The Military Industrial Complex at 50

Over 20 speakers will lead the discussion, planning, and organizing.  Speakers will include retired Army Colonel Ann Wright, author Bruce Levine, retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and former Pentagon desk officer Karen Kwiatkowski, author Robert Jensen, international affairs analyst Helena Cobban, retired CIA officer Ray McGovern, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space Bruce Gagnon, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee Shahid Buttar, author and West Point graduate Paul Chappell, and many more. 

See additional speakers and agenda.

In Charlottesville, as around the country, increasingly the best place to look for a job is in the military-weapons-logistics-spying-reconstruction industry.  There were 161 military contractors in Charlottesville taking in $919,914,918 through 2,737 contracts from the federal government between 2000 to 2010.  And the trend is ever upward, the budget “crisis” notwithstanding.

This flood of money creates jobs less efficiently than investment in most other industries or even tax cuts.  We are putting over half of every dollar of federal income tax and borrowing into the military.  We could cut this by 85% and still be the top-spending nation in the world militarily.  Meanwhile we are failing to invest in infrastructure, green energy, education, housing, jobs, and care for our young, old, and ill.  The current trend will ruin us economically, as well as in terms of civil liberties, representative government, environmental destruction, social cohesion, hostile blowback, and weapons proliferation.  Reining in the MIC has become a matter of survival.

We can and must turn this around!