America’s biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military - by: Robert Reich

[kpete]

America’s Biggest Jobs Program - the US Military

Saturday 14 August 2010

by: Robert Reich | Robert Reich's Blog | News Analysis

America’s biggest — and only major — jobs program is the U.S. military.

Over 1,400,000 Americans are now on active duty; another 833,000 are in the reserves, many full time. Another 1,600,000 Americans work in companies that supply the military with everything from weapons to utensils. (I’m not even including all the foreign contractors employing non-US citizens.)

If we didn’t have this giant military jobs program, the U.S. unemployment rate would be over 11.5 percent today instead of 9.5 percent.

And without our military jobs program personal incomes would be dropping faster. The Commerce Department reported Monday the only major metro areas where both net earnings and personal incomes rose last year were San Antonio, Texas, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. — because all three have high concentrations of military and federal jobs.

This isn’t an argument for more military spending. Just the opposite. Having a giant undercover military jobs program is an insane way to keep Americans employed. It creates jobs we don’t need but we keep anyway because there’s no honest alternative. We don’t have an overt jobs program based on what’s really needed.

more:
http://www.truth-out.org/robert-reich-americas-biggest-jobs-program-is-us-military62313

[ThomCat]

1. Many have been saying from the beginning,

That some level of economic devastation was deliberate to make sure people enlisted so that the wars wouldn't end simply from declining enlistments and lack of personnel.

I don't think the scope and size of the economic devastation was planned. But some level of economic hardship for the poor was intentional so that the poor would be driven to enlist.

The Republicans have always intended that the poor would be forced to join the army and fight for corporate access to oil and mineral rights. The poor have always been expendable to them.

What really sucks the most is that so many of us thought Obama would end the wars. We didn't think he was going to expand the wars, direct his economic stimulus package primarily to corporations and the rich, and continue the policies that funnel poor people into enlisting.

Two and half years in, and just like the republicans, he is using the military as his jobs program too. His only other jobs program was a tiny thing saving only a few hundred thousand teachers, after he has done so much to support privatizing of schools, diverting public money to union-busting privately owned charter schools that far more public school teachers than that have lost their jobs because of him. The net impact on teachers is still massively negative because of his own policies.

So that makes the military still his only successful jobs program. Sending poor people off to die in unnecessary wars...

:(

[inna]

2. K&R. kpete, you're truly a DU treasure.