Fantasy Island

For those of you old enough to remember, there was a TV program on in the late 70s - early 80s called Fantasy Island. The diminutive character, Tatoo, used to open each episode with the weird exclamation, "De plane, de plane!" Recently, Washington's two US Senators could be heard chortling the same line.

The B-I-G state news last week is that Boeing -- one of the state's largest employers -- was awarded a major defense contract. Unfortunately, as Robert Scheer points out,

So, faced with major problems in developing the next generation of civilian aircraft, Boeing has been blessed with a massive Defense Department contract that will allow it to use an old, about-to-be-discarded assembly line to refurbish the 767 at enormous cost to the taxpayer so that it is fit to haul fuel and serve as a gas station in the sky for planes that no longer have a pressing strategic mission requiring such refueling...

Scheer also notes that, "defense pork has always been defended as a jobs program" and, at a time when good-paying, private-sector, union jobs are hard to come by, it is easy for people to overlook the inherent waste of contracts like this AND the fact that it furthers the idea of a robust defense spending program that, at the end of the day, is about waging war.

I certainly do understand why this contract has warmed the cockles of Seattle-area officials, union workers and area service-oriented businesses. It means more money to be spread around. It provides a healthy shot-in-the-arm to a sagging state economy. For these reasons, it's easy for most to ignore the death and destruction angle.

But any nation that continues to feed the war machine -- as little more than a jobs program -- is in deep trouble. We can't seem to find the requisite funds to pay teachers, firefighters, compliance officers and other public sector employees, but we can find the money to continue to build military crap that we don't need!!