, The Carlyle Group has grown from a group of four investors with $5 million in capital to one of the world’s largest private equity firms. As of September 2002, the firm had over $13.9 billion in capital committed to 23 private equity funds.”  That’s a whopping 2800 percent increase over fifteen years. Don’t you wish the stock market had fared so well?

Writing for Red Herring business magazine, Dan Briody named the Carlyle Group’s real assets: “...Among those associated with Carlyle are former U.S. president George Bush Sr., former U.K. prime minister John Major, and former president of the Philippines Fidel Ramos. And Carlyle has counted George Soros, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden's estranged family among its high-profile clientele. The group has been able to parlay its political clout into a lucrative buyout practice (in other words, purchasing struggling companies, turning them around, and selling them for huge profits)--everything from defense contractors to telecommunications and aerospace companies....”
      
Although the Carlyle Group’s $14 billion may seem like a lot of money to me and thee, it’s crumbs from the table when compared to the trillions the US spends on weapons. And crumbs often seem to fall from that table. Consider the story that broke in July 2001, when the BBC reported a problem with Pentagon credit cards, “Last year alone, according to investigators, Pentagon employees went on a $9bn dollar shopping spree, some of it blatantly fraudulent.” 

In January 2003, the General Accounting Office reported that the US Navy had failed to properly account for $929 million of an allocated $1.4 billion for 1997-99. Specifically, the GAO found $452 million that was no longer earmarked for specific projects, but remained in the Navy’s coffers without being designated for anything else. A further $330 million was inaccurately reported due to unresolved errors, such as bills that were not processed properly. 

You’ve probably heard the expression, “A million here, a million there – pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Well, hold on to your hats. The Pentagon cannot account for $2.3 TRILLION in transactions.

Newhouse News reported that, "For fiscal year 2000 alone, auditors for the Pentagon's Inspector General's Office found $1.1 trillion in bookkeeping entries that could not be tracked or justified....[and] for fiscal year 1999 the Pentagon Inspector General reported $2.3 trillion worth of untraceable accounting entries..."  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reported that, "A March 2000 report by the Pentagon's Inspector General found that only $2.6 trillion of a total of $6.9 trillion in accounting entries could be fully documented."

One retired Vice Admiral reportedly told CBS News that, "With good financial oversight we could find $48 billion in loose change in that building, without having to hit the taxpayers." At his swearing-in as Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld reportedly described this figure as "terrifying". Evidently he got over it; the current administration increased Defense appropriations by $100 billion even before the attack on Iraq, which President Bush estimated would cost another $75 billion.

Far from requiring the Pentagon to account for its spending, the Bush administration has enthusiastically stripped all other programs in order to keeping feeding the gigantic maw. In March, The American Prospect reported that the administration was slashing $25 billion from veteran’s benefits in order to finance the attack on Iraq – thus creating a new definition of the term, “chutzpah”. 

Leaving aside for a moment the devastating environmental impact of weapons spending, and the enormous social costs of neglecting public health and education, let’s just look at the policy implications of this economic program. Simply put, even if the Bush administration suddenly abandoned its plans for world domination, as spelled out in the New American Century Project, they could not stop the runaway locomotive that is driving the US economy. When it comes to job creation, building weapons is the only program the US has.  

The Iraq invasion is only a fraction of ongoing US military actions. US forces are still involved in Afghanistan, and serving as “advisors” in Colombia and the Phillipines. In addition, as the Center for Public Integrity disclosed in its 11-part series, “The Business of War”, the US hires private military companies – mercenaries – to fight where it does not want to be officially involved. 

With all that momentum behind the war machine, the only way it can stop is economic collapse. That’s why Iraq will prove to be just a stepping stone, as the US attempts to expand its sphere of power in the Middle East. So far, the Bush administration has managed to stay one step ahead of bankruptcy. Its continued survival depends on finding more nations to attack, though. Watch out, Syria! 

Practically all that remains is a key scene where viewers learn that Destiny is a secret US government project to create targeted earthquakes, by manipulating earth’s electromagnetic fields. In the movie, the results of this manipulation threaten to extinguish all life on earth within a few months. 

Does that sound like the asteroid-threat movies of two years ago? Here is the difference: there really is a secret US weapons project very much like Destiny, called HAARP, which makes Destiny’s disappearance from this movie curious indeed. 

HAARP stands for High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. According to the official  website, it’s academic research. “HAARP is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.” 

On the contrary, says mathematician and scientist Dr Rosalie Bertell. HAARP is Star Wars – Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars, revived by George W Bush. Bush’s plans for a National Missile Defense system faltered because the defense missiles couldn’t hit their targets even when they had beacons on them. So the Pentagon went back to Plan A, which was energy transfers, or “death rays”.

Energy transfers could include laser beams, which are widely known. But Bertell and others say that the armed forces are also experimenting with microwave and electromagnetic energy beams, at all frequency ranges. 

New technology has opened up uses for theories originally proposed by Nikolai Tesla, a contemporary and rival of Thomas Edison’s. While Edison's distribution method for electricity involved selling it as a commodity, Tesla advocated wireless distribution so that electricity could be free for everyone. Tesla also invented a "death ray" that he hoped would end all wars. 

The Federation of American Scientists says that one element of recent research is to explore the use of Extremely Low Frequency and Very Low Frequency electromagnetic induction "to detect and image subterranean features such as tunnels, bunkers, and other potential military targets.” Opponents say that ELF waves pose environmental hazards and interfere with fetal development and with human mental processes. 

At the other end of the scale are Very High Frequency waves -- Tesla's death rays. In the mid-1980s, a scientist named George Eastlund discovered and patented a method whereby VHF waves can heat up the ionosphere enough to create a bubble that will bounce energy down to a target hundreds of miles away.  Critics charge that the HAARP project is a “super-heater” aimed at the ionosphere, which could also affect the electromagnetic Van Allen belts, and the upper atmospheric strata that protect us all from ultraviolet rays. 

“To date,” writes journalist Dan Eden on the Viewzone website, “there have been eleven other patents derived from Eastlund's original work. These patents describe the reflective alterations of the ionosphere for such uses as ‘nuclear scale explosions without radiation,’ ‘power-beaming systems,’ ‘over-the-horizon radar systems,’ and ‘nuclear missile detection and destruction systems.’ Further, the patents are now owned by Raytheon, a long-standing defense contractor, and can now be combined with other military patents and used for battlefield applications.” 

Reportedly, Russia and other nations have also experimented with VHF waves. Russia is said to have achieved success in beaming very powerful waves to create very large explosions at great distance. They couldn’t keep those explosions on or even near the target, however. 

In August 2002, the Russian Duma (Parliament) issued a statement that expressed concern about the HAARP program. "The significance of this qualitative leap could be compared to the transition from cold steel to fire arms, or from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons. This new type of weapons differs from previous types in that the near-Earth medium becomes at once an object of direct influence and its component.” 

Noting that three US facilities were scheduled to begin testing in the spring of 2003, the Duma appealed for an international ban on large scale geophysical weapons experiments. The Duma didn't say so, but the results of a HAARP experiment gone awry could be very much like the catastrophe depicted in "The Core" -- lightning storms, wholesale static discharges, seismic events, misalignment of the Van Allen belts, and huge holes in the ozone layer. 

A major question which is extremely unlikely that the Pentagon would answer is: what role did HAARP play in the 2002 attack on Afghanistan? Did the US rely on HAARP to discern movement within caves under the Tora Bora mountains? And were those earthquakes in the Nahrin region entirely coincidental, or the result of poor targetting? 

There have been previous attempts to start a public discussion on the subject. HAARP was included in Project Censored’s Top Ten Censored Stories of 1994. Besides being the subject of Rosalie Bertell’s most recent book, Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War, HAARP is central to  Angels Don’t Play This HAARP by Jeanne Manning and Dr Nick Begich, and a video – Holes in Heaven? by producer Paula Randol-Smith and Emmy-winning director Wendy Robbins, with narration by Martin Sheen. 

This, then, is the news that The Core could have brought to a larger audience. Did the key message get sidetracked somehow? Intriguingly, The Core’s credits indicate that the movie has its roots in Canada, in BC, although it now displays the Paramount banner, and benefits from Paramount’s distribution and marketing campaign. 

"Destiny, meet the world," computer hacker Rat says, in the last dialogue in The Core. "World, meet Destiny."  But it doesn't happen. The Core misses its social message opportunity. Instead, it’s just another disaster movie, with an apparently inexplicable premise. More important, the public lost an opportunity for a vitally urgent discussion.