Hightower Lowdown

The United States is at long last creating good-paying jobs in manufacturing!

The bad news is that the jobs are in Turkey, South Korea, Poland, and elsewhere— not in the U.S. of A. The worse news is that these jobs are in the arms industry, manufacturing weapons that ultimately could be used by dictators against their own people, their neighbors . . . or us!

The Clinton administration has required our embassies to shill for U.S. weapons makers, essentially making them sales agents for Lockheed Martin and the rest. And it's worked. In Clinton's first year in office, U.S. arms sales doubled. Since then, the U.S. government has exported some $200 billion in weapons to nearly every nation on earth. But also since then, the U.S. weapons makers have cut some 800,000 American jobs. Odd, huh? More sales, fewer jobs.

What's at work here is the U.S. policy of promoting arms sales by giving "offsets" to the purchasing country. The "offset" is an incentive in the form of agreeing that our corporations will make some or all of the weapons in the buyer's country, hiring their folks to do the job. Lockheed Martin, for example, in a deal to sell F- 16s to Poland, is offering to build an assembly plant there where they would make all future F-16s to be sold in Europe. Lockheed shareholders make a bundle, but U.S. workers get the shaft.