Gaza Casts A Shadow As State Colleges Are Yoked To War Profiteers

Members of the Statewide Coalition for Palestine protested outside the unveiling of the Maine Defense Industry Alliance at the York County Community College’s Instructional Site in Sanford on March 1, 2024. (Maine Morning Star)

The U.S. sees a problem: our economy is not on a war footing. Not only can the U.S. not recruit even close to the number of soldiers and sailors they say the Pentagon needs, their wealthy contractors like General Dynamics also report they cannot recruit enough skilled workers to fulfill their Pentagon contracts. 

And despite accepting hefty tax breaks from my state, ostensibly for the purpose of funding job training, GD and others have now maneuvered the state's public post-secondary education establishment to train students in the needed skills.

By accepting funding from the Pentagon to train workers in jobs like welding that are necessary for building war ships and other weapon systems, Maine's community colleges and universities will be pushed to abandon liberal arts or mathematics education and instead fund job training programs. That's what the MDIA is all about.

Founding partners include the State of Maine, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, the Maine Community College System, the University of Maine System, Maine Maritime Academy, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Pratt & Whitney

To add insult to injury, the companies getting this deal -- GD/Bath Iron Works and also Pratt & Whitney -- are directly profiting from Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza. (Details on that in my previous post here.)

link to video here

So on very short notice a group organized by the Maine Coalition for Palestine showed up at York County Community College to let Sen. Angus King, Sen. Susan Collins (invited but only zoomed in), and Rep. Chellie Pingree know: "USA your hands are red! Thirty thousand people dead!"

The event was swarming with journalists eager to interview Maine's congressional delegation, and many of them also wanted to interview and film our protest. Especially after two of us snuck in to the event and raised a ruckus about profiting by participating in the massacre of 13,000 children in Gaza.

Maine Morning Star's Evan Popp and Lauren Macauley published, "At unveiling of defense workforce initiative Maine's top officials fail to escape shadow of war in Gaza"

And WGME local tv news had this piece: "Maine coalition for Palestine protests before Maine defense industry alliance reveal"

A quote from our press release that resonated with an unnamed WGME journalist:

This MDIA effort to make war a core component of the Maine economy is dystopian in the extreme. We should never find ourselves in a position where peace is bad for the Maine economy. War should not be a jobs program.

But warmongering for profit has always been justified in terms of allegedly many good jobs it generates. This enormous lie deliberately sidesteps the fact that a similar investment in several other sectors of the economy would actually generate as many as double the number of full-time jobs with benefits. 

Source: Costs of War presentation of research, Robert Pollin & Heidi Peletier, June 13, 2011

Rep. Chellie Pingree once lectured me on presenting this research to her. In the supercilious way of liberal Democrats she pointed out that her previous gig with Common Cause had her presenting the very same research around the country. Doesn't sound like she learned much.

Or maybe the status and wealth that accrues to a long run in the U.S. Congress proved too seductive.

Whatever the reason, she claims she's proud of selling Maine post-secondary students' futures to General Dynamics.

To quote one of many chants yesterday outside the venue where our elected officials were being glad handed by corporate lobbyists: "How do you sleep at night?"