Star Wars SDI

=Not too long after “The Last Jedi” hit the silver screen in December 2017, Kelly Marie Tran, one of the saga’s new breakout stars, suffered an ongoing online harassment crusade that eventually compelled her to terminate her social media accounts. Likewise, racist anti–“Last Jedi” trolls of similar motivation emerged from hiding to throw virtual tantrums on the wiki website FANDOM, defacing Tran’s character’s page with racial slurs.The abuse wasn’t exclusive to FANDOM’s wiki or Tran’s personal social media pages; vitriol about “The Last Jedi,” mainly complaints that it was overly politically correct and represented a threat to hegemony, pervaded all manner of social media; to this day, there are numerous Twitter accounts with display names like “Star Wars Lives Matter” and "LastJediAwful" devoted entirely to denigrating the movie for the aforementioned sociopolitical reasons. After Tran quit social media, she wrote about <a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/08/23/lessons-from-kelly-marie-trans-instagram-exit/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">how the harassment impacted her in the New York Times.</a><h1 class="title"></h1><div><a href="http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-mccarthyism-how-fear-socialism-fuels-americas-climate-denial">http://www.alternet.org/environment/new-mccarthyism-how-fear-socialism-fuels-americas-climate-denial</a></div><div>
</div><div>oreskes and c 10/15</div><div>
</div><div>In the late 1970s, scientists first came to a consensus that global warming was likely to result from increasing greenhouse gases released by the burning of fossil fuels. This idea had been around since the turn of the century, but the development of computer models made it possible to make quantitative predictions. Almost immediately, a small group of politically connected and conservative scientists began to question this consensus. As empirical scientific data mounted up, their attacks became more unprincipled. These conservative scientists used data selectively and often misrepresented the conclusions of many studies undertaken by the scientific community.In 1992, world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro to sign the United Nations Framework on Climate Change. President George W. Bush promised to translate the written document into “concrete action.” Three years later, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared that the human impact on the earth’s climate was no longer a prediction but an observable fact.In the early 1990s, a group of skeptics claimed that Roger Revelle, one of the first climate scientists, had changed his mind about global warming and no longer believed it was a serious problem. The claim was repeated through several news outlets, including the Washington Post. When a graduate student named Justin Lancaster — who had worked closely with Revelle before his death in 1991 — tried to insist that Revelle had not changed his view, he was sued for libel. Lancaster was obliged to settle out of court. The claim was repeated again and again, and even today, exists on the Internet.In 1996, when the IPCC released its second assessment report, stating that the human impact on climate was “discernible,” a fossil-fuel-industry-funded group called the Global Climate Coalition accused the IPCC author Benjamin Santer of making unauthorized changes to the document, with the intent of creating a sense that global warming was more certain than it was. The following year, Frederick Seitz, chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, repeated the charges in the Wall Street Journal in an op-ed piece headlined “A Major Deception on Global Warming.”Massive attackHad Santer made unauthorized changes to the IPCC report? No: his changes were made in response to peer review. He was doing what every scientist is expected to do — and what IPCC rules required him to do — accepting criticism and using it so that the conclusions of the study were rigorous and clear. Frederick Seitz was a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, so it was not plausible that he did not know about the peer-review process.In 2007, the claims were repeated in Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, a book whose premise is that “human-emitted CO2 has played only a minor role” in contributing to global warming. The authors are Dennis Avery and Fred Singer. Singer is a physicist with a track record of challenging scientific evidence. He had taken part in the previous attack on Santer.Both the IPCC and Santer’s co-authors took considerable pains to set the record straight, denying that Santer had done anything wrong. Yet, in their book, Avery and Singer reassert that “scientific reviewers discovered that major changes had been made ‘in the back room’ after they had signed off on the science chapter’s contents” and that “Santer single-handedly reversed the ‘climate science’ of the whole IPCC report”. The idea that any one individual could reverse the entire IPCC process is absurd, and yet, like the “Revelle changed his mind” claim, it remains on the Internet today.Climate scientists have been subjected to repeated attacks of this kind. In 2005, Congressman Joe Barton of Texas demanded that Professor Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University, produce a huge volume of paperwork relating to his research. In February, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma accused a dozen climate scientists of criminal violations of Federal Law, based on alleged evidence contained in the UEA emails. Recently, Virginia’s attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, went after Mann again, asking that the University of Virginia produce thousands of pages of documents relating to Mann’s research.We, too, have been objects of attack. When one of us (Naomi Oreskes) published a review on the book The Republican War on Science in the journal Science, in which we noted some connections not pursued in that book, Science was threatened with a lawsuit unless it published a rebuttal. (We supplied documents, Science held firm, and the threat went away.)Blaming scientists for speaking truth to power is an old story. Scientists have long recognized that both the government and public can be reluctant to accept scientific evidence that results in discomfiting conclusions. In 1949, when the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb, the U.S. had to face the reality that it had lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons. Scientists had been warning of this since 1945, but the success of their predictions did not increase their standing. When they then said that any attempt to stay ahead of the Soviets by building the H-bomb would only speed up the arms race, they were accused of being disloyal. As Harold Urey, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934, wrote: “Because we [scientists] told disagreeable truths, we have even been accused of wishing to give up our progress because we are impractical dreamers or plain traitors.”What is most disagreeable to many “resistors” of global warming is the fear of climate change being used as a warrant for heavy-handed government intervention. There is a parallel with 1949: fear of the Soviet Union then was not fear of a potential invasion, but that the Soviets would export communism to Europe, from where it might spread to the U.S.Today, U.S. conservatives and right-wing commentators are red-baiting once again. The columnist Charles Krauthammer alleges that “with socialism dead . . . the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green”. Patrick J. Michaels, director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, labeled plans for a cap-and-trade system to control greenhouse gases as “Obamunism”. The irony is that in 1990, Bush installed a cap-and-trade regime to reduce acid rain because it was an acceptable market-based mechanism. Yet, when Congress finally took the model seriously, conservatives called it communism by other means.Market failureAttacks on climate science, including the 2009 “Climategate” campaign, had nothing to do with the science itself and neither did the entire earlier history of global-warming denial we have studied. Scientists are an easy target. The real issue is the politics of defending the free market.Since the mid-1990s, the fossil-fuel industry has made common cause with old cold warriors, maverick scientists and conservative think tanks to undermine climate science. The obvious reason is that climate change is what Nicholas Stern calls “the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen.” If the free market has failed, then governments will need to act. And that is precisely what various constituencies, from Inhofe to Cuccinelli and a host of think tanks, do not want. It was also what Seitz and his colleagues didn’t want. These scientists were passionately anti-communist and viewed any form of government regulation as a step towards socialism.No wonder we see the rise of McCarthyite tactics today: the stakes, at least in some people’s eyes, are the same. But what these people seem to have forgotten from the 1950s is that McCarthyism didn’t just destroy the careers of many innocent people: in the end, it destroyed Joe McCarthy.</div><div></div>=Olin, Heritage GCMI backers

see Oreskes as seed of ctr GW:

Merchants of Doubt

epi: ad stev;  the trouble w/ Americans is that they haven't read the minutes of the previous mtg

IPCC partner is world meteor soc p 2, exceptionally inclusive and peer rev p3

MoD  germans proved cancer in 30's but tainted by nazi assoc (antismoke campaign, hitler forbade in presence

co's met to plan stategy 1953, reacting to tar on mice stuidy, created "research body" , hired CC little

discoverd create doubt just by asking questions (even if you know answer not helpful or irrelevant 18

p 22 dropped 'industry' from name

used fairness doctirine to get = time!

met with publishers, Luce, scripps, hearst etc 16

created ties to medical schools , public health officals etc 20

by early 60's tob co's knew cancerm addictive etc 21, brit co admitted no controv

busted for racketeering RICO 31

by end of 90's most ppl know tob harmful, but 30% could not name specific illness 33, 25% said no harm p 33

acid rain 1979, some int'l action and bi-lat Carter 73, undermined by RR

Nierenberg RR, pete wilson acoustic anti-sub res p 79, Scripps did defense work

edison inst inserted prop into comm? 89

Fortune mag ran version of singer written by hudson inst 94  Liken ~ in sci mag, but not pop --> pattern p 100

singer claimed fix acid rain difficult, expensive, hurt economy, opposite has happemned  103  bush1 cap and trade?

regulation drives innovation 105

OZone Hole: blame volcanos

hole found 4 yrs abefore, but no one could believe data so thrown out 118

panel included DuPont, which decided to quit cfc's 123

RR sec of int hodel proposed shirts to protect, canned (for Watt?!)

all thinktaknks anti eco, pro biz but Heritage grew out of SST controv p 125  coors, scaife, GM, Chase mAN BANK AND mOBIL

sci bs on ozone to bump funding charge 126, twist sci 127

pattern: sci uncertain, sci corrupt, hard and $ to fix 129

singer's SEPP affil w/ Moon funded IVPP 130

ch 5 secondhand smoke

Brown and Wm paid .5 mil to stallone to smoke in 4 films 139

sietz and singer ~ 142

scam: fake conf endrun peer review 154

1995 PM had record profits, best yield on dow 162

FOREST thatcherite UK group smoking = freedom

ch6 gw

polls 169, hist 170 150 yrs tyndall

Jasons study Carter 172

EPA rept nierenberg  meese 182  gep keyworth advisor

89 berlin wall falls, GMI picks eco as new villain 186

Jastrow claims GMI killed carbon tax in ltr to API 190

Revelle, singer scam 190-, used against Gore 194 by G Easterbrook in New rep

singer sued lancaster for libel, forced him to fold 196

Larry gates at Livermore got all models to run same data to check 199

santer wigley , ch reformated to be uniform, led to singer/ alter charge 205

singer wash times

jrnlists fooled 214 bullied. max and jules boykoff found 1/2 arts 88-02 had balance. 1/3 gave space to deniers p 215 p 242 1999 UCSF study found  2/3 coverage 2nd h smoke 92-4 said controversy // acid rain

dod paid retired gen'l to be pundits 243

bogus jrnls to cite 244 r proctor researched

oregon 244

rmn got rid of pres sci advis comm 246

cf gelbspan, mooney (on exxon) and mckibben of gw skeptics and funding

ch 7 anti Carson used a poster child anti-reg; also imp b/c RC marked shift from aesthetics to realiztion that biz needed regulation p 237 acid rain, o3 co2 all lessons

to fight commie, you have to save mkt/biz; irony is ended up as stalinist defenders of lies 238; kept it up 40 years 241. if no eco growth, rationing = commie  252 world gov ironically, stall will req drastic action soon 254

rmn supported epa b/c he knew it wd be advantage in elections 222

Lonborg 223

ddt 5x breast cancer

dixie lee ray

j gordon edwards sjsu, oregon inst affil

court case 1977 http://cases.justia.com/us-court-of-appeals/F2/556/113/68241/

cribbed by crichton state of fear novel

capitalism, like marxism clians to be sci 249

santer attacked, mann by barton 264

positivism redux 267

5x up anti eco books 90's:

-----

<h3 class="issue">March 2001, Volume 3, Number 3</h3>

</td><td align="right" valign="middle">

<h3 class="issue_right">Edited by Jim Hightower and Phillip Frazer</h3>

</td></tr><tr><td>

</td><td valign="top" align="right"> </td></tr></tbody></table>

<h3>Sec. Rumsfeld is the Keeper of the Flame</h3>

<h2 class="article">Bush Inc. brings back Star Wars</h2>

<ul>

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It is said that if you build a better mousetrap,

the world will beat a path to your

door. But if you.re a big honking military

contractor and you build a mousetrap

that doesn’t even work, the White House,

the Pentagon, and Congress will beat a

path to your door and dump unlimited billions of

our tax dollars on your front stoop.

This is the serendipitous situation for Boeing,

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, TRW, and other huge

weapons outfits that are wallowing in money thrown

at them by Washington to build a convoluted high-tech

mousetrap they.re calling National Missile

Defense (NMD). Sounds imposing, but it’s nothing

more than the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

dream that caught Ronald Reagan’s fancy 20 years

ago: Star Wars.

Most people assumed that Reagan’s fantasy of

deploying an umbrella of space satellites firing

lasers to zap incoming missiles hurled at us by

our enemies had faded away

when Ronnie drifted off into

the sunset, but no.

Pentagon contractors

and their puppets

in Washington

have quietly kept

the program alive

with our tax dollars,

and now its back, bigger than

life, in the form of

NMD, being furiously

pushed by George

Bush, Dick Cheney,

Don Rumsfeld, and a

horde of corporate

lobbyists. It’s got a new name and

a new package, but it’s

the same old silliness

with the same old

problems, namely: It doesn’t

work, isn’t needed,

is too damn

costly, and makes our

nation weaker rather than

stronger.

The saga of NMD is a case study in

how Washington works, and it’s one

more impetus for you and me to get

busy forging grassroots coalitions for a

new politics that just says no to such

ignorance and arrogance.

<h2>The greed head-industrial complex

</h2>

Guess who said this: .Every gun that is

made, every warship launched, every rocket

fired signifies, in the final sense, a

theft from those who hunger and are not

fed, those who are cold and are not

clothed.. It wasn’t Martin Luther King Jr.,

Bobby Kennedy, or some squishy-hearted liberal.

It was Ike! Eisenhower, the Republican president

who’d been supreme commander of the allied

forces that crushed Hitler in Europe, was a

war man, but he had an abiding distrust of

the Pentagon’s collusive relationship

with the big military suppliers

that have insatiable corporate

appetites for keeping the war

machine chugging along.

It was 40 years ago in his

farewell address that President

Eisenhower solemnly warned

against the .acquisition of

unwanted influence. by what he

called the .military-industrial

complex,. telling the country that

.the potential for the disastrous

rise of misplaced power exists

and will persist..

NMD is the product of that corrupt

complex. The nerve center

of the Star Wars lobby has been

a group calling itself the Center

for Security Policy, established

and directed by Frank Gaffney Jr.,

a former Reagan Pentagon

appointee whom the New York

Times calls .the high priest of the

Reagan missile-defense vision..

Founded in 1988 with cash from

right-wing military hawks like

Richard Mellon Scaife and Joseph

Coors, the Center is the picture perfect

poster boy of the military industrial

complex.

Its 100-member advisory board

is a roll call of all-star Star Wars

champions, including such luminaries

as Edward Teller, the mad

scientist who planted the original

sugar-plum visions in Reagan’s

head. Rounding out the board are

almost two dozen current and

former members of Congress,

retired Pentagon officials, and six

defense-industry honchos from

Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Unlike most think tanks that

work on national-security issues,

the Center makes no pretense of

impartiality, unabashedly taking

financial support from the main

NMD contractors. Boeing,

Lockheed, and TRW, as well as

from others that will share the

multibillion-dollar pie, including

General Dynamics, Northrop

Grumman, and Rockwell

International. Guess what? These

corporate donations are tax-deductible,

meaning that we taxpayers

subsidize the Center’s propaganda.

Gaffney is candid about the

Center’s mission: .From our

inception, our organization has

been a champion of national missile

defense.. It has produced

such tracts as .Missile Defense:

Cheap at Twice the Price,. and a

Center spinoff financed a TV ad

that’s as subtle as a sledgehammer.

The ad shows babies in cribs

and children playing baseball,

interspersed with shots of missiles

raining down on the U.S. An

announcer intones ominously:

.Where will you be when the missiles

are launched?.

We could laugh this off as slapstick

from Dr. Strangelove,

except that this outfit is actually

driving policy in the Bush II

administration. Donald Rumsfeld,

Secretary of Delivering Boodle to

Defense Contractors, has been

tight with the Center. Gaffney’s

annual report cites the new

Defense Secretary as an .advisor

and faithful supporter..so faithful,

in fact, that Don received the

Center’s 1998 .Keeper of the

Flame. award, in the proud tradition

of previous awardees like

Newt Gingrich and the Gipper

himself. Attending the gala dinner

to applaud Rumsfeld were appreciative

members of the complex:

retired military officers,

Congressional leaders, and representatives

of Lockheed Martin

and other NMD contractors.

The Newt connection to NMD is

one of the crucial reasons why

we.re now faced with financing

this turkey. Back in 1994,

Gaffney and the Star Wars lobby

convinced Gingrich to include the

revival of Ronnie’s fantasy in his

Contract With America.

After Republicans won control

of Congress in the .94 elections,

Speaker Newt teamed up with

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott

to appoint a special panel called

(cue the trumpets) the

Commission to Assess the

Ballistic Missile Threat to the

United States. Chairman of the

Commission? Donald Rumsfeld.

It will not surprise you that this

rigged panel concluded that the

CIA, Defense Department and

independent military analysts all

were wrong in their assessments

that there is no imminent threat

of anyone zinging a mess of missiles

at America the Beautiful.

The Rumsfeld Commission (as it

was dubbed by Newt, Trent, and

Don, seeking to puff up its significance)

breathlessly concluded

that North Korea, Iraq, and other

.rogue nations. could be raining

fire on us by 2005, so we’d

damned sure better be popping

up our NMD umbrellas PDQ.

Rumsfeld & Co. came to this

ominous conclusion using the latest

in threat-assessment methodology:

They made it up.

<h2>The phantom menace

</h2>

One problem Star Wars devotees

have is finding an enemy

capable of lobbing missiles at

us, much less one that’s likely to

do so.

North Korea is most often trotted

out as Suspect No. 1. Hello?

North Korea? Its citizens are

starving, its industry is at a

standstill, it’s already agreed to a

moratorium on new missile tests,

it’s starting to make nicey-nice

with South Korea after a 50-year

standoff, and it’s said it’ll negotiate

to cut its rather primitive

missile-development programs in

exchange for some dollars, John

Deere tractors, and potatoes. To

top it off, our government has

officially declared that North

Korea is no longer to be considered

a rogue nation, downgrading

it to a .country of concern..

Still, the Rumsfeld Commission

adopted a worst-case scenario,

declaring that North Korea might,

maybe, could possibly become a

dangerous threat if some outside

high-tech power were to give it

the technology.

Apparently, the commission

meant China. But wait. China is

America’s business buddy. They

even have major deals with

Boeing, Lockheed, and the rest.

They.re going to risk all that for

some North Korean Scud aimed

at our heartland?

Messing with Uncle Sam these

days means messing with the Big

Dog. The fatal tactical flaw in

shooting at us is that every ballistic

missile has what U.S. intelligence

expert Robert Walpole calls

a .return address.. The only thing

a hypothetical enemy state would

ever get would be a swift and

massive retaliation by the U.S.

before their missile was halfway

to Topeka.

Nonetheless, the faulty findings

of the Rumsfeld Commission

gave the Star Wars lobby and its

Congressional zealots the PR

gloss they needed to push their

agenda.

In this they were crucially aided

by the inherent wussiness of Bill

Clinton. He had long been an

NMD doubter, but when Newt’s

gang won the Congress in 1994,

Clinton panicked and decided it

would be smart politics to

embrace their bunkum. Doing his

inimitable triangulation two-step,

he adopted national missile

defense as one of his national,

security priorities, pouring billions

into more research, development,

and tests.

Who got these billions? Bingo if

you said Boeing, Lockheed,

Raytheon, and TRW. The Big Four

contractors have received 60% of

all NMD contracts, presently splitting

about $2 billion a year of

your and my money.

They.ve earned these contracts

the old-fashioned way: bribery.

Oh, they don’t call it that, they

call it .campaign contributions..

The four giants pumped more

than $7 million into both

Republican and Democratic campaigns

in the past two elections.

They.ve also spent more money

than the tobacco industry on lobbyists,

running up a two-year tab

of $32.3 million to hire

Washington influence peddlers,

including former members of

Congress and former officials of

the Clinton, Bush I, and Reagan

administrations.

That’s a lot of loose change, but

it pays off like a stacked poker

deck. In 1998, for example,

Congress shoveled an extra billion

bucks into the Pentagon’s

NMD budget, labeling it .emergency

funding,. even though the

Pentagon had declared no emergency

and had not even requested

the money.

<h2>The damn thing doesn’t

even work</h2>

At the height of the Cold War,

there were atom-bomb drills in

U.S. schools. A siren would sound

and children were instructed to

take cover under their desks to

protect themselves from a nuclear

blast. That seems like good science

compared to the fanciful

notion that we.re going to have

missiles or laser beams that can

shoot down incoming missiles

hurtling toward us at more than

15,000 miles per hour. Besides the

fact that there is no present danger

of such an attack, there also is

no present possibility that the bullet-

hitting-a-bullet trick will work.

In the late 1990s, NMD underwent

three flight tests, and none

of them worked, despite the fact

that the tests were rigged to hide

a fundamental flaw in the missile defense

system: It can’t tell the

difference between an incoming

warhead and a decoy.

This is where we have to get a

little technical on you, so brace

yourself for the term of the

month: Exoatmospheric Kill

Vehicle. Let’s call it EKV, as the

Pentagon does. This baby, made

by Raytheon, is the key to NMD,

for it’s the gizmo (another scientific

term) that will be launched

into the sky to find and destroy

any enemy missile that’s been

fired at us.

Here’s the rub: The enemy, darn

it, won’t play fair. They’ll shoot a

missile (or several) at us, surrounded

by decoys. The decoys

can be as simple as (we.re not

making this up) striped balloons.

Poor EKV can’t tell the difference

between a warhead and a balloon,

so it misses. In the 1997 and

1998 tests, the Pentagon substituted

simpler and fewer decoys

than an enemy would use, yet the

EKV still failed.

For the July 2000 test, the

smart guys of the military-industrial

complex figured out what to

do: They eliminated the decoys

altogether. Of course, any potential

enemy will not be so generous,

but hey, the NMD crowd had

a lot riding on getting a .kill. in

this test, so they rigged it.

Theodore Postol and Nira

Schwartz, however, blew the whistle

on them. Dr. Schwartz was

senior engineer at TRW, and she

openly disagreed with the contractor

.s claim that the system could

differentiate between decoys and

warheads. She was fired.

Dr. Postol, who had worked on

missile defense in the Reagan

administration and is now an

arms expert at M.I.T., is even

more blunt about this .scientific

fraud,. saying Pentagon officials

.are systematically lying. about

EKV.s performance and have .put

flawed testing methods at the

heart of all its plans to develop

and build. the NMD.

Michael Munn, a retired

Lockheed Martin scientist and a

pioneer in designing and testing

such weapons, is also candidly

critical: .The only way to make it

work is to dumb it down,. adding

that manipulating these tests is

nothing new: .It’s always been a

wicked game..

For last year’s test, the manipulation

was ludicrous. no decoys,

plus the EKV was informed when

the mock .enemy. missile was

being fired, from where, how fast

it was going, and what its location

was throughout its flight.

Still, the system failed again.

Clinton could have gone public

with all this and stopped the

insanity, but, never one to pass

up a chance to equivocate. He

refused either to kill it or to order

the first stage of the failed NMD

to be built, leaving that decision

to George W. Bush.

<h2>A rush to failure

</h2>

Dubya has long been a cheerleader

for restoring Reagan’s fantasy

to the national agenda. No

sooner was he sworn in than he

declared, in his own stumbling

way, his intention to rush ahead

with the failed system: .My point

is, is that I want America to lead

the nation,lead the world.

toward a more safe world when it

comes to nuclear weaponry..

Under Bush’s scheme, America

will lead neither the nation nor

the world to a safer place.

Indeed, if the U.S. is to deploy a

missile-defense system, we must

either violate or withdraw from

the 1972 Antiballistic Missile

Treaty. Oh, that thing,Rumsfeld

now says it’s .ancient history,.

since the evil empire of the

Soviet Union no longer exists.

Russia will want to protect its

interest by having enough missiles

to overwhelm our porous

missile shield. And the mere

mention of missile defense to

Russia has them pushing away

from the nuclear-disarmament

table. Since it’s far cheaper to

build more missiles than to build

a missile defense, the Chinese

(who now have only a small arsenal

of about 20 nukes) would

likely bulk up. This would force

the Japanese to consider building

their own nuclear missiles, and

India would also react to China’s

build-up. If India enlarges its

arsenal, so will Pakistan, and . . .

well, you see where this is going.

Meanwhile, here at home, building

the NMD will bust our budget

for a totally nonproductive product,

diverting public funds from

projects that truly can make

America stronger, such as good

health care for all, small classes

and top-trained teachers from K

through 12, and an energy-efficient

high-speed rail system

across the country.

Star Wars is a black hole for tax

dollars. On top of the $95 billion

spent so far, it will cost $60 billion

in the next few years just to

build the Yugo version of the system

that Clinton developed. Bush,

however, wants a Cadillac system

of sea-based EKVs, and he’s still

starry-eyed about the sci-fi delusions

of Reagan, saying he’ll consider

a space-based laser-firing

satellite system. Cost of Bush’s

extravagant scheme: $240 billion.

That’s a quarter of a trillion tax

dollars for some razzle-dazzle

rocket science that will fail to

defend us from an enemy that’s

not there anyway. This juice ain't

worth the squeeze.

Former Air Force chief of staff

General Larry Welsh rightly calls

the deployment of this faulty system

a .rush to failure.. Star

Wars, NMD, whatever it’s called.

it’s a failure not only of technology

and military strategy, but a

failure of today’s corporate-driven

politics that overwhelms logic and

the public interest. Foisting this

boondoggle on us has nothing to

do with protecting us from enemy

missiles, and everything to do

with protecting executive pay

packages at Boeing, Lockheed,

Raytheon, and TRW.

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