Robert Scheer: Boeing Boondoggle: Pork Can Fly

[marmar]

from truthdig:



Boeing Boondoggle: Pork Can Fly
Posted on Mar 2, 2011

By Robert Scheer


“The gift that keeps on giving” should have been the headline on the Pentagon’s decision to award the Boeing Co. a $35 billion defense contract. Defense of the nation, of course, had nothing to do with it, since the end of the Cold War also ended the need for midair refueling of the nuclear-armed bombers intended to retaliate after a Soviet first strike, a scenario brought to the public eye in the 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove.”

Indeed, at a time when drones seem to be bypassing the need for manned military bombers and fighters of any kind, and when schoolteachers and firefighters are being terminated across the country, the awarding of this long-delayed and always questionable military-industrial-complex scam is simply perverse.

There has always been vast bipartisan support for spending upward of a trillion dollars a year on the various items that claim to enhance our national security. For Republicans, their attacks on big federal spending rarely include the more than half of the federal discretionary spending gobbled up by military programs. For Democrats, defense pork has always been defended as a jobs program, and that was the theme of what the Seattle Times headlined as a “victory rally” in the historical home of Boeing operations, where the new plane is expected to create about 11,000 jobs.

At the rally, Washington’s liberal Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell was cheered by the crowd when she said, “there could be no better economic news” for the region and “Boeing will maintain their superiority in making the best airplanes in the world.” She and fellow Democratic Sen. Patty Murray were hailed by “workers shouting `thank you’ and ‘my children thank you.’ ” There is not a word in the article quoting anyone as to why this new plane is needed other than as a jobs program. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/boeing_boondoggle_pork_can_fly_20110301/

[n2doc]

1. I've come around to thinking that, in the broad context of things

This isn't nearly as bad an example of pork as, say, the troop killing Osprey, or for that matter the money spent on Iraq and Af/Pak, or even to maintain all the bases we have around the world. I'd much rather see those things cut/wound down, at least this keeps US workers employed.