War is Not a Green Job

[Joanne98]

Imagine if the U.S. government provided a plethora of alternatives for the best and brightest of our engineering graduates.

My brilliant young cousin, we'll call her Linda Pearl, works as a rocket scientist at a local aerospace plant a few miles from LAX. Linda Pearl considers herself one of the lucky college grads who landed a job in the space end of the aerospace industry. Some of her friends, the not-so-lucky ones, are designing drones for a living, knowing all the while that these euphemistically-called unmanned aerial vehicles sometimes miss their terrorist target and blow up an innocent wedding party in Afghanistan.

Linda Pearl tells me about a friend of hers, a drone-designer, who dreamed some video warrior in the Nevada desert, where these drones are operated by remote control, pressed the wrong button and accidentally bombed my cousin's friend in her bedroom in the United States. "She's still designing these drones, though," my cousin tells me, adding the kicker, "that's where the money is, the jobs, in military contracts, in building sophisticated weapons systems."

Imagine if the U.S. government provided a plethora of alternatives for the best and brightest of our engineering graduates.


After all, if an engineer can design a drone, certainly this brilliant young mind can build a rapid transit system to get us where we need to go to sustainability. Why can't Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest build electric buses, instead of new missile systems? In Washington, President Obama and the Democrats are working on a multi-billion dollar jobs bill. In his Thanksgiving message, the President said:

"And it is my fervent hope and my heartfelt expectation that next Thanksgiving we will be able to celebrate the fact that many of those who have lost their jobs are back at work."
-- President Barack Obama November 26, 2009
Congress would be wise to model a new job stimulus package after a proven program: the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the 1935 Roosevelt Depression brainchild that employed an estimated 10-million Americans building 850 airports, 110,000 libraries, schools, and hospitals, 500 water treatment plants, 78,000 bridges, and 8,000 parks.

The WPA also employed writers and artists, many of whom painted murals in post offices, like the San Pedro post office on Beacon Street, where inside the Art Deco building of marble and chrome we find a WPA mural depicting the history of the harbor. We need a Green New Deal that would fund jobs both in the public and private sector to develop renewables in solar and wind, build light rail in all the major metropolitan areas, particularly sprawling Los Angeles, and repair our aging infrastructure. Let the bursting levees in New Orleans serve not as a harbinger of dark days but as a warning that unless we fix our ports, our bridges, our water and sewage treatment facilities, we will find ourselves in a world of hurt.

Google "Top Ten Green Jobs of the Future" and you'll read about the need for organic farmers, solar panel installers, wind turbine developers, energy-efficiency builders, waste recyclers, mass transit engineers, hydrologists, urban planners, electric and hybrid car manufacturers, and drought-resistant landscapers. Notice, the words "defense contractor" were not listed.

War is NOT a Green Job

Flying 100,000 troops to a far off land to fight an ever-morphing enemy leaves a huge carbon footprint; bombing cities and then rebuilding them emits a carbon monster. Plus, war is not job smart. In The U.S. Employment Effects of Military and Defense Spending Priorities (pdf) (Institute for Policy Studies/Oct., 2007) economics researchers Robert Pollin and Heidi Garrett-Peltier analyze the effect of spending a billion dollars, using 2005 employment statistics, to create jobs in various industries. How many jobs would a billion dollars buy?
"Defense" = 8,555 jobs Health Care = 12,833 jobs Education = 17,687 jobs Mass Transit = 20,000 jobs
Note, a billion dollars invested in education or mass transit creates twice as many jobs as the same investment in defense or military contracting.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/War-is-Not-a-Green-Job-by-Marcy-Winograd-091219-794.html

[midnight]

1. Let's get back to work...

[wuvuj]

2. Obama good at chess?

...:applause:

Don't look up Barack....I think they are on to you. Better play the game like you mean it.