Screenshot from "Mapping the Business of War" by Christian Sorenson
Today I am reposting my Op-Ed published by Maine Morning Star January 6:
Does Maine profit from genocide in Gaza?
Quite simply, the genocide in Gaza is good business for General Dynamics, which employs thousands of Mainers. How are we to feel about that blood money fueling our economy?
Demonstrators, led by the Maine Coalition for Palestine, protest at a General Dynamics factory in Saco, Maine Jan 3
(courtesy of Schaible, Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights)
Saco students and parents arriving at school on Jan. 3 saw protesters demanding that General Dynamics stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It was an unintended consequence of the company locating their bomb factory — that sounds like hyperbole or an exaggeration, but I assure you it’s not — across the street from an elementary school. Maine law won’t let you have a gun on school property or discharge one within 500 feet of a school, but it says nothing about making bombs across the street.
Nor do these bombs just sit in a warehouse somewhere. Rather, since October, more than 5,000 of the 500-lb Mk-82 bombs, parts for which are manufactured by General Dynamics in Saco, have been given to Israel by our United States government for use in their “war” in Gaza. These munitions play a particularly direct role in what many scholars and analysts, including a professor of Holocaust studies writing in Jewish Currents, believe is an ongoing criminal genocide of Palestinians by the Israeli government, for instance targeting densely populated areas such as the Jabalia Refugee Camp.
They also make 155mm artillery shells in Saco, which Oxfam has labeled, “virtually assured to be indiscriminate, unlawful, and devastating to civilians in Gaza.”
General Dynamics Chief Financial Officer Jason Aiken told investors on a call October 25, “I think if you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of [the attacks on Gaza], the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”
Up the road, in Bath, at the General Dynamics-owned Bath Iron Works, Mainers have built a number of warships currently deployed in the Red Sea — including the USS Laboon, which launched from BIW in 1993 — to protect Israeli commercial vessels from being attacked by rival nations that do not approve of its actions in Gaza.
Quite simply, the genocide in Gaza is good business for General Dynamics, which employs thousands of Mainers. How are we to feel about that blood money fueling our economy? Is it contributing to the future we want here in Maine?
Mainers are continually told that we must tolerate weapons of mass destruction being built here because we need the jobs. And it is undoubtedly true that thousands of people make a living from working for General Dynamics, Raytheon, and other contractors for the Pentagon. Some hold union jobs with full benefits, but many are increasingly out-of-state laborers working outside the contract on temporary assignments.
And we never seem to ask the question: If we’re spending U.S. taxpayer money to create jobs, why do we have to make weapons to be used by other countries to maim and kill people? Why couldn’t we use that tax money to pay Mainers to build something we actually need here in Maine?
Ironically, building weapons is not even a good jobs program. Research by economists at UMass Amherst over several years has found that a similar investment in other sectors of the economy – such as clean energy construction – would produce far more good union jobs. Workers at Bath Iron Works have tried for years to argue for conversion of the shipyard away from depending solely on contracts from the U.S. Navy, to no avail. Opportunities to build a light rail system, or offshore wind platforms, or even hospital ships are ignored while Maine’s congressional delegation accepts campaign funding from military contractors and continues to vote for sending taxpayer-funded contracts their way.
How much do people in Maine really know about the military contracting businesses in our state? If they knew that there was a bomb factory directly across the street from an elementary school, would they care?
As the genocide in Gaza continues and war in the region widens, Mainers would do well to take an honest look at their own involvement. While the war in Gaza — and Ukraine, for that matter — can sometimes seem far from our shores, there are thousands of Mainers who are intimately involved. These wars are part of their very livelihoods.
Regardless of how much money flows back to our state, do we really “profit”?
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My additional notes to support others in discovering how their state "profits" from genocide.
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