WORD COUNT 634                                                                                                                                                                            MAY 13, 2008      

WAR PLANES WE CAN FLY TO THE POORHOUSE – by William A. Collins

Weapons keep us,

Safe and free;

On the road,

To Bankruptcy.

The United States is kind of broke.  Our trade deficit is mind-boggling, our bailout costs are unprecedented, and our stimulus package harkens to the Depression.  We’ve got to save money somewhere before the dollar totally crashes and burns.

The Republicans, remaining consistent, propose cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and any programs aimed at reducing human suffering.  The Democrats, also consistent, have little idea what to do.  Making the rich once again pay their fair share in taxes starting in 2010 will surely be a good start, but expenses need to be chopped too.  Any ideas?

Aha!!  The Pentagon!  It’s half our budget!  Dwight Eisenhower himself suggested it, and President Obama has kept on a Republican defense secretary, Robert Gates, to give himself cover for the upcoming slashing.

Nice try.  Gates has dutifully proposed ending the F-22 fighter, the new presidential helicopter, and the V-22 Osprey, reining in Star Wars, cutting back on pointless nuclear submarines, and restricting other wasteful weapons programs.  But somehow even after all his hatcheting, the arms budget still would go up by four percent, not down.  And that doesn’t count the spiraling costs in Afghanistan or the continuing rat hole in Iraq.

The next question is whether Gates will even succeed with these controversial cuts.  Every weapon comes with a militia of corporations, workers and politicians, none caring a whit as to whether it has any earthly use for the good of the nation.  My own state is sorely afflicted with just such white elephants, which often manage to transform our occasionally sensible congressmen into mindless cheerleaders.

Take the F-22.  We make the engines, but various other parts are made in 42 different states.  That’s pretty good political planning.  Our state would lose between 2,000 and 3,000 jobs if production ended.  Well heck, we can lose that many banking jobs in a week unnoticed, but “defense” means government jobs, and thus we expect our elected officials to protect them, needed or not.

So it is no coincidence that springtime in Washington can be measured by danger alarms from the Pentagon as well as by cherry blossoms.  Each spring’s annual report, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,” is keyed to preserving the defense budget by scaring Congress into ever larger appropriations.  That ploy always works, even though Chinese forces actually seem embarrassingly paltry compared to our own.  Other similar reports try to scare us about Resurgent Russia and nuclear-tipped Iran and North Korea.

This elegant dance of waste producers vs. waste cutters is unfortunately not well illuminated by the press.  Each newspaper is, after all, local.  Consequently their headlines concentrate on just how many defense dollars could be coming to the region and how many heroic jobs are at stake.  Heroic congressmen, in turn, are quoted from their stern late-night impassioned speeches to empty chambers about the need to keep up our guard against our sworn enemies, real or imagined.

Lucky us in Connecticut, besides F-22 engines we also boast the nation’s largest military dinosaur, the nuclear submarine.  Although these have proved remarkably ineffective against Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba, Iran, or Somalia, they are immensely popular here at home.  While their cost may yet sink the nation, they keep the local economy afloat, especially when they run aground and need expensive repairs.

Adding to its potent array of congressmen, arms makers, unions, merchants and media, the Pentagon itself fields an outreach army of 27,000 recruiters, ad men, and PR specialists to tout the glories of military waste.  Meanwhile China, from whom we borrow the dough to produce all that, is now shifting its investments from dollars to copper, cobalt, and other long-term global assets.  Perhaps in time each American town will eventually be awarded a bronzed F-22 to commemorate this giant financial fiasco. 

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Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk, Connecticut. A photo of Bill Collins is available CLICK HERE

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