War production vs. real economic recovery

The U.S. spends as much on the military in a single year as it did on the entire $700 billion financial bailout. Yet the military-industrial complex is hungry for more.

New Defense Secretary Robert Gates is already pushing Congress for massive increases in defense spending for new military hardware. We'll see how Obama and the Democrats respond, especially in the face of the worsening economic crisis and a war on two fronts that is sucking the U.S. economy dry.

From AlterNet:

"War production doesn’t create real economic health," Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies recently wrote in a commentary. "What do all those fancy missile systems, space weapons, battleships, even tanks and Humvees, produce other than a lot of dead Iraqis and dead Afghans?"

Instead, Bennis argued, government ought to "bail out our battered economy [by providing] real jobs to soldiers drafted by lack of opportunities, and [by redirecting] the hundreds of billions of war-spending into green jobs, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, training new teachers and building new schools."