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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.7 KB | 123 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 94

The Most Costly Addiction of All



One strains to imagine recent conversations between President
Bush and Defense Secretary Cheney:

    G.B.: A few more of those, entirely your decision of
course, those Vulture 13 heat-seeking fighter planes with the
can openers attached. You could use 'em, right?

    D.C. (deftly translating from the Bush-speak): Can't use
the ones we already have. They don't fly, remember? Plus
there's a worldwide enemy shortage, as you might have noticed.

    G.B.: It's the damn polls, Dick, economy thing -- Reagan
Democrats, Clinton Republicans, every which way. Get the jobs
out to the ZIP codes, Jim says, or it's January in
Kennebunkport, too cold for golf.

    D.C.: But sir, we're running out of storage space, and
Lynne says absolutely no more Vultures in the garage


    They must go through this over and over. There was
Homestead Air Force Base, for example, which probably would have
been mothballed anyway if Andrew hadn't got to it first. Bush
wanted to spend $480 million rebuilding Homestead. Why not use
the money to rebuild Floridians' actual homes? And what the
Pentagon won't take, someone else will buy: 72 F-15s to provide
jobs for Missourians, 150 F-16s for the Texans -- with Saudi
Arabia and Taiwan footing the bills.

    The Democrats too have been using the military pork barrel
as a grab bag of gifts. Bill Clinton, for instance, backs more
Seawolfs for Connecticut. And of course nothing turns a liberal
Congressman into a hawk faster than the threat of a base
closing on his home turf.

    It gets painful after a while, like watching people who
can no longer control their actions: the drunk bellying up to
the bar for one last drink to keep the other 10 company. We
could just as well put people to work weeding the median strips
on the interstates or digging holes and filling them back up,
but we make weapons, so when we want to employ people, we make
more weapons; any other form of publicly sponsored employment
is derided as "leaf raking" and possibly socialism.

    Addiction is the operative metaphor here. Obviously, money
spent on the military, as much as $10 trillion over the duration
of the cold war, was money not spent on developing new
technologies for consumer use, on retraining workers for
domestic production or on social-welfare programs to ease the
plight of the dislocated and unemployed. So what is to be done
with 3 million workers in the military industry and nothing but
a pinched, depleted domestic economy awaiting them? Just one
more fix, is the addict's witless, blubbering solution -- one
more useless, death-dealing, high-IQ toy.

    You can hardly blame the defense workers. They have no
reason to trust that their jobs would survive if the warm,
nourishing flow of federal dollars were cut off, cold turkey.
That would be the "free market" solution, which has already cost
300,000 defense workers their jobs since 1989. Weapons firms are
notoriously loath to beat their swords into plowshares: Why
brave the rigors of the market if you've been suckled on
cost-plus contracts? It's easier to mail out the pink slips.

    Then there's the arms-for-export approach: If the U.S.
can't afford any more high-tech weapons, find some Third World
potentate who can. Saudi Arabia gets its F-15s; Taiwan gets
F-16s (in violation, incidentally, of a 1982 agreement signed
with China). Why not atom bombs for Ciskei? Cruise missiles for
Serbia? Lofty moral objections aside, one problem with the
export approach is that it puts the U.S. government in the
unseemly position of pimping for the military-industrial complex
-- using taxpayers' money, for example, to set up arms fairs
abroad. The other problem is that today's arms customer may be
tomorrow's armed brigand, a Saddam with his own stock of
U.S.-made missiles.

    There is an alternative: planned conversion of our
military-industrial capacity to production for civilian use. Let
the defense firms, workers as well as management, figure out
what else they could produce, while the rest of us figure out
what we could use. The late Congressman Ted Weiss's Defense
Economic Adjustment Act shows how to go about it, as does the
fine new book Dismantling the Cold War Economy, by Ann Markusen
and Joel Yudken. The possibilities are endless: high-speed
transit systems, waste-disposal technology, high-tech machinery
that we now (like any Third World country) are forced to import.

    One can imagine the fervent ideological objections:
planned conversion, like planned anything, would be an
"industrial policy," meaning "social engineering" in George
Bush's lexicon, meaning socialism and leading straight to the
gulag. But military pork-barreling is a kind of industrial
policy itself, in which the "plan" seems to be that millions of
Americans will make weapons or go without jobs. As for
socialism, the military-industrial complex already represents
a Soviet-style command economy in the midst of capitalism, a
haven from the perils of the market, financed by public
largesse.

    Overcoming denial is the first step in confronting
addiction. We got into this state of toxic dependency on
militarism through conscious choices, made all too often by
opportunistic politicians and profit-hungry arms dealers.
Getting out requires another set of choices; call it "planning"
if you will. We can continue with the ghoulish fixation that
condemns our nation to production-for-death. Or we can, through
an open and democratic decision-making process, find some more
life-affirming way to keep 3 million Americans employed.