PENTAGON BUDGET HURT JOB CREATION

Has the Pentagon reached the point of being too big to fail? The argument in Washington DC seems to be that if we cut Pentagon spending it will destroy many communities because of job losses, which will be so pervasive that it will throw the entire country into an economic recession . . .   tragedy beyond measure. It isn’t just economics, it is more pervasive then that. It is insidiously reaching into unsuspected areas of public interest. For example, industries, led by government military spending, have wormed their way into the administration of public funded educational institutions through research funding putting our educational system of higher education in jeopardy. A little known fact, which in any other context would be trivia, is that the speechwriter, Malcolm Moos, the man who wrote the famous Eisenhower Military Industrial Complex Speech became the president of the University of Minnesota. During his tenure the industrialization of that institution of higher education started. The final form of that corruption is that the current president of the University of Minnesota has recently attended a meeting held at the U.S. Department of Commerce, not the Department of Education, but the Department of Commerce where he bragged about how entrepreneurial effort are part of faculty tenure questions. The mark of the military is everywhere and hurts us.

Is this telling us that the Pentagon is too big to fail? I think not, nonetheless, the rapid expansion of the Pentagon budgets is a warning that it could happen.

What we must do is stand back and look at the reason the Pentagon exists. It exists to defend us! I like to think in terms of the Boeing 787. Imagine that the military, to guarantee jobs in Seattle Washington, converted that plane into a military cargo liner and that we have a President Reagan who wanted to invade Granada because there are eight Cuban terrorist inhabiting that island. The problem is that the island isn’t big enough for the plane to land; our mammoth military, like the plane, is just too big to do the job that we have on hand, which is to defend our selves from terrorists. We would have to build a bigger airport, which is what I mean when I say the military has reached a point where it is feeding on itself.

The economy will not collapse if we cut the pentagon budget. In fact, it will blossom. Pentagon gluttony is costing us so much that we cannot afford to pay for real jobs, jobs that will really help this country compete on the world market: infrastructure, bridges, highways, alternative energy, power grids, high-speed transportation and a long string of etceteras.