Reject Brands---open conflicts of interest

In a piece explicitly defending bloated military budgets, however, perhaps it would be useful to know what exactly the “Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments” is.  We can start by reading this  taken directly from their website (unabridged):

Below is a list of organizations that have contributed to our efforts over the past three years.

Aerojet Rocketdyne

Army Strategic Studies Group

Army War College

Austal USA

Australian Department of Defence

BAE Systems Inc.

Carnegie Corporation of New York

Chemring Group

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

Department of the Navy

Embassy of Japan

Fincantieri/Marinette

Free University Brussels

General Atomics

General Dynamics—National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO)

Harris Corporation

Huntington Ingalls Industries

Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force

Kongsberg Defense Systems, Inc.

L3 Technologies, Inc.

Lockheed Martin Corporation

Maersk Line, Limited

Metron

National Defense University

Navy League of the United States

Northrop Grumman Corporation

Office of the Secretary of Defense/Office of Net Assessment (ONA)

Office of the Secretary of Defense/Office of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE)

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (AT&L)

Polski Instytut Spraw Miedzynarodowych (PISM)

Raven Industries

Raytheon Company

Sasakawa Peace Foundation

Sarah Scaife Foundation

SEACOR Holdings

Secretary of Defense Corporate Fellows Program

Smith Richardson Foundation

Submarine Industrial Base Council

Taiwan Ministry of National Defense

Textron Systems

The Boeing Company

The Doris & Stanley Tananbaum Foundation

The Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation

United Kingdom Royal Air Force

Brands is a senior fellow at an organization funded almost entirely by those with a clear interest in the upcoming $750 billion defense budget Brands is pushing for. While we don’t have a tax filings for CSBA since Brand was hired there, and thus we do not know his specific income, the average senior fellow at the organization, as of its , makes just under $300,000 a year.

They can call it whatever they wish—”think tank,” “nonprofit,” “Center”—but by any objective metric, this organization is just a lobbying entity for the weapons industry and Western militaries. A cursory glance at their  reveals they, unsurprisingly, always support more spending on weapons systems. Unlike other weapons-funded lobbying groups such as Center for Strategic and International Studies (FAIR.org, ), they don’t even bother throwing some banks or soda companies in there to give the appearance of being anything other than a weapons industry trade group. (Don’t be fooled by the “Sasakawa Peace Foundation”—that’s an organization founded by far-right Japanese business executive Ryoichi Sasakawa, who was jailed as a war crimes suspect after World War II, and who once described himself as the “world’s richest fascist”—Time, .)

Setting aside its disqualifying conflicts of interest, Brands’ piece is an assortment of sophistry about how weapons systems create middle-class jobs for Americans. Given that any meaningful definition of “progressive” must take into account the 95 percent of the world who are not Americans—e.g., those on the other end of these weapons systems and military occupations—the column rests its premise on a massive category error.