Reclaiming Our Future: An Agenda for American Labor by William W Winpisinger & John Logue

Author:William W Winpisinger & John Logue [Winpisinger, William W & Logue, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000237290
Goodreads: 52845678
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Sky is for Stars, Not Wars

The Space Defense Initiative—an oxymoron if ever there was one—presents the world with the ultimate terror in economic and technological tyranny.

The Star Wars scheme not only threatens to increase our military expenditures by anywhere from $24 billion to $40 billion a year, it also threatens to destabilize the whole trip-wire national and global security system. Since there’s not a reputable scientist or engineer in the world who supports this hair-brained scheme—every reputable scientist from Hans Bethe to Jerome Weisner discredits it—it is being sold as a big public works program here in the United States, and overseas, a big Marshall Plan in the sky. It isn’t purchasing us more security; it is increasing our insecurity on more borrowed money.

Our NATO allies, with the possible exception of Chancellor Kohl of West Germany, don’t want any part of Star Wars as a credible defense system. Even Maggie Thatcher is squirming against this one. But Administration salesmen are trying to buy West Europeans with fat offers to participate in Star Wars research and production contracts. Japan already has its space agency cranked up to get a big piece of Star Wars cash and technology.

For those who may be counting on Star Wars for their personal economic security in the future, and who may believe that is the way to launch this nation onto a new growth path toward peace and prosperity, we say nix. Conservative estimates make it a $100 billion program. But most engineers and scientists who are in the business say Star Wars is an open-ended scheme, since no one knows whether it can be made to work, let alone when it might be made to work.

Where are we going to get the dough? Wring it out of military production workers’ compensation? Lay some more cuts in people programs onto the unemployed, the poor, the elderly, minorities, women and single parent children? If the current $300 billion a year military budget gives us six to seven percent unemployment, what makes anyone think another $100 billion, let alone $26 billion, will get us to anything approaching full employment? Star Wars may well increase unemployment, at home and around the globe.

The truth is, if we, the people, don’t have economic security, and our government and major corporations don’t have industrial and financial integrity in this country, then there is no way we can purchase national security with Star Wars or chemical wars or biological wars or conventional wars or dirty little Central American Wars or all of the above.

Uncontrolled arms spending, a staggering national debt no longer controlled by U.S. national interests, and our international trade deficit are now inextricably intertwined. They feed on each other to undermine our economic security and, hence, our national security.

As Thomas Jefferson, one Founding Father who conservatives almost never quote, put it, “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.”

Let us rebuild America on the principles of real peace and prosperity, rather than war and poverty.

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