The Pratt & Whitney Problem

 

On Saturday we'll turn out early for a protest at the gates of an air show in Maine that will feature the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. Activists will distribute flyers designed to push back on recruiting kids and to make clear the connection between the U.S. Air Force and Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza.

U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell self-immolated at the Israeli embassy in Washington DC last February saying he could not live with his complicity in genocide. He shared how his job in the U.S. Air Force was to provide surveillance and targeting information for Israel’s war planes. Since Bushnell’s death, numerous U.S. Air Force personnel have offered resistance by hunger strikes, burning their uniforms, applying for conscientious objector status, and going AWOL.

The Thunderbirds' proud sponsor is Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of RTX (formerly Raytheon). P&W is drenched in blood money as this genocide profiteer makes the engines for the F-15 and F-16 warplanes Israel uses to drop bombs in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran. And it makes many of the drones they use, too. The U.S. Air Force is also a big customer.

On an October 24, 2023 call with investors, P&W CEO Greg Hayes said, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you're going to see a benefit of this restocking.” Restocking is the kind of euphemism that genocide profiteers use to conceal that they mean selling weapons to genociders.

P&W's factory in Maine, North Berwick Aero Systems, was on our radar in March when it teamed up with the tax-payer supported community college system to produce workers for the war machine. Some of us stood out at their big pr event announcing creation of the Maine Defense Industry Alliance. Fascism is really the marriage of industry and government to the extent that they operate in tandem to ignore the will of the people or to subvert it by offering "good" jobs.

A "good" job is defined as being one that provides benefits like health insurance, paid time off, full time employment under a union-negotiated contract, and enough income to afford a home plus toys like 4-wheelers and snowmobiles. This kind of job is scarce in Maine, and politicians leverage this to ensure that the war machine always has enough contracts to keep the willing workers engaged.

Air shows recruit future Aaron Bushnells. Not only will the noise and air polluting Thunderbirds enrapture crowds of children brought to the show, but inside there will be flight simulators and video games aimed at creating a desire for future enlistment. Nowhere will the truth about suicide rates among military personnel be shared, nor will attendees learn that the Air Force in particular is experiencing a wave of resistance in its ranks. Turns out that killing children from on high either with a jet or a drone tends to make people suicidal. Who could have predicted that?

P&W doesn't care. It predicts profits, not human suffering. The unholy alliance of P&W with the Pentagon is dangerous. It subverts the will of the people, most of whom don't want genocide conducted at their expense.

Fascism subverts democracy. That's the P&W problem.

Join us to protest while you still can.

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?"